Is there no such thing as Italian cuisine?

Italian cuisine may be one of the most recognised and loved in the world – often imagined as a collection of ancient recipes and local traditions preserved by skilful nonnas over the centuries. But now, a food historian is exposing common myths and false stories, arguing that the Italian cuisine as we know it is barely a few decades old.

Food is no doubt an integral part of the country's culture and identity – so much so that Italians cherish Neapolitan pizza or pasta alla carbonara as much as the great historical and artistic treasures of the boot-shaped peninsula. Tales abound of centuries-old local feuds over what city has the best filled pasta, while every local cheese or cured meat is likely to boast links to the Renaissance or the Middle Ages.

Alberto Grandi, food historian and professor of economic history at the University of Parma, has been debunking Italian food myths for years. In 2018, Grandi published Denominazione di Origine Inventata (Invented Designation of Origin: The Lies of Marketing on Typical Italian Products) and later launched a podcast called DOI. But it was a 2023 interview with Financial Times that put Grandi's work into the spotlight and sparked wide debates across Italy.

Grandi claimed in the interview that pasta alla carbonara was invented in Italy just after World War Two using US Army provisions like bacon and powdered egg yolks, countering the common belief that the authentic recipe includes pork jowl and Roman pecorino cheese. This theory is backed by other authors, like Luca Cesari in The Discovery of Pasta: A History in Ten Dishes, but caused outrage in a country increasingly obsessed with maintaining the lore of Italian authenticity in food. The discussion evolved into a heated Italian-American dispute about the origin of the iconic dish.  

Grandi's latest book, La Cucina Italiana Non Esiste (Italian Cuisine Doesn't Exist), written with his podcast co-host Daniele Soffiati and published in April 2024, stirred new controversies with its provocative title. 

The idea that many beloved recipes and products such as cheeses or cured meats have hundreds of years of history, Grandi and Soffiati claim, is pure fantasy. Food is constantly changing and evolving. No product or recipe has always been as we know it now, and most dishes have a shorter history than most people imagine.

Grandi argues that migration is what made Italian cuisine what it is today. Millions of people left Italy in the 19th and 20th Centuries, emigrating to South America, North America and European countries. They were leaving behind a country that was poverty-stricken, where the diet was limited to a handful of products. Pellagra, a disease caused by lack of vitamin B3, was endemic in several areas of Italy at the end of the 19th Century. 

The Italians who landed on New York's Ellis Island left hunger and misery behind. And it was in the "new world", Grandi argues, that Italian immigrants found the wealth and ingredients to create the recipes that eventually popularised Italian food worldwide.

However, many Italians are not familiar with this history. They might imagine that their beloved recipes were born in Italy, passed down, unchanged, from generation to generation and eventually exported abroad by Italian migrants. "It might seem that the rest of the world didn't know how to eat until all of a sudden Italians arrived," says Grandi. He believes it's pure myth – popularised by social media – that nonnas taught Americans how to cook rich, genuine Italian food.

Pizza is the most famous example of this. Born as a cheap street food in Naples, in the 19th Century it was almost synonymous with poverty and filth. Pizza is "a crust of leavened bread dough, oven-toasted, with a sauce of a bit of everything on top", wrote Pinocchio author Carlo Collodi in 1886. He added that pizza had "an air of complex filth that perfectly matches that of its vendor".

It was in America, says Grandi, that pizza became "red". While fresh tomatoes were among the original toppings, Italian immigrants to the US popularised pizza prepared with tomato sauce, a product that industrialisation made easy to access and store. And it was in the US that pizzerias really started to take off.  

Scholars call this process "the pizza effect": when a product leaves its place of origin, gets profoundly transformed and then returns to its place of origin to be fully embraced in a completely different form.

Grandi also angered Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese producers when he argued that parmesan has evolved for the better over the last few decades, and the Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese that was eaten in Italy 100 years ago and earlier – a smaller wheel with a black rind – is now only made in Wisconsin.

The shift in the Italian culinary landscape started with the rapid expansion that occurred in Italy post-WWII. The boom brought new possibilities to millions of Italians. Cars, supermarkets and refrigerators meant that people who were limited to a daily local supply could travel to restaurants, buy new products and create new recipes. Tiramisu, says Grandi, is a great example of this: a dessert created in the late 1960s that is based on supermarket ingredients and only possible with a refrigerator.   

With the new products and brands also came marketing. "Television influenced our cuisine and gastronomical identity greatly," says Grandi. He argues that most of Italy's gastronomic traditions were invented by food marketers. Carosello, a short television programme that aired in Italy every night from 1957 to 1977, introduced new products and brands through stories, sketches and iconic characters. Carosello provided the consumer education upon which Italian home cuisine was then built, especially by mothers and grandmothers.

Grandi's book explains that when industry-driven growth started to lose steam in the 1970s, Italy's economy pivoted to small companies, niche products and local excellence. Thousands of protected labels and regional products emerged and Italians doubled down on gastro-nationalism.

"Cuisine is no longer part of our identity," says Grandi, "it is our identity." He argues that after decades of industry decline and economic stagnation, Italians have no faith in the future – that's why they "invent the past".

In less than a century, Grandi says, Italians went from being malnourished migrants to self-appointed custodians of ancestral traditions. The obsession for tradition has sparked searches for "true" recipes and "correct" ways of consuming food. Italians are ever more adamant to say that bolognese should be called ragù alla bolognese and never served with spaghetti. You should also never put chicken (let alone pineapple) on pizza, cook pasta alla carbonara with cream or break spaghetti in two.

"I always say that every time anyone in the world adds cream to carbonara, somebody in Rome dies," says Grandi. "Italians used to get upset when they were defined as 'pizza, pasta, mandolin, mafia'," he adds. "Now it looks like it's us Italians feeding those stereotypes."

Social media seems to have contributed to popularising these attitudes. The X account Italians mad at food, launched in 2015, showcases comments of furious Italians who are outraged and offended by how people in other nations choose to eat "their" cuisine. The account even sells t-shirts with quotes like "carbonara is not an opinion" and "you break spaghetti, you break my heart".

Content creators on platforms like TikTok and Instagram have popularised a genre of video content showing Italians reacting to food "blasphemy", with creators and celebrities vigorously showcasing their disgust and indignation – with no shortage of drama and hand gestures.

The popularity of these memes is now so widespread that people might think all Italians feel offended by people's choice of pasta sauce.

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"Food as entertainment can be triggering, especially for Italians," says Aurora Cavallo, a young Italian chef known as Cooker Girl, with more than 1.3 million followers on both TikTok and Instagram. "For many people in the world, food isn't just an object but something that carries a lot of significance," she adds. "In my experience, Italians can be more sensitive not just towards recipes, but also towards how food is handled on screen."

Grandi's relentless debunking of Italian food myths has made many people angry over the last few years, but he is adamant that he just wants to dispute the invented history of many products and recipes, not their quality.

As social media demonstrates, however, some Italians have convinced themselves that food dogmas are more important than innovations or accuracy.

"We don't need to make up stories about Italy's amazing products," says Cavallo, echoing Grandi. "We shouldn't create a situation in which changing recipes is the end of the world because that's the opposite of how Italian food came to be."

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