Introduction
Who was the first to recognise the rise of identity politics in postwar Europe? A good candidate would be the great Franco-American historian Stanley Hoffman. As long ago as 1964, Hoffmann noted that the process of European integration was producing an unexpected reaction:
The more European societies become alike in their social structures and economic makeup, the more each national society seems to heighten its idiosyncrasies. (Hoffman Reference Hoffman1995, 18)
One of the earliest references to the contemporary version of this dynamic came from the playwright and president of the Czech Republic, Vaclav Havel, in an address to an American audience in 1994:
[I]ndividual cultures, increasingly lumped together by contemporary civilization, are realizing with new urgency their own inner autonomy and the inner differences of other cultures. Cultural conflicts are increasing and are more dangerous today than at any other time in history. (Havel Reference Havel1994)
The mid-1990s unwittingly saw the beginning of the era that produced our contemporary populisms, today’s identity politics, and what I call militant provincialism. In Italy, the would-be secessionist Northern League was born, and popular sociologists such as Gian Enrico Rusconi wrote books with titles like Se cessiamo di essere una nazione (Rusconi Reference Rusconi1993).
Impulses of innovation coming from America ever since the start of the twentieth century have always exacerbated the politics of identity wherever they landed, with a fragmenting effect on receiving cultures, which adapted, adopted or rejected them according to their ability to express cultural or political agency, and according to class, ethnicity, gender, generation and time (Ellwood Reference Ellwood2012). Among the outcomes was the reinvention of the ancient practice of cultural protectionism (Bekhis, Meuleman and Lubbers Reference Bekhis, Meuleman and Lubbers2013).
The most classic modern examples of cultural protectionism date back 100 years, produced by defensive elite responses to the arrival of Hollywood and other models of commercial entertainment from the USA (Ellwood Reference Ellwood2012, 111–113, 124–125, 140–141). The birth of the BBC in 1922 was a product of cultural protectionism (Camporesi Reference Camporesi2002), as was the decision of ruling groups almost everywhere to keep broadcasting under state monopoly control, all the way down to the late 1970s. The popular masses, of course, embraced Hollywood, jazz, the star system and so on with enthusiasm: that was the problem.
Food and drink
In food and drink, France was the country in Europe that first saw divided responses to an American novelty when Coca-Cola arrived in 1949. A vast political controversy blew up, intensified by the Cold War, of course, but manipulated too by the lobbies of wine and beer producers (BBC 1994). As Richard Kuisel pointed out in a pioneering study in 1993, at stake in this conflict were longstanding French conceptions of identity, sovereignty and modernity, a triptych always methodologically useful in analysing such conflicts (Kuisel Reference Kuisel1993, 69). In 2010, French cuisine received recognition in UNESCO’s list of the world’s intangible cultural heritage, the first time food had been included (Italian cuisine as such has never received this accolade). National food museums were opened in Lyon and Dijon after 2020 (‘Cité internationale de la Gastronomie’). It was the Macron government of July 2022 which added ‘food sovereignty’ to the title of the ministry of agriculture, a concept it appropriated from the long-established, transnational movement of farmers from less developed countries, La Via Campesina (‘What is food sovereignty?’).
Following the French example, the new right-wing Meloni government of 2022 also introduced the concept of ‘sovranità alimentare’ (sovereignty in food) into the title and functions of its agriculture ministry. What the phrase meant, the new minister of agriculture, Francesco Lollobrigida, told parliament, was that, in the contemporary world situation, he and his ministry expected to play a much more significant role in government policy than had previously been the norm. The point was to raise the profile of Italy’s food and agriculture sector, to highlight its traditions, its products and its rural origins, emphasising their identities and capacity for leadership. Farmers, said the minister, were the custodians of the country’s land and immense food, agricultural and forest assets. They were under threat from economic emergencies of all kinds and were to be defended. In the end, sovereignty in this sector was about the right of each nation to choose its own food production system, rejecting global standardisation and synthetic food, and insisting on quality, local production, natural sustainability and the Mediterranean diet (Masaf 2022).
In April 2024, The Times wrote that ‘Giorgia Meloni’s government uses purism over Italian food and drink to spearhead its brand of nationalism’. The agriculture minister, said the report, ‘has previously campaigned against meat grown in laboratories and flour made from ground-up insects, describing them as threats to Italian agriculture conjured up by multi-national firms’. He also attacked Ireland’s plan to put a health warning on wine bottles, a label stating that alcohol raised the chances of liver disease and cancer. At the annual gathering of wine producers, Vinitaly, the minister said: ‘Wine is successful around the world because it represents identity, culture, history and economy’ (Kington Reference Kington2024a).Footnote 1
But not all the campaigns have worked. The food researcher Stefania Leo claims that Lollobrigida is ‘obsessed’ with the fate of the nation’s hard wheat crop, the essential ingredient of pasta. ‘Perhaps he is thinking of the famous wheat threshing episode of 1935, when Mussolini took part in the harvest in Sabaudia.’ The problem, says Leo, is that not enough hard wheat, of the right quality, is produced in Italy to meet industrial-scale demand, so quantities must be imported, exposing prices to international speculation (Leo Reference Leo2025).
