Speak the way you eat

I am lucky. I was born and have spent all my life in a country where food is the king of topics: Italy. Actually, foreigners use to remark that Italians talk about food even when they’re having their meals, and I’m here to explain why. Truth is that we never think of food as simply... ‘food’. Every dish reflects the complex history of the country, and some of them are tied to particular events: for example, the name ‘vincisgrassi’ ( a gorgeus variation of the more famous ‘lasagne’) comes from Winzgratz, a Nazi officer who stopped at a farm in the Marche countryside one night, during the retreat of the German army in World War II. According to tradition, he asked for food for his soldiers, threatening to kill the people in the farm if they wouldn’t comply. The women, then, prepared a dish with what they had in the kitchen: with eggs, flour and water they made thin layers of pasta, and with tomatoes, chicken liver, onion, basil, mushrooms, boiled eggs prepared a savoury sauce. The result was so tasty that it saved the farm and the the people who lived in it. Did it really happen this way? Actually, nobody knows, but the point is that we eat stories together with food: it’s our way to build bridges between regions, territories, even small areas that until a century ago used to be part of different kingdoms, ruled by foreign countries, divided by hatred, wars, even by language. ‘Italian’ is a rather recent word, our current political problems show that still it is little more than a word. But food evokes memories, feelings, it has the power to put people back in contact with the good side of their history. Despite the economic, cultural and social gaps that exist in our country, food is capable of hushing arguments and appeasing conflicts. At the end of XIX Century, politician Massimo d’Azeglio said: “We have made Italy, we still have to make Italians”; couldn’t it be a laid table instead of a battlefield the base for a real unification?