Edibles & Potables: The “pizza effect”; Alberto Grandi; and debunking Italian culinary myths

By Roger Baylor, June 25, 2023 767

The Summer 2023 issue of Food & Dining Magazine — our 20th Anniversary issue — is now available in all the familiar places: Louisville area eateries and food shops, newsstands and online.

We have the Austrian-born Hindu monk and anthropology professor Agehananda Bharati (1923-1991) to thank for “the pizza effect,” as explained at Wikipedia:

In religious studies and sociology, the pizza effect is the phenomenon of elements of a nation’s or people’s culture being transformed or at least more fully embraced elsewhere, then re-exported to their culture of origin, or the way in which a community’s self-understanding is influenced by (or imposed by, or > imported from) foreign sources.

Bharati chose food as the medium for his insights, offering this (in)famous explanation in 1970.

The original pizza was a simple, hot-baked bread without any trimmings, the staple of the Calabrian and Sicilian contadini from whom well over 90% of all Italo-Americans descend. After World War I, a highly elaborated dish, the U.S. pizza of many sizes, flavors, and hues, made its way back to Italy with visiting > kinsfolk from America. The term and the object have acquired a new meaning and a new status, as well as many new tastes in the land of its origin, not only in the south, but throughout the length and width of Italy.

Another way of stating “the pizza effect” is the more formally academic “invented traditions.”

Invented traditions are cultural practices that are presented or perceived as traditional, arising from the people starting in the distant past, but which in fact are relatively recent and often even consciously invented by identifiable historical actors.

Was Bharati’s interpretation of pizza history correct?

Some might say this dynamic hasn’t ever been so simple, and while I lack the credentials (and time) to pursue the topic, allow one observation from personal experience: when visiting Rome for the first time in 1985, street vendors and the ubiquitous pizzerias selling slices from storefront windows seemed to offer > uniformly excellent flatbread adorned with herbs and maybe a mushroom or two, but little else except a dusting of parmesan cheese. They usually were “sauced” with olive oil.

None of this was what I’d have expected coming from a Pizza Hut upbringing in Southern Indiana.

It wasn’t until passing through Finland a couple months later that I dined on pizza made in the heaped and cheesy manner to which I was accustomed as an American, and while the end product certainly tasted comfy and familiar, it seemed disappointing compared to the fresh, novel variety powering those days roaming > Rome.

Returning to Italy in 2016 (Sicily) and 2019 (Trieste), we’ve enjoyed pizza far closer to Louisville standards than anything I saw in Rome in 1985. Forty years before my first visit, World War II was just ending. It’s been 40 years since that trip. In both instances, enough time has elapsed for traditions to be > inverted, if in fact this really is what I’ve experienced (the sampling size is admittedly small).

Shakespeare wrote “what’s past is prologue,” and the main objective of today’s (hopefully) edible and potable thought experiment is Alberto Grandi, who earlier in the year created a stir after sitting for an interview with Marianna Giusti of the Financial Times: Everything I, an Italian, thought I knew about Italian food is wrong (“From panettone to tiramisu, many ‘classics’ are in fact recent inventions.”)

The man I’m dining with is Alberto Grandi, Marxist academic, reluctant podcast celebrity and judge at this year’s Tiramisu World Cup in Treviso. (“I wouldn’t miss it, even if I had dinner plans with the Pope”.) Grandi has dedicated his career to debunking the myths around Italian food; this is the first time he’s > spoken to the foreign press. When his 2018 book, Denominazione di origine inventata (“Invented Designation of Origin”), started racking up sales in Italy, his friend Daniele Soffiati suggested they record a spin-off podcast.

Since its launch in 2021, their Italian-language show, called DOI after the book, has had three seasons and more than one million downloads. Grandi’s speciality is making bold claims about national staples: that most Italians hadn’t heard of pizza until the 1950s, for example, or that carbonara is an American recipe. Many Italian “classics”, from panettone to tiramisu, are relatively recent inventions, he argues. Some of DOI’s claims might be familiar to industry insiders, but most are based on Grandi’s own findings, partly developed from existing academic literature. His skill is in taking academic research and making it > digestible. And his mission is to disrupt the foundations on which we Italians have built our famous, and famously inflexible, culinary culture — a food scene where cappuccini must not be had after midday and tagliatelle must have a width of exactly 7mm.

My attention was drawn to Grandi’s reference to the great Eric Hobsbawm, which brings his points about “invented traditions” into sharper focus.

“It’s all about identity,” Grandi tells me between mouthfuls of osso buco bottoncini. He is a devotee of Eric Hobsbawm, the British Marxist historian who wrote about what he called the invention of tradition. “When a community finds itself deprived of its sense of identity, because of whatever historical shock or > fracture with its past, it invents traditions to act as founding myths,” Grandi says.

From about 1958 to 1963, during the economic boom that followed years of wartime poverty, Italy saw the same kind of progress that the UK had witnessed over the course of a century during the Industrial Revolution, Grandi says. “In a very short time, Italians who’d had their bread rationed were living in abundance. > This level of prosperity was completely unforeseen, and to them at the time it seemed endless.” The nation needed an identity to help it forget its past struggles, while those who had emigrated to America needed myths that would dignify their humble origins.

As one example, tiramisu.

Its recent origins are disguised by various fanciful histories. It first appeared in cookbooks in the 1980s. Its star ingredient, mascarpone, was rarely found outside Milan before the 1960s, and the coffee-infused biscuits that divide the layers are Pavesini, a supermarket snack launched in 1948. “In a normal > country,” Grandi says with a smile, “nobody would care where [and when] a cake was invented.”

Alas, the Financial Times isn’t always easily accessible, so if readers find the pay wall prohibitive, here’s a second choice of similar reading by Luzi Bernet at Neue Zürcher Zeitung.

The professor destroying the myths of Italian cuisine: how Alberto Grandi is shaking up a somewhat self-righteous country

No one has any interest in destroying Italian cuisine, (Grandi) adds. Least of all him: Grandi’s favorite dish is carbonara; he is a judge at the international Tiramisu World Cup in Treviso, which gives awards to the person who prepares the dessert the best. But it bothers him that there are so many fables circulating in his country. “They’re not doing us any good, because we’re starting to believe in them.”