The food historian Alberto Grandi pointed to another problem for the government. Talking to The Times’ Rome correspondent, Tom Kington, in an article from September 2024, he spoke of the difficulty of linking Italy’s ancient culinary traditions to national identity: some of those traditions are not very old:
The truth is that Italian cuisine is often based on innovation, not tradition. Think of prosecco, which was invented in the 1960s or the modern industrial version of balsamic vinegar made with caramel which was dreamed up in the 1970s.
He added: ‘It is, however, proving an effective way to create consensus.’ In the same article, Kington reported that Lollobrigida had
previously warned of the danger of ‘ethnic substitution’ involving migrants filling the gaps left by Italy’s plunging birthrate, but he admitted that Italian food production often depends on migrants, from Sikhs tending cows that produce Parmesan cheese in Emilia-Romagna to Africans picking fruit and vegetables in southern Italy. ‘That’s why we have increased the entry quotas for migrants. We need migrants who enter the country legally.’ (Kington Reference Kington2024b)Footnote 2
Nevertheless, the shadow of forced, illegal immigrant labour continues to fall heavily over sectors of greatest demand, such as high-end wines, as the Financial Times reported in January 2025 (Kazmin Reference Kazmin2025).
The American challenge and the rise of Slow Food
The new policy emphasis in Rome fitted into a long tradition of defending and promoting Italian ideas of sovereignty and identity in this crucial sector, especially by consciously organising the boundary between innovation and tradition. In particular, the novelties coming from the American fast-food industry have for years prompted forms of response, impulses that have sought to reinforce local belonging and kinship in food production and consumption. ‘[T]he American inspiration played a key role in orienting choice, establishing boundaries between what was “ours” and what was not “ours”’ (Ellwood Reference Ellwood, Almqvist and Linklater2009, 101–102).
The anthropologist of modernity Arjun Appadurai had already perceived this dynamic, reports the sociologist Fabio Poppi,
arguing that while the lines between ‘us’ and ‘them’ may have always been blurred at the boundaries and unclear across large spaces and big numbers in human history, globalization exacerbates these uncertainties and produces new incentives for cultural purification as more nations [and the people Poppi interviewed for his study] lose the illusion of national economic sovereignty or well-being. (Poppi Reference Poppi2024, 18)
The most spectacular example of what could happen involved responses to the arrival of McDonald’s in Italy from 1986 onwards. A cultural activist from a small town in Piedmont, Carlo Petrini, with friends, was among the first to raise his voice in protest when the first McDonald’s opened right by one of Rome’s most treasured landmarks, the Spanish Steps. Petrini’s own version of this story shows that this was just one episode in a long-developing form of local left-wing voluntarism, revolving around food (Petrini and Padovani Reference Petrini and Padovani2017, 7–80, 106–109). The Slow Food movement was officially founded in Paris in 1989 by Petrini and 15 like-minded international campaigners, and published its own ‘Manifesto’. This denounced the evils of an ever faster, ever more intense industrialisation in all things, and the virtues of a much slower lifestyle, renouncing specifically fast food and all that it implied. The snail became Slow Food’s trademark symbol (Slow Food 1989; Petrini and Padovani Reference Petrini and Padovani2017, 109–120; full contextualisation in Siniscalchi Reference Siniscalchi2023, 24–26).
In an article in the Turin daily La Stampa in 2022 – commenting on the arrival of the ‘sovereignty in food’ concept in the new Meloni government – Petrini recalled that beyond the anti-McDonald’s phase, another early stimulus came from the concluding rounds of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade free-trade negotiations that led to the birth of the World Trade Organization in 1995. Here, the full liberalisation of trade in agricultural produce was envisaged, a green light in the view of Petrini and his associates for global agri-business and industrial-scale food production. They took their cause to the Food and Agriculture Organization in Rome, which, in 1996, according to Petrini, officially recognised the right of peoples everywhere to self-determination in their agricultural policies, in order to guarantee access for all to nutritious, ecologically sound and ‘culturally appropriate’ food (La Stampa 2022).
