Feeding Fascism: The Politics of Women’s Food Work by Diana Garvin (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Feeding Fascism: The Politics of Women’s Food Work by Diana Garvin Megan Kirby Garvin, Diana–Feeding Fascism: The Politics of Women’s Food Work. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2022. 292 p. Diana Garvin’s fascinating new book brings Fascist foodways to the Italian dinner table. Feeding Fascism explores how the state intervened in food and feeding, and in doing so, Italian women across all classes adapted, negotiated, and resisted such culinary dictates. In an attempt to avoid reducing these women to domestic roles, Garvin instead uses “site-based” case studies—rural rice paddies and grain fields, the Perguina factory, and ideal fascist kitchens—to demonstrate how these spaces are neither private nor public but interconnected. In her examination of women’s lived experience feeding their families, she argues that these women did not “unquestioningly receive cultural messages from above” and instead made careful decisions about what to cook, how to prepare, and what to preserve; Fascist food policy was often applied unevenly in such decisions (pp. 5, 14). Daily decisions and everyday life are explored through varying socio-economic classes of women from the Northern and Central regions of Italy. Her approach is the strongest feature of the book; she presents the rural and urban settings—and the women who lived and laboured in both—in tandem with one another. In doing so, she avoids the [End Page 217] tendency to create an isolationist and monolithic experience of Fascism; women in both spaces became national interests. As part of her methodology, Garvin takes care to present these women’s “own conceptions of gender, class, and region” to describe social categories and make sense of daily life, food, and feeding under Fascist rule (p. 4). Using food as a lens, Feeding Fascism investigates how Fascism’s affinity for autarky, rationalism, and pronatalism transformed the kitchen into a political landscape. Feeding Fascism first explores what Garvin refers to as tabletop politics to explain how politics, public policy, and debate made its way into the family household. The first chapter reads like an extension of the introduction, providing context on the topics explored in further depth throughout the rest of the book. In doing so, the reader is presented with the regime’s goal of autarky, a mandate for economic self-sufficiency, and how this political goal was harnessed through women’s work, bodies, and children (p. 17). Autarkic production heavily depended on rural women’s agricultural labour. Not only did their work on rice and grain paddies fulfill Mussolini’s state-approved foods campaign, such as the Battle for Grain, National Day for Rice, and “Amate il Pane,” as substitutes to bread and pasta to liberate the country from foreign foodways (pp. 18, 20). Consumption and production of Italian products meant there was more food to feed the nation, healthier bodies, more infants birthed, and more Fascists for tomorrow. Garvin argues that rural women’s bodies also embodied the Fascist vision of hyper productivity, femininity, and maternalism (p. 48). Popular ricettario’s (pamphlets) insisted Italy was the land of plenty and abundance, particularly when it came to young children. Imagery in these ricettario’s would often depict happy and plump infants with overflowing bags of rice produced from Italian soil. The mondine (female rice workers) “constituted a symbol of gendered hyperproductivity based on and in the female body” through their ability to harvest autarkic foods and their reproductive capabilities (p. 59). Regime intervention occurred in urban factory settings too. The woman-founded, and overwhelmingly woman-employed, chocolate factory, Perugina, is one such case study. Garvin follows the management style of Luisa Spagnoli to demonstrate how the Fascist vision of Taylorism, state surveillance, autarky, and pronatalism found its way inside the factory walls. Much like the mondine, the women workers of Perguina could feed the nation through Italian-made chocolates and through breast milk (p. 98). In true Taylorist fashion, these working women’s bodies were provided breastfeeding rooms and nurseries in the Perugina factory. This allowed working mothers the space and employment to feed their children, but it also allowed Spagnoli the opportunity to promote the company and their products as autarkic (p. 101). The Fascist regime...