Pasta, Pizza and Propaganda

Francesco Buscemi

Description

This book aims to develop a political history of Italian ‘good food’ on national television, and the central role of food in Italian culture. The focus is highly original and this is a unique interdisciplinary study at the intersection between food studies, media studies and politics.

The three protagonists of Pasta, Pizza and Propaganda are food, television and politics. These are the three main characters that interrelate, collaborate and fight behind the scenes, while in front of the camera the writers, intellectuals and celebrity chefs talk about, prepare or taste the best Italian dishes.

The book retraces the history of Italian food television from a political point of view: the early shows of the pioneers under strict Catholic control in the 1950s and 1960s, the left-wing political twist of the 1970s, the conservative riflusso or resurgence of the 1980s, the disputed Berlusconian era and the rise of the celebrity chefs, which, for better or for worse, makes Italy similar to the other western countries.

The history of Italy since the mid-1950s is retold through the lenses of food television. This lively book demonstrates that cooking spaghetti in a TV studio is a political act, and tries to uncover how it is possible that, while watching on TV how to make pizza, we become citizens.

The primary readership will be an academic audience, including those in the disciplines of food studies, media studies, politics and Italian studies, as well as potentially for those interested in Italian sociology and anthropology. There may be a potential wider readership because of the popularity of Italian food and food television.

Introduction                                                                                                             

Chapter 1: Literature review, theoretical framework and methodology        

            Politics, television and food in Italy: Dangerous liaisons                       

            Politics in Italy after the Second World War                                             

            Television in Italy                                                                             

            Italian food between reality and stereotypes                              

            Italian food TV                                                                                  

            Theoretical framework                                                                                

            Methodology                                                                                                 

            Conclusion                                                                                                    

Chapter 2: Broadcasting sacred food: 1954–1970                                             

            Soldati's journey to the Po Valley                                                              

            Soldati's conception of genuineness                                                         

            Nature and culture                                                                                     

            Culture and the past                                                                                               

            Where are the women?                                                                               

            Soldati's sacred food                                                                                   

            Linea contro linea                                                                                       

            Conclusion                                                                                                    

Chapter 3: 1971–1980: The ephemeral wind of change                                              

            A new political scenario                                                                               

            The new scenario on TV: RAI's reformation                                             

            A Tavola alle 7                                                                                              

            The relationship between Veronelli and Ninchi                          

            Ninchi, Veronelli and the field of Italian politics in the 1970s    

            Dimmi Come Mangi and the dawn of neo-TV                                          

            Conclusion                                                                                                    

Chapter 4: 1981–1999: Going back home (and to the kitchen)                        

            Riflusso and Italy in the 1980s and 1990s                                                           

            Wilma De Angelis and home cooking                                                         

            A Pranzo con Wilma                                                                         

            Food television becomes a genre                                                              

            Conclusion                                                                                                    

Chapter 5: Eating TV: Food on Berlusconian television, 2000–2012                

            The celebrity housewives and their shows                                             

            La Prova del Cuoco                                                                          

            Women between power and stereotype                                      

            Serving sacred food in Trattoria                                                   

            The contrasted discovery of foreign food                                               

            Food in the news                                                                                         

            Conclusion                                                                                        

Chapter 6: 2012–the present, the Italian way to the celebrity chef              

            The invasion of the global formats           

            A case of Italian adaptation: From kitchen nightmares to Cucine da Incubo

            A Cena da Me: Representing food to talk about something else          

            Food Network Italia                                                                                     

            The new celebrity chefs                                                                            

            Alessandro Borghese e Simone Rugiati

            MasterChef                                       

            Italian food out of Italy                                                       

            Dietary chefs and their enemies                                                   

            The tough chef                                                                               

            Female professional cooking                                                                      

            Benedetta Rossi, the anti-chef                                                        

            Conclusion    

Conclusion

Sujets

• Arts visuels
• Histoire des Arts
• Histoire des Arts
• Public Policy
• Social Science
• Sociologie, société et politique
• Ave Ninchi
• Italian cuisine
• RAI
• General officer
• Cultural studies
• Region
• Television
• Politics
• Media studies
• Politics of Italy
• Italy
• Food
• My Last Duchess
• Regional
• General
• Agriculture
• Luigi Veronelli
• ART
• Mario Soldati

