Food as a Terrain for Identity Construction and Ethnic Confrontation among Italian Americans in the United States

Abstract

Linguist Cornelia Gerhardt maintains that “food is not only sustenance,” because it fulfills more than “bare necessities” for physical survival (4). Indeed, echoing the aphorism dis-moi ce que tu manges, je te dirai ce que tu es by the late French epicure and gourmet Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin (3), historian Donna R. Gabaccia suggests, starting from the title of a 1998 volume, that “we are what we eat,” namely that preparing and consuming meals are a reflection of people’s self-perception. Many scholars share her view. For instance, according to social scientist Claude Fischler, “food is central to our sense of identity” (275). Likewise, anthropologist Carole Counihan argues that “every coherent social group has its own unique foodways” (6). Such observations are particularly pertinent in the case of immigrant minorities. On the one hand, ethnic cuisine is much easier to reproduce and to retain than the mother language and other cultural traits over the generations in the adoptive country (Alba 4; Waters 116). On the other, newcomers and their progeny tend to recognize themselves by means of their eating habits (Diner 413). Since gastronomic practices operate as tools for inclusion and exclusion, shopping for ingredients, cooking them, and consuming meals symbolically express identity. Donna Caruso, for instance, recalls about her immigrant mother and aunt that “memories of Italy come fill their hearts while they stand at the stove, stirring, tasting” with “their hands forming the meatballs or handling the pizza dough” (114). Helen Barolini similarly revived her ethnic identity through a cookbook project after endeavoring to“dissolve my Italian ties of more than twenty-five years” (Chiaroscuro 70). Indeed, according to historian Luigi G. Pennacchio, “for immigrants, food is a primary means by which they socialize, worship, shop and do business - in short, by how they live their lives as ethnics coping with the alien culture that surrounds them” (111). Against this backdrop, scholarship has repeatedly stressed the relevance of culinary choices to define . . .