Illuminating read. Thanks for sharing.
I found it fascinating as well. This is a great paragraph:
We are told that Italian cuisine must remain pure, fixed and inviolable ā as if purity had anything to do with our past. Italian food is a champion of adaptation. It has always survived by stealing, assimilating and reinventing. The Darwinian logic is embarrassingly simple: the cuisines that change are the ones that survive. Yet sovereigntist rhetoric insists on freezing everything in place, as if the national menu were a snow globe.
File under the amberfication of celebrated cuisines.
Thanks for sharing this. Ive seen some articles here and there about this subject. Putting it in context with the unesco status adds a crazy dynamic. Love this authorās prose too.
So interesting.
This is what I call lazy writing. āwe are toldā¦ā oh yes, can you give me a specific example? Or is this just a āthink pieceā that requires us to assume what you say is true?
Alberto Grandi is the author of La Cucina Italiana Non Existe and a professor of food history at Universitaā di Parma, so he may at least have a smidgen of an idea what heās talking about.
Obviously, article space is limited. Perhaps his book dives into the specifics you are missing.
Nice read, and he has a point. If things were great or even reasonable, few or no one would leave Italy, or any homeland for that matter. You need a good push to leave, hunger is a pretty good push. Still an active culture adapts and grows so thereās that. It is interesting not everyone wants the myth or fantasy to be debunked but that might also be universal to human nature.
Very much so.
Great article. Iāll keep it bookmarked for to add context to those those what is āauthenticā cuisine moments. 
I well imagine that The Guardian turned to an expert, but itās too bad he canāt find some justification for what he is saying in the article. Itās one supposition after another. Thatās exactly why it is lazy. Itās a toss off.
Maybe the justification would be giving publicity to the Italian far right which plays around with this notion of the purity of Italian cuisine? Iāll link an article below (which you might find similarly sub-your-standard, but given the relatively low rewards for journalistic endeavours nowadays, nobody seems to make much of an effort and the Guardianās subediting is famous for being woefully lackadaisical), but I fully expect it to be flagged and removed by mods.
As I suggested in my earlier reply ā if you are that interested in his arguments you can always read his book 
Itās a pretty standard example of an opinion piece by a subject matter expert in response to a current event ā¦ Iām not saying youāre obligated to be persuaded by him at all (Iām certainly not by a lot of op eds!), but I donāt think thereās anything about this one thatās got the author out on a limb. If you start putting citations in an article like this, and theyāre not from a single text youāre specifically responding to, those are the first things the editor takes out.
Alberto Grandi has given a number of interviews over the last 5-10 years and is a highly controversial person in Italy with a lot of chefs and (food) historians disagreeing with him and saying that he creates what he claims others have done with Italian food - myths. He is very good at publicity.
Books by Massimo Montanari are quite good on the history of Italian food and he describes a very fluid history of āItalianā food and the many different approaches and how it is less about āauthenticā approaches whereas Grandi is more about āshock argumentsā for publicity (Montanariās area of academic expertise is in this field whereas Grandi is normally focused on economics)
Heās an idiot.
maybe itās just his ideas that are idiotic
what happened to critique the idea, not the person ? 
Yes, indeed.
The premise that migration due to push factors led to changes in cuisine isnāt outrageous. Every cuisine that came to the US changed from the home version and some went back home. This is not controversial. Other countries that send a lot of immigrants all had economic and or food scarcity problems at home, namely Ireland and Germany. Conversely France did NOT send a lot of immigrant to the US because their economy was okay. If Grandi takes an economists perspective on food and culture, I can see how it pisses off fascists and traditionalists. Thereās a lot to unpack with food and Italian history and politics but it does seem traditionalists want the myth devoid of other external factors.
In any case, yes this is a tease piece to get you to buy the book. If you take the bait, you might have to read it.