Informations

• Publié par: Intellect Books
• Date de parution: 19 avril 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781789384086
• Langue: English

Extrait

Pasta, Pizza and Propaganda
Pasta, Pizza and Propaganda
A Political History of Italian Food TV
Francesco Buscemi
First published in the UK in 2022 by
Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK
First published in the USA in 2022 by
Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street, Chicago, IL 60637, USA
Copyright 2022 Intellect Ltd
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or byany means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, orotherwise, without written permission.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Copy editor: Emma Rhys
Cover designer: Aleksandra Szumlas
Cover image: Mario Soldati, 1957-58. Courtesy of RAI, Rome
Production manager: Debora Nicosia
Typesetter: MPS Limited
Hardback ISBN 978-1-78938-406-2
ePDF ISBN 978-1-78938-407-9
ePUB ISBN 978-1-78938-408-6
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This is a peer-reviewed publication.
Contents
Figures
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1. Literature Review, Theoretical Framework and Methodology
Politics, television and food in Italy: Dangerous liaisons
Theoretical framework
Methodology
Conclusion
2. 1954-70: Broadcasting Sacred Food
Soldati s journey to the Po Valley
Soldati s conception of genuineness
Nature and Culture
Culture and the past
Where are the women?
Soldati s sacred food
Linea contro Linea
Conclusion
3. 1971-80: The Ephemeral Wind of Change
A new political scenario
A new TV scenario: RAI s reformation
A Tavola alle 7
Dimmi come Mangi and the dawn of neo-TV
Conclusion
4. 1981-99: Going Back Home (and Back to the Kitchen)
Riflusso and Italy in the 1980s and 1990s
Wilma De Angelis and home cooking
Food TV becomes a genre
Conclusion
5. 2000-12: Eating TV, Food on Berlusconian Television
The celebrity housewives and their shows
The contrasting approaches towards foreign food
Food in the news
Conclusion
6. 2012-Present: The Celebrity Chef, Italian Style
The invasion of the global formats
A case of Italian adaptation: From Kitchen Nightmares to Cucine da Incubo
A Cena da Me : Using food to talk about something else
Food Network (Italia)
The new celebrity chefs
Female professional cooking
Conclusion
Conclusion
References
Figures 2.1: Mario Soldati in Alla Ricerca dei Cibi Genuini: Viaggio nella Valle del Po (RAI), 1957–58. Courtesy of RAI, Rome. 3.1: Luigi Veronelli and Ave Ninchi in A Tavola alle 7 (RAI), 1974–76. Courtesy of RAI, Rome. 6.1: Simone Rugiati and a hamburger. Courtesy of Scripps International Media Holdings LLC. 6.2: The Italian celebrity chef Francesco Panella, 2019. Courtesy of Francesco Panella. 6.3: The Italian celebrity chef Marco Bianchi, 2019. Courtesy of Realize, Milan. 6.4: The Italian celebrity chef Benedetta Rossi. Courtesy of Benedetta Rossi.
Acknowledgements
I want to express my gratitude to series editor Flavia Laviosa for believing in this project from the very beginning, when it was difficult to envision a concrete result, even for the author; Jelena Stanovnik and Debora Nicosia at Intellect, who have followed the entire process – always problem-solving and suggesting improvements; and Andrea Purgatorio from Radiotelevisione italiana (RAI), who provided permission for the publication ofthe photos of RAI's food shows from the 1950s and 1970s.
I also express my appreciation and gratitude to the colleagues and students of the universities where I have worked over the years, including Queen Margaret University, where I earned my Ph.D. in food and TV, and Bournemouth University, the Catholic University of Milan and Insubria University, Como, where I taught courses that often touched upon the topic of food TV (even when they were about something else). These people gave their guidance and support during meetings, classes and breaks, and in these pages there is much owed to them all.
Introduction
In past years, whenever I found myself in Britain or the United States and came across a cooking show on television, I asked myself the same question: why are cooking shows here so different from those in Italy? It might seem like an irrelevant question, but the differences were radical and inexplicable to my level of knowledge. Thus, when I decided to do a Ph.D., I was in no doubt of the topic: the proposal that I sent to several UK universities was a historical comparison between British and Italian food TV. When the proposal was accepted, I dived into the food culture of the two countries, elaborated my theory beginning from the origins of the two approaches to food, started to write my thesis and, when I was about to finish, discovered that in the meantime the differences had been erased and Italian food TV was now identical that of the Anglosphere.
