Fascist foodways: Ricettari as propaganda for grain production and sexual reproduction

Abstract

Food connects people and land, a link that the Italian Fascist regime exploited through their seizure of local culinary culture for the promotion of national demographic goals. This article traces the connections between the regime’s concurrent drives for food production and sexual reproduction. It will show the propagandistic potential of recipes, and also the limits of top-down dietary change under dictatorship. Ricettari, propagandistic recipe pamphlets, blended public politics and private practices into a heady cocktail, one that cast autarkic cookery and sexual reproduction as valuable contributions to the Fascist state. These documents establish a clear link between the regime’s demographic policy and the autarkic campaigns in favor of Italian grain production. Cooking, the professed subject of ricettari, conveyed political neutrality—it falsely marked the documents as feminine and innocuous. So too did design: small and light, these stapled leaflets could be easily rolled up and stuck in an apron pocket. Portability thus insured that these documents could cross the threshold from the public rally to the private kitchen. Once there, they could directly address women, and attempt to modify their daily habits in ways that would change the body from the inside out. At stake in the ricettari lies a broader contribution to Food Studies in terms of food and politics: this unique form of ephemera reveals that the Italian Fascist regime took a pronatalist approach to cuisine.