Protesters angry about foreign restaurants in Italian cities should consider where much of their food comes from

by Matthew Fort
guardian.co.uk

According to recent reports, some Italians are getting all worked up about kebab palaces, Chinese hostelries and curry kingdoms colonising the high streets of their scenic towns and cities. (Where would we eat if we were so prescriptive in this country? It hardly bears thinking about).

Mind you, the Italians are a funny lot when it comes to food. Not only do they not like foreign restaurants on Italian soil, but they also get all shirty about the quality of Italian food served in other countries. It wasn't that long ago they were laying down the law about how substandard most of the food in Italian restaurants is in the UK. They're right of course, but it's none of their business.

But then, Italians have a rather different relationship with cooking than we do. When an Italian gets up in the morning, he or she expects to eat the very best food their money can buy, and best food still usually means mother's cooking. Even if they go out, it means their mother cooking.

New wave Italian restaurants are few and far between. Italians want to eat local food, and by local I don't just mean the food of this region, or this area or even this valley. It means the food of this village or zone of a town, and frequently the food of this house. And the food of every other village, area, region wouldn't be worth serving to a dog.

Food, and dialect, still define a person's sense of identity and belonging in Italy. Consequently, most Italians are blind to the wider food culture of their own country (and so doubly blind the food cultures of other countries). A few years back I was eating with an Italian family in Turin. They had just come back from a holiday in Spain."It was very interesting," said Maura, "but we didn't really think much about the food. Paella wasn't a patch on a good risotto."

As John Dickie's recent book, Delizia, pointed out, the Italian food we know and love today is not rooted in the distant, rural past, but is largely the creation of Pellegrini Artusi, a food writer and collector of recipes in the late 19th century, and Fernanda Momigliano, a Jewish housewife during the Fascist years. Before all that, Italy was a melting pot of foreign cultures, as invading armies and the satraps or occupying forces came and went.

You can trace their passage in Italy's dishes. Baccalà – which features prominently in the cooking of the Veneto, home of Luca Zaia, the minister of agriculture and one of the prominent tambourine bangers for the ethnic purity of Italian food – comes from the Baltic states. Corn for polenta, of course, was a gift from the Americas (along with tomatoes, chocolate, turkeys, potatoes, tobacco and chillies). The techniques for growing rice for risotto, another speciality of the Veneto, were initiated by the Moors in Sicily. Sicilian food is a hymn to the influences of North African cooking. Trapani is famous for its fish cuscusu.

Look closely at Italian cooking, and you'll find Spanish theatre, French pastries, Austro-Hungarian stews, the breads of Byzantium. Italian food is no different from that of any other country. It is a history of past comings and goings, trade and invasions, immigration and emigration.

In spite of history, or maybe because of it, it seems that some Italians are gearing up to fight the Crusades all over again, albeit in soundbites, and no doubt xenophobia streaked with racism is inherent in these pronouncements.

But before we charge off on our own moralistic high horse, it might consider the dire state of our own food culture and remember that the Slow Food Movement was set up to resist the submerging of Italian food culture by the forces of globalisation and homogenisation in the form of McDonald's and the cohorts of capitalism. Is there a difference between giving two fingers to American food invaders and to those of Middle East, India and China?