Feeding Fascism explores how women negotiated the politics of Italy’s Fascist regime in their daily lives and how they fed their families through agricultural and industrial labour. The book looks at women’s experiences of Fascism by examining the material world in which they lived in relation to their thoughts, feelings, and actions.
Over the past decade, Diana Garvin has conducted extensive research in Italian museums, libraries, and archives. Feeding Fascism includes illustrations of rare cookbooks, kitchen utensils, cafeteria plans, and culinary propaganda to connect women’s political beliefs with the places that they lived and worked and the objects that they owned and borrowed. Garvin draws on first-hand accounts, such as diaries, work songs, and drawings, that demonstrate how women and the Fascist state vied for control over national diet across many manifestations – cooking, feeding, and eating – to assert and negotiate their authority. Revealing the national stakes of daily choices, and the fine line between resistance and consent, Feeding Fascism attests to the power of food.
Feeding Fascism explores how women negotiated the politics of Italy’s Fascist regime in their daily lives and how they fed their families through agricultural and industrial labour. The book looks at women’s experiences of Fascism by examining the material world in which they lived in relation to their thoughts, feelings, and actions.
Over the past decade, Diana Garvin has conducted extensive research in Italian museums, libraries, and archives. Feeding Fascism includes illustrations of rare cookbooks, kitchen utensils, cafeteria plans, and culinary propaganda to connect women’s political beliefs with the places that they lived and worked and the objects that they owned and borrowed. Garvin draws on first-hand accounts, such as diaries, work songs, and drawings, that demonstrate how women and the Fascist state vied for control over national diet across many manifestations – cooking, feeding, and eating – to assert and negotiate their authority. Revealing the national stakes of daily choices, and the fine line between resistance and consent, Feeding Fascism attests to the power of food.
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Tabletop Politics
1. Towards an Autarkic Italy
2. Agricultural Labour and the Fight for Taste
3. Raising Children on the Factory Line
4. Recipes for Exceptional Times
5. Model Fascist Kitchens
Conclusion: From Feeding Fascism to Eating Mussolini
A Note to Future Researchers
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Diana Garvin is an assistant professor of Italian at the University of Oregon.
Garvin’s book is a fascinating look at how dinner tables, café
menus, cookbooks, and kitchen utensils can help us understand the
intersection of politics and daily life. In this case, Garvin takes
readers on a journey through women’s experiences of Fascism under
Benito Mussolini’s regime by exploring their cooking, agricultural
labor, and industrial food production in Italy from 1922 through
1945."
*Civil Eats*
"Feeding Fascism is a fascinating journey through the food,
kitchens, and work of women in an era of intense political ideology
and citizen stewardship, where nutrition and food science, design
and modernity were all used to facilitate that stewardship."
*Nature Food *
"Feeding Fascism contributes much to our understanding of women’s
lives under Mussolini’s dictatorship and is a welcome addition to a
growing body of scholarship that challenges the consent-resistance
dichotomy that long dominated studies of interwar Italy. Fascists
rarely missed an opportunity to celebrate what they were doing or
to explain to people how they wanted them to act and feel. By
subjecting the kitchen cabinets, factory cafeterias, ration cards,
and recipe collections of the period to scrutiny, Garvin has
brought the experiences of at least some Italian women into the
frame."
*LARB*
"Feeding Fascism looks past the gilded hearths of Fascist leaders,
and transports us instead to rice paddies, factories and
working-class kitchens. This important intervention in Fascism
scholarship examines cooking, foraging, and labour in fields and
factories to understand ‘what happened between rebellion and
consent’ throughout the ventennio."
*Modern Italy*
"Feeding Fascism is for a general audience, and Garvin succeeds in
making the material accessible – no dry prose or unfamiliar
academic jargon here. By using the less-explored lens of women’s
food work, she sheds light on a moment in history that threated to
profoundly changed Italian culinary traditions."
*The Parliament*
"Feeding Fascism is an excellent contribution to the scholarship on
Italian women, labour, food production and policy,
industrialization, and architecture."
*Histoire sociale / Social History*
“Garvin deftly strikes a balance between explaining the process of
food distribution and describing the subjective experiences of
women within the macroeconomic transformations that concerned food
production at the time.”
*EuropeNow Journal*
“Garvin’s work announces that the comprehensibility of the
feelings, stories and struggles from those kitchens can only be
partial without understanding their physical, tangible, tactile
features … her constant emphasis on biopolitics and banal
nationalism in everyday life underlines the extent to which food is
always inherently political, whether or not it is recognized as
such.”
*MLN*
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