The Slow Food movement has witnessed extraordinary global development; it boasts over 2,000 ‘slow’ communities across the world, and claims to support 10,000 market gardens in Africa alone. The University of Gastronomic Sciences opened in its birthplace in Piedmont (Petrini and Padovani Reference Petrini and Padovani2017, 255–284). The Eataly chain, originally a Slow Food cousin, opened its first shop in Turin in 2007. It is now present across North America, Europe and the Middle East, but – as a profit-making commercial operation – formally detached from its ‘slow’ origins (‘La nostra storia’).
The Terra Madre movement is another Slow Food spin-off. The first world meeting of Terra Madre food communities, held in Italy in 2004, brought together 5,000 producers from 130 countries. Today it brings at least 300,000 people to Turin in alternate Septembers. The Slow Food website suggests that the movement includes 1 million supporters and 100,000 members in 160 countries. Enthusiasts can join programmes that favour slow travel, slow fishing, slow cheese, slow bees, slow meat and much else besides. Its networks include markets, chefs, gardens and indigenous communities around the world (Slow Food 2024; Siniscalchi Reference Siniscalchi2023, 191–210). Petrini himself has become a national hero, and still speaks on key issues of food, biodiversity and environmentalism (Petrini Reference Petrini2025a), yet without attracting the accusations of extremism that similar activisms have often witnessed. Unlike his French counterpart, José Bové, he has never attacked McDonald’s or any other commercial food outlet, showing the difference between an alternative and an antagonistic response to the American fast-food challenge. Petrini has made clear that this was a conscious choice by Slow Food (cited in Siniscalchi Reference Siniscalchi2023, 92).
Slow Food’s early critics have faded away. It is inconceivable that the Meloni government, which includes a component of the militantly provincial Lega party, could officially sponsor an allegedly Italianised version of McDonald’s, as Berlusconi’s minister of agriculture, Luca Zaia, did in 2010, symbolised by a full-page advertisement for the new ‘McItaly’, headed with the official stamp of the ministry of agriculture (La Repubblica 2010a). The novelty was accompanied by a newspaper polemic between Zaia, one of the Northern League’s most successful politicians, and Carlo Petrini of Slow Food, on who best defended the prosperity and identity of the nation’s farmers. The story was illustrated by a photo of Zaia consuming a hamburger with the managing director of McDonald’s Italy, who also contributed his own response to Petrini (La Repubblica 2010b; Zampaglione Reference Zampaglione2012).
This was the same Zaia who, in 2008, newly appointed as minister of agriculture, had addressed that year’s Terra Madre gathering in Turin (Siniscalchi Reference Siniscalchi2023, 194). Yet in 2009 he endorsed the Lombard League’s official crusade against the spread of ‘ethnic’ fast-food outlets – for example, kebab shops – in the region’s city centres, in the name of ‘our native commercial philosophy’. Zaia was quoted in a newspaper interview as saying that he did not eat pineapple, ‘never mind that stuff’ (La Stampa 2009).Footnote 3
The polemics continued as the nation rallied round the project for a world exhibition to be based in Milan in 2015, dedicated to the theme of ‘Feeding the planet, energy for life’. McDonald’s was among the event’s main sponsors. Naturally, Slow Food objected (Slow Food 2015). The American chain responded for the first and so far only time in public, accusing Petrini of ‘half-baked Third Worldist rhetoric which will never feed the planet … it’s sad that Slow Food feels the need to fight McDonald’s in order to give itself an identity’ (Corriere della Sera 2015).
Enogastronomia: an Italian soft power asset
The general success of the Milan Expo – over six months, more than 20 million visitors explored 150 national and company pavilions – was converted into a number of spin-offs. The foreign ministry in Rome took up the challenge of ‘gastrodiplomacy’, setting in motion an annual tradition entitled the ‘World Wide Week of Italian Cuisine’. Italian embassies and consulates in 105 countries now regularly organise over 1,300 food-oriented events: tasting sessions, presentations by celebrity chefs, cooking shows and mini-courses, fairs and exhibits, films and exhibitions (Ellwood Reference Ellwood2016).
The understanding of food and wine as an exceptional source of commercial and cultural influence – soft power – took root. Governments and other institutions choose ‘soft power’ today from the conviction that their nations, institutions, personalities and especially culture are endowed with a charisma of their own which can be deployed to generate prestige, attention and respect in the world. The Milan Expo showed how Italy’s gastronomic heritage fitted perfectly into this definition of the formula, and was embraced forcefully by the Meloni government from 2022, as we have already seen.
