Paige Hill: Cultural Food Bans and Immigrants’ Socio-Economic Integration in Italy

Image

Background

How do Italy’s restrictive food policies shape immigrant socioeconomic integration? In the last decade, several Italian municipalities started to institute bans on the selling of “ethnic food” in historic centers of famous Italian cities. In the wake of the European migrant crisis, Italian cities such as Verona, Lucca, and Venice prohibited what they deemed to be ethnic food from being advertised or sold in certain districts in an effort to safeguard authentic Italian cuisine. The bans were sometimes accompanied by nationalistic campaigns from far-right parties that sought to target North African, Chinese, and Middle Eastern migrants and explicitly prohibit kebab shops. There is also a growing literature on identifying the causal effects of cultural integration policies. My hunch is that Italian food culture shapes immigrant identity, and these cultural bans on food may inhibit immigrants’ economic integration or, conversely, promote social assimilation.

Thanks in part to the generous funding provided by The Europe Center, I was able to spend six weeks in Italy conducting qualitative work regarding these municipal policies. My time was mostly spent in the Tuscany region, where there is variation in city governments’ food policies, as well as throughout Northern Italy, including to Venice and Bologna. I conducted a participant observer ethnography, collected newspaper and statistical data, and interviewed local elected officials, restaurant workers, academics, and activists in the midst of the 2022 election.

Fieldwork Insights

Nostalgia for Centro Storico

In Italy, the historic city center, or centro storico, is the center of social, political, and economic life. In the region of Tuscany, these areas are often demarcated by the still-standing medieval city walls, which serve as imposing, visual boundaries. Communities across the world have struggled with the social, economic, and political implications of globalization. Italy is no exception. City centers in popular destinations such as Florence and Venice have been increasingly commercialized due to increased tourism. Commercialization is coupled with an increase in emigration of younger Italians, declining birth rates, and increased immigration of newcomers.

This results in a change of hands of local business and street vendors from long-established families to new migrants looking to enter the workforce and larger corporate entities, such as fast fashion stores and supermarkets. My qualitative interviews and review of local media revealed a theme of nostalgia for what the city center used to be and subtle contempt for what the changing demographics and storefronts represent. I predict that the underlying anti-immigrant rhetoric in the push for cultural preservation laws, such as the food bans, is partly in response to these factors.

Identity & Food Culture

I conducted preliminary ethnographic work on immigrant identity formation and assimilation as it relates to Italian food culture. My interviewees included participants who identified as Italian, Bangladeshi-Italian, and Afro-Italian. Several interviews with restaurant owners, chefs, academics, and activists exposed strong themes: access to Italian food is essential to the integration process; respect for Italian cuisine is central to Italian identity; and, accumulating social capital in the form of knowledge of food norms is critical. These themes are common in popular culture as well, as evidenced by the opening lines of Nigerian-Italian rapper Tommy Kuti’s song #AFROITALIANO: “Non mangio la pasta senza il parmigiano” translated as “I don’t eat pasta without parmesan cheese.” Knowledge of food norms sends powerful signals of assimilation, and this is particularly true in the Italian context.

Cultural Food Bans

The cultural food bans represent the intersection of the enforcement Italian food culture and anxious responses to increased globalization. Although the globalization literature is large, I hypothesize that there is a contribution to be made here on the specific element of culture. There is significant variation across Italy in how the policies are worded and selectively enforced to target certain migrant communities. There is also variation in the way political parties speak about these polices, with left-leaning politicians advocating for restrictive food polices in the name of cultural preservation, and right-wing politicians espousing more explicit anti-immigrant tropes and language in banning specific cuisines. I plan to leverage this variation in my project.

Next Steps

My first contribution will be a second-year field paper for my PhD program. I will employ an in-depth case study to outline under which conditions local governments employ cultural policies, using the evidence I gathered during my trip to describe these bans, their variation, and potential consequences. This paper will contribute to the literatures on cultural enforcement, comparative immigration policy, and multiculturalism theory.

One of my goals was to determine the feasibility of a bigger project that identifies the causal effects of food polices on immigrant integration in Italy. My experience in the field highlighted missing data issues at the local level that I will need to be mindful of in my quantitative strategy, which may employ a difference-in-differences design at the city level to estimate the effect of the bans on measures of integration.

The big picture questions here are: how are salient cultural norms codified and enforced, and what does this mean for the integration of newcomers? My dissertation level project will involve similar themes of cultural integration and local level political responses to globalization.

Photos

Image

Caption: City wall in Prato, a city in Tuscany, separating the historic city center from a neighborhood with a prominent Chinese community. Prato instituted a law in 2009 forbidding the opening of new “ethnic” restaurants in the historic city center. The policy has since been overturned and there is now Chinese-Italian representation in the City Council.

Image

Caption: A “No Picnic” sign in Venice, where eating take-out or fast food in public in St. Mark’s Square and the surrounding historical center is prohibited. Venice banned the selling of fast food, including kebab, in the city center starting in 2017. In 2022, the rule was expanded to target other types of immigrant-run shops.

Image

Caption: A sample ballot on a bulletin board in Florence, Tuscany ahead of the September 25 election. Tuscany has historically been a left-leaning region, but Fratelli d’Italia, a right-wing anti-immigrant party and the party of the new Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, made electoral gains in the 2022 election.