Simone Cinotto, University of Gastronomic Sciences Pollenzo
The Italian Fascist regime envisioned transforming Ethiopia into its own granary to establish self-sufficiency to encourage demographic expansion, and to strengthen Italy’s international political position. While these plans failed, the extensive food exchanges and culinary hybridizations between Ethiopian and Italian food cultures thrived, resulting in the creation of an Ethiopian-Italian cuisine, a taste of Empire at the margins. Using a decolonizing food-studies approach and unexplored Ethiopian and Italian sources, Simone Cinotto describes the meanings of different foods for different people at various points along the imperial food chain. Exploring the subjectivities, agencies, and emotions of Ethiopians and Italians, Gastrofascism and Empire (Bloomsbury, 2024) goes beyond simple colonizer/colonized binaries and offers a nuanced picture of lived, multisensorial experiences.
Thursday, April 11, Luisa Del Giudice, author and independent scholar, presented her new book In Search of Abundance: Mountains of Cheese, Rivers of Wine, and Other Gastronomic Utopias (2023 Bordighera Press), in which she outlines the fascinating and complex journey of ideas about plenty and scarcity in the history of Italian diasporic cultures.