This strategy enjoyed a particular success in February 2025, when King Charles III hosted an official celebration of Italian food at his country residence, Highgrove. Carlo Petrini was there, as well as stars of stage, screen and popular music, the relevant ambassadors, and the television food celebrities Stanley Tucci and Francesco Mazzei. They assembled a typical Italian menu, but using products sourced exclusively in Britain (except the olive oil and the Piedmont wine). The king made a speech in Italian expressing his admiration and enjoyment of the country’s food culture (La Repubblica 2025).
But official activity in promoting national and international awareness of the importance to Italy of its gastronomic heritage has also involved creating defensive boundaries – legal, economic and cultural – around its most cherished products. The subversive forces thrown up by globalisation have always been ready to produce counterfeit or adulterated versions of products such as Parma ham and buffalo mozzarella, and now, it seems, even tomato paste (BBC 2024). Using figures supplied by Coldiretti – the national farmers’ union – the food researcher Stefania Leo reported in February 2025 that all the Americans who bought fake Parmesan cheese, or mortadella, or ‘San Marzano Style Tomatoes’, cost Italy €120 billion per annum (Leo Reference Leo2025).
The DOC (Dénomination di origine controlée) system invented for French wines in 1935 was adapted for Italy in 1963 and reinforced by the EU – becoming DOP, where P stands for ‘protetta’ (protected) – in 2006. What the professionals call the ‘DOP economy’ reported a turnover of €20 billion in 2023, the work of 194,000 businesses and almost 850,000 employees (Il Sole 24 Ore 2024). The number of products enjoying the DOP guarantee of quality is vast (Masaf 2024). The bestselling DOP products in the world remain the classic cheeses from Parma and Reggio Emilia, Parma ham and buffalo mozzarella from the Naples region. The producers defending the authenticity of Neapolitan mozzarella say they are now adopting artificial intelligence to detect fakes (Ellwood Reference Ellwood2024).
An extension of the 2022 budget law provides for a system of protection and promotion of Italian industries as a whole (Ellwood Reference Ellwood2024). In this campaign, the agro-alimentare industry, as one of the largest single productive sectors of the economy – at 3.8 per cent of GNP (Celesti Reference Celesti2024) – gets special attention. Coldiretti claims that it generated roughly €70 billion of exports in 2024, an 8 per cent increase over the previous year. Germany was the principal market, followed by France, the USA, Britain and Spain. Exports to America were worth €7.8 billion (Leo Reference Leo2025). A badge to be shown on products whose authenticity and ‘integrity’ are truly Italian would be guaranteed by the state under a scheme entitled ‘Certified Italian Excellence’. An official Register of Brands of Historic Importance has been created. The same law provides for quality certificates for Italian restaurants worldwide (Mimit n.d.; Ghiotto Galfre Reference Ghiotto2024). How this vision could be enacted is unclear. In the UK alone in 2023 there were ‘currently 11,489 Italian restaurants’, an increase of 16.4 per cent since 2022 (LACA 2023).
After interviewing a series of actors across the food sector, the researcher Fabio Poppi concluded:
[W]hat emerges … is a defense of Italian food culture that is not only based on economic opportunity, but fundamentally on ideal, moral terms … This tendency can be described as an engagement in the defense of Italian tradition, a value that is rhetorically privileged and opposed not only to necessary market strategies, but also to foreign influences … One people, one country, one food culture. (Poppi Reference Poppi2024, 13)
So everyone, it appears, now believes in ‘sovranità alimentare’, including those who normally oppose the Meloni government on all fronts. The president of Slow Food, Barbara Nappini, in a 2024 book which is part autobiography part manifesto, endorses the concept, especially in the version expressed by the Via Campesina movement. This proposes ‘an indissoluble link between food and food policies, agricultural production, ecosystems, territories and the communities which live on them, their culture and identity’ (Nappini Reference Nappini2024, 49). The Slow Food members, and the Terra Madre movement most prominently, believe in food as ‘an instrument of political and cultural change. It opens up questions of access, security and quality, but also [emphasises] values which are philosophical, anthropological and also about identity’ (Nappini Reference Nappini2024, 143; Siniscalchi Reference Siniscalchi2023, 200).
But, as the ethnologist Valeria Siniscalchi, who has been investigating the movement for a long time, makes clear, this sort of statement can serve to hide the contradictions that will inevitably come out in such a massive, sprawling organisation over the years. She talks of
the different motivations for membership [now]: there are members who are interested in food and good meals, and there are others who talk about the food system and politics; members who primarily organize dinners, and others who undertake less traditional responsibilities; the more nostalgic and the more militant … Even if commercial elements are never far away, Terra Madre appears very different from Slow Food’s other organized events, where the commercial and promotional dimensions occupy a dominant place. (Siniscalchi Reference Siniscalchi2023, 201)
But those who believe that Slow Food has become its own establishment, or is too big and corporate-looking, now offer their own, more radical versions. The Campi Aperti movement talks of ‘sovranità alimentare’ too, wishing to start from the Emilia-Romagna region ‘to promote through public debate a broad coalition of associations and groups … who strongly believe in the need for a radical change in the system of production, distribution and consumption of food’. There is no mention of any other conception of ‘sovranità alimentare’ (Campi Aperti Reference Campi2024).
