Food as a Terrain for Identity Construction and Ethnic Confrontation among Italian Americans in the United States

Year 2023, Issue: 60, 17 - 42, 31.12.2023

Stefano Luconı

Abstract

Linguist Cornelia Gerhardt maintains that “food is not only
sustenance,” because it fulfills more than “bare necessities” for physical
survival (4). Indeed, echoing the aphorism dis-moi ce que tu manges,
je te dirai ce que tu es by the late French epicure and gourmet Jean
Anthelme Brillat-Savarin (3), historian Donna R. Gabaccia suggests,
starting from the title of a 1998 volume, that “we are what we eat,”
namely that preparing and consuming meals are a reflection of people’s
self-perception. Many scholars share her view. For instance, according
to social scientist Claude Fischler, “food is central to our sense of
identity” (275). Likewise, anthropologist Carole Counihan argues that
“every coherent social group has its own unique foodways” (6).
Such observations are particularly pertinent in the case of
immigrant minorities. On the one hand, ethnic cuisine is much easier to
reproduce and to retain than the mother language and other cultural traits
over the generations in the adoptive country (Alba 4; Waters 116). On
the other, newcomers and their progeny tend to recognize themselves by
means of their eating habits (Diner 413). Since gastronomic practices
operate as tools for inclusion and exclusion, shopping for ingredients,
cooking them, and consuming meals symbolically express identity.
Donna Caruso, for instance, recalls about her immigrant mother and
aunt that “memories of Italy come fill their hearts while they stand
at the stove, stirring, tasting” with “their hands forming the meatballs
or handling the pizza dough” (114). Helen Barolini similarly revived
her ethnic identity through a cookbook project after endeavoring to“dissolve my Italian ties of more than twenty-five years” (Chiaroscuro
70). Indeed, according to historian Luigi G. Pennacchio, “for
immigrants, food is a primary means by which they socialize, worship,
shop and do business - in short, by how they live their lives as ethnics
coping with the alien culture that surrounds them” (111). Against this
backdrop, scholarship has repeatedly stressed the relevance of culinary
choices to define . . .

Keywords

Foodways, regional cousine, ethnic identity, Americanizations, Italian Americans

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