Abstract
Picking up this large format book for the first time had me puzzled. Why, with its four, full-colour food photographs each captioned in Italian (antipasti, il primo…), does it look more like a cookery book than a work of sociology? And why had no-one noticed the howler (il caffè misspelled as il cafe) in the caption to a cup of coffee in the fourth photograph? Do authors have no say? These were just the first puzzlements.
The book’s scope is ambitious. It straddles visual sociology (to which I am new) and the sociology of food (of which I know something). A shared knowledge of the former had brought the authors together. Then Harper fell in love with Faccioli’s mother’s cooking at home in Bologna which, coupled with Faccioli’s self-confessed hitherto taking food for granted, led them newly to the latter. (Faccioli’s position as both co-author and key informant is potentially very interesting but barely analysed.)
Ranging widely, not only does the book squeeze into a single chapter a history of food to the present day, in what is now Italy, that ‘begin[s] with Rome at its height’ (p. 33), it also devotes a later chapter to examining the ‘way the raw materials available in other parts of the world … in Italy are constructed differently, carrying their Italianness in how they are made, used, combined, and defined’ with reference to ‘several iconic Italian foods’ (p. 152). As if that were not enough, it presents an amply illustrated study, conducted intermittently over five years of eating, interviewing and photographing in the homes of 25, mostly professional, Bolognese families.
All this is geared to that Italianness. The authors assert that:
[F]ood defines much of what is desirable in Italian life. Few people could tell you what people eat in Finland or how or if food symbolizes Finnish life (to chose [sic] an arbitrary example), but an astonishing number of people can provide those definitions in the case of Italy. (p. 14)
The study families are divided into four types via a 2x2 table: levels of commitment (ritualistic/pragmatic) by focus (traditional/eclectic). Food is considered in relation to power ‘… how food influences the identity of the modern Italian woman’ (p. 97), to the domestic division of labour, to love ‘[f]ood is love; love is energy and it is excessive. It is the Italian spirit, a source of joy to those inside the culture, and a source of mystery for Anglo visitors’ (p. 95). What seems the most important conclusion is a ‘peculiar pull between structure and improvisation’ in Italian culture (p. 285).
Unhappily, it amounts to a desperately unsatisfactory book. While I was merely sorry not to have been taught anything about visual sociology beyond a few obvious remarks, I was far more disappointed to end up with even more puzzlements. Why, despite a chatty style, was the discussion hard to follow: unaccountable chapter sub-divisions, the conceptual inspiration of Saussure’s distinction between langue and parole introduced (p. 14) but never mentioned again, history bafflingly leaping from the Middle Ages to the films of Bertolucci and Olmi in a few paragraphs (p. 35)? Why, when defiantly defensive about a small sample in a single city are there repeated generalizations to ‘Italians’ and Italian culture? Who is the book for? What is the reader to make of recurrent exclamation marks, of the over-use of food metaphors, of explanations such as ‘[B]eneath the manifest functions of social phenomena are what sociologists call latent functions’ (p. 230)? What is the purpose of the Italian Glossary (including non-Italian entries such as ‘béchamel’, ‘pellagra’ and a third misspelling of caffè) when its contents are explained in the text? Why has the book been so dreadfully badly proofread: missing nouns, superfluous prepositions and misspellings in both Italian and English? Why is a cookery book recommended to ‘those English-speaking gourmands who want to learn to cook the foods of Bologna’ (p. 31)?
This last is perhaps the biggest clue. In effect, the book never gets beyond what Rebecca Spang has adroitly dubbed ‘gastro-hagiography’. It would seem that Harper’s love affair with a version of Bolognese cuisine led to casting the study as a search for its essential nature. But ‘what is Italian and wonderful about the food?’ is a gourmet’s question. The sociologist’s question is ‘how does framing the gourmet’s question become possible and deemed unexceptionable?’. The authors miss the opportunity of devising a defensible sociological stance, in good measure by overlooking much of the literature. Indeed, although they do cite Helstosky’s 2004 Garlic and Oil, they appear to miss its explicit observation that what non-Italians regard as typical Italian eating is as much an imagined and invented tradition as it is reality. Had Harper and Faccioli double-checked this source, among many others, they might have been saved from ending where they should have begun.