*
At the start of the ‘American century’, in the 1940s, a nationalist Irish writer said: ‘Our problem is to find a formula of life as between the old traditions and the new world rushing into us from every side’ (O’Faolain Reference O’Faolain1940, 305). In Italy, you have a choice of such formulas: if you do not care for Slow Food, you can choose the Future Food Institute of Bologna, or the WomeninFood Forum, or the Ferrara Food Festival, or the Ecomuseo della Dieta Mediterranea in the Cilento. Thanks to the recognition given by UNESCO to the Mediterranean diet, the Ecomuseo also has a worldwide network of contacts, while insisting, like so many, on the fundamental role of local traditions in pointing the way to the future. Movements such as Genuino Clandestino or Campi Aperti offer a more radical, small-scale alternative to nationalist or even trans-nationalist rhetoric (Sambuco Reference Sambuco2024, 121).Footnote 4
But the hyper-protectionist tariff policy introduced by the Trump administration in March 2025 represented a fundamental challenge to the role of food and wine in the identity politics and economics of the Meloni government, and to the wellbeing of the sector as a whole. Suddenly, the indispensable role of the EU as the sole institution authorised to negotiate trade issues pushed cherished ideas of sovereignty into the shade. The minister of agriculture Francesco Lollobrigida told the newspaper La Stampa that tariffs were ‘culturally unacceptable, illogical’, and that pacification and diplomacy were the only methods for avoiding a trade war (La Stampa 2025). While the tariff threat was suspended in the short term, the Federazione Nazionale Agroalimentare demanded that the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy be superseded by a ‘United States of Europe’ for this sector (Agrocepi 2025).
The Lega’s militant provincialism was disrupted by the new American challenge, with the aforementioned Zaia pro-EU, while others insisted on bilateral negotiations (Zambon Reference Zambon2025). Prime Minister Meloni’s attempts to bridge the various gaps with a special trip to Washington in April 2025 produced no visible results (Il Post 2025). In a La Stampa article of 11 April, written to celebrate Charles III’s visit to Ravenna, Carlo Petrini made much of his friendship with the king, and their long-shared environmental concerns. But he made no mention of the tariffs issue (Petrini Reference Petrini2025b).
Once again, the force of an American challenge was demonstrating its ability to divide those obliged to deal with it. While the most recent versions, especially AI, represented instances of innovation in a long tradition of forceful novelties (narrated in Ellwood Reference Ellwood2012), the tariff wall represented to most qualified observers a step back to the deeply divided 1930s (Financial Times 2025).
The reputational boost given to Italy’s food and wine sector by the Meloni government and by the sector’s producers – but also by the vast Slow Food movement – offers a fine example of the ‘soft power’ formula at work. But the geo-economic upheaval introduced by President Trump has also shown the formula’s limits. The way in which Meloni and her agriculture minister Lollobrigida have leveraged Italian cuisine’s immense world prestige has masked other contradictions in its recent development, revealing the wishful thinking – velleità – in so much of their idea of ‘sovereignty’ in food and wine. Defiant sovereignty at the dinner table, as so often elsewhere, is an illusion. But then, as Jesus Christ reportedly said, ‘Man does not live by bread alone.’
Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank Milena Sabato, general co-editor of Modern Italy, for her tireless support in preparing this article for publication, Ian Mansbridge for his editing, the anonymous reviewer for their comments on the original version, and Patrizia Sambuco for her helpful suggestions.
David W. Ellwood taught contemporary history at the University of Bologna from 1978 to 2012, and now teaches courses on aspects of US–European relations at the SAIS Europe campus of Johns Hopkins University, Bologna. His main books are Italy 1943–45 (Leicester University Press, 1985), Rebuilding Europe: Western Europe, America and Postwar Reconstruction (Longmans, 1992) and The Shock of America: Europe and the Challenge of the Century (Oxford University Press, 2012). The connecting theme of his research has always been the function of American power, in all its forms, in contemporary European history. He was president of the International Association for Media and History (IAMHIST) from 1999 to 2006. He lives in Turin, where he is a Fellow of the Fondazione Einaudi.
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