She’s blonde, sassy, dresses in yellow and bubblegum pink, and is going to be the cause of World War III. She’s not Barbie. She’s the can of spaghetti carbonarathe youngest favorite daughter of the food giant Heinz. A few days ago she was presented to society from the company’s official UK account. The English applauded with a restrained nod. The Italians, who in 2017 accused Nigella Lawson, British cooking star and daughter of Thatcher’s former Chancellor of the Exchequer, of having killed Italian cuisine by adding three tablespoons of cream to her carbonara recipe, let the dogs loose. Today, Mr. Heinz, with a strange gleam in his eyes, takes in the fresh air on the terrace of his palace and watches Rome burn, playing the lyre and singing verses about the fall of Troy while his assistant counts banknotes.
In that can, two diametrically opposed ways of relating to food collide.
On the one hand, there are the Italians, effusive, passionate, expansive, for whom eating is more than an emotional matter, it is sacramental. Their experience of gastronomy is of a visceral nature that transcends the literal meaning of the word. It is expressed loudly and vehemently, and goes far beyond seeing cooking as an act of love, care or connection with family lineage and the land. Through food they articulate their identity, express who they are and where they come from with meticulous meticulousness: each region of the country corresponds to a specific pasta shape, ingredients and dialect; combining spaghetti with meatballs or putting basil in a Paccheri Eating mussels is grounds for excommunication and even for the withdrawal of a greeting. For Italians, food is the mainstay of the family and of the sense of identity, both at an individual and collective level, and they have clung to it, when football has failed, to get through every storm. The English, on the other hand, have the crown for this task.
For the British, world champions of raising suspicious eyebrows, hunger is an insidious inconvenience that adds to everyday life the need to exchange money and time for satiety.
There are many different academic approaches to this phenomenon of the British seeming disconnect with food. On the one hand, there are those who argue that the British Empire has been too busy winning world wars to pay attention to the pleasures of the table, and that decades of rationing, austerity and trade blockades throughout the twentieth century led the British population to forget the recipes, techniques and connection with indigenous ingredients of the Victorian and Edwardian eras. On July 1, 1916, the British entered the First World War. When they woke up to the end of rationing in 1954, powdered eggs, tinned meat and evaporated milk had taken up residence in their pantries, and entire generations had had no contact with traditional recipes.
Yet this hypothesis cannot explain everything. Many other countries have suffered from food shortages and rationing and yet have kept their culinary traditions alive. Necessity has been the driving force behind traditional recipe creativity: the vast majority of today’s great popular dishes were born in response to a problem of scarcity. So for the British, there must be something more to it.
Not only were they the first to industrialise, but they were the ones who did so most intensively. As population density in large cities grew, those who had once lived in the countryside lost touch with the agrarian world, the seasonality and freshness of ingredients. Intensified and rigid working hours turned food into a mere way of fueling the body to keep working in factories. They embraced the revolution of mass production of standardised canned food, and its large-scale distribution blurred regional differences across the British Isles.
In addition, Italy was not only not united into a single state entity until the end of the 19th century, but it cannot be said that it was fully industrialised until the end of the 1960s. This allowed regional gastronomic characteristics to reach the modern era in full form and to react vigorously to the invasion of processed food on the market.
But there is something deeper and more interesting at the heart of the matter. Protestant sobriety runs through the veins of the average Briton. For a culture built on the pillars of reserve, restraint and discretion, the public displays of emotion and passion in Catholic culture, which is much more lax in the face of life’s sensory pleasures, are embarrassing. The shouting with which an Italian family receives a lasagna at the table is an extravagant and deeply uncomfortable sight for the British mind.
It is no coincidence that Heinz introduced its spaghetti carbonara to the world with the slogan “It’s time for fuss-free Carbonara with zero drama”, that is, “the time has come for a carbonara without fuss and without drama”. Two universes that are incomprehensible to each other collide in that can. Heinz knows it. The advertising campaign is perfect.
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