Italian Cuisine, Cultural Exchange & Migration

How pure, how authentic, how traditional… is Italian cuisine? Not at all, according to Alberto Grandi, a professor of food history at the University of Parma and the author of La Cucina Italiana Non Esiste (Italian Cuisine Doesn’t Exist). Italy’s cuisine has recently been added to Unesco’s Intangible Heritage List, and this is Grandi’s realistic response to that honor. Let’s read his essay explaining why he feels this way:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/dec/15/myth-traditional-italian-cuisine-food

This suggests many questions. The first is whether the supposed sin of ‘cultural appropriation’ is even really possible? Is any cultural or identity element so pure and ancient - and clearly demarcated - that it becomes inviolable, or should be made so? Certainly culture and the details of culture are real, and have effects on individual lives. But can we really draw boundaries around them? How legitimate are such boundaries, and how important to maintain? What Grandi says about the messy, mongrel history of Italian cuisine implies that this incessant exchange of cultural elements (in this case, around food) has been going on a long time, and that it’s just normal?

What does this have to do with migration, an issue that is currently washing over many nations throughout the West and significantly affecting their politics? Well, are those who are anti-immigration just concerned about cultural values that are different - i.e. adequate cultural assimilation? No, it seems also to be the exchange of people that bothers them. And we know there’s always intrinsic tribalism & xenophobia in human groups.

On the one hand, historically people have always moved from one place to another based on the availability of resources, and allowing this to some degree makes sense. The argument on the other hand is that people have some right to defend their territory and resources from those who want to share or take them. Let’s try to understand the perspectives of both sides.

~Michael