Reality had run faster than my thesis. Embarrassed, I added a couple of sections to explain what had occurred and how it impacted my theories, benefited from the understanding of the examiners and achieved my goal of earning my doctorate.
Since then, however, I have continued to visit Britain and the United States and have continued to be stupefied by their food shows. The only difference is that I now ask myself why the cooking shows here are so similar to those in Italy. The fact that two such different cultures, which I know very well after my studies, produce the same types of programmes, makes me even more surprised than when I noticed the differences.
This book proceeds from the knowledge gained during my studies and provides a historical account of Italian food TV and how it has changed. In the meantime, I have, however, discovered other factors: first, Italian food TV had not changed as suddenly as I believed at the end of my Ph.D., but had undergone various processes of mutation; second, many of these changes were related to politics; and third, Italian food TV has been underrated in the international academic debate, yet I firmly believe that knowledge of its history would aid in the understanding of media development in Italy and other countries, and this conviction hastened the writing of this book. Italian food and Italian TV have been investigated separately 2 by scholars worldwide. Indeed, many studies (Capatti and Montanari 2003; Parasecoli 2004 ; Petrini 2005 ) have been published on Italian food culture, the history of Italian food, the Slow Food movement, and the centrality of food in Italian culture, though some have drawn on stereotypes. Similarly, much research has been devoted to Italian TV, especially concerning the Berlusconi years. However, the combination of the two fields, that is, Italian food TV, has never been a hot topic, perhaps because for many years up until the 1980s there were not many cooking shows in Italy.
In linking food and television, this book also adds politics, a field that has very frequently been coupled either with food or with television. In studies on food and politics (Hibberd and Sorrentino 2007; MacDonald 2013 ), the division between food as a necessity and food as a luxury is fundamental. Italian food TV has told this story precisely, gradually moving from food as a necessity, hunger, to refined unnecessity, that is, appetite. Regarding the link between politics and television, years of British and North American cultural studies, and abundant media sociology research (Hall 1992 ; Hibberd 1994), have taught us that TV is either directly or indirectly controlled by governments, and often contributes to the diffusion of the dominant ideologies in society, as well as to nation-building in its popular culture form. This perspective is adopted in order to analyse the development of Italian cooking shows over the years.
In this book, the points of convergence between food TV and politics are concepts such as good food, good cooks, top chefs, etiquette, in which good does not mean food that is good to eat, or food that is tasty or healthy, but food that is designated good for reasons that are extraneous to nourishment and instead linked to politics. Given the relationship between TV and politics, I have investigated cases where TV shows have suggested a specific type of food, or a particular method of preparation or eating, or of being a cook, and have argued that these suggestions hide political motives, supporting traditional or innovative social roles, values or cultural views. Obviously, this is not true of a single ingredient or dish, but of wider themes, such as sacred food in the 1950s-70s, eating at home in the 1980s, food cooked by celebrity housewives in the 2000s and on the global taste of the last ten years. This angle of analysis prefigured the investigation of bad food, that is, food that has been branded as negative or somehow dangerous and to be avoided. Consequently, this book is certainly incomplete, as it focuses on the relationships between food TV shows and their practices of guided consumption, and on how it has changed through the years, ignoring other aspects that a straight history of food TV might address.
Hence, the necessity of Bourdieu ( 1984 , 1993, 2003, 2005). The French sociologist, as it is clear in my theoretical framework outlined in Chapter 1, was interested in the way that fields of cultural production build power by legitimizing and 3 delegitimizing cultural goods, by promoting some kinds of consumption and discouraging others, and by including some professional roles and excluding others. This is exactly the type of investigation that I carry out in this book by considering what kinds of food, cooks, cooking methods and eating are encouraged by a specific TV show, and conversely what is advised against. Moreover, a group of scholars (Stringfellow et al. 20