Italian Food Activism in Urban Sardinia: Place, Taste, and Community 9781474262286, 9781474262316, 9781474262309

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ITALIAN FOOD ACTIVISM IN URBAN SARDINIA

Also available from Bloomsbury Beyond Alternative Food Networks, Cristina Grasseni Food Activism, Carole Counihan and Valeria Siniscalchi Garlic and Oil, Carol F. Helstosky

ITALIAN FOOD ACTIVISM IN URBAN SARDINIA

Place, Taste, and Community

Carole Counihan

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2019 Paperback edition published 2020 Copyright © Carole Counihan, 2019 Carole Counihan has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. Cover image: © Tore Porta All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-­party websites referred to in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Counihan, Carole, 1948– author. Title: Italian food activism in urban Sardinia : place, taste, and community / Carole Counihan. Description: London, UK : Bloomsbury Academic, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018030421| ISBN 9781474262286 (hardback) | ISBN 9781474262309 (epdf) Subjects: LCSH: Food habits—Italy—Sardinia. | Food industry and trade—Italy—Sardinia— Social aspects. | Local foods--Italy--Sardinia. | Sardinia (Italy—Social life and customs. Classification: LCC GT2853.I8 C68 2018 | DDC 394.1/209459—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018030421 ISBN:    HB:  PB: ePDF:  eBook: 

978-1-4742-6228-6 978-1-3501-7007-0 978-1-4742-6230-9 978-1-4742-6229-3

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Dedicated to my sister, Susan Fratus For always being there

CONTENTS List of illustrations Preface

viii xii

Chapter 1 Ethnography of Italian food activism

1

Chapter 2 Food, Slow Food, and middle-class activism

9

Chapter 3 Food and territorio: Place, identity, and activism

25

Chapter 4 Resistance farming and multifunctionality

47

Chapter 5 Taste activism and the emotional power of food

65

Chapter 6 Restaurants: Sites of activism, local food, and taste-making

81

Chapter 7 Critical food education: Place, taste, and community

101

Chapter 8 Commerce and activism: Compromises and challenges

115

Chapter 9 Conclusion: Italian food activism and global democracy

133

Notes References Index

139 153 173

illustrations Maps 1 2

Italy, highlighting Sardinia Sardinia

x xi

Figures All photographs are by the author, unless otherwise noted. 1.1 The author and Cagliari, photo by Jim Taggart 2.1 Giuseppe Deriu 2.2 Walter Vivarelli with the beef of the red steer of the SardoModican breed 2.3 Anna Cossu at the Slow Food twenty-fifth anniversary celebration 3.1 Teresa Piras 3.2 Map of Sardinia made from 120 bean varieties at the AGRIS Bean Research Institute 3.3 Visitors in the bean fields at the AGRIS Bean Research Institute 3.4 Some of the 120 bean varieties at the AGRIS Bean Research Institute 3.5 Urban garden in the shape of a butterfly 3.6 Paolo Erasmo and Tore Porta in the urban garden 3.7 Amphitheater for social gatherings in the urban garden 3.8 Urban garden with scarecrow and panorama of Cagliari 4.1 Alessandro Pedini in a Carignano vineyard 4.2 Marco Maxia 4.3 Caper bushes growing on Cagliari’s ramparts 4.4 Gianfranco Deidda with olives and olive oil at the GAS market in Piazza Islanda 4.5 Experimental orchard at Su Staì farm 4.6 Marco Pau at Su Staì farm 5.1 Capers and tomatoes at caper tasting 5.2 Luca Galassi guiding the caper tasting 5.3 Lucio Brughitta at the GAS market in Piazza Giovanni XXIII 5.4 GAS biodynamic strawberries 5.5 GAS market in Piazza Islanda, Cagliari 5.6 GAS wild herb-­gathering expedition near Barrali

2 13 17 19 29 32 34 35 36 37 39 41 50 54 55 59 62 63 67 68 73 74 77 78

Illustrations

6.1 6.2 6.3 6.4 7.1 7.2 7.3 7.4 8.1 8.2 8.3

Stefano Deidda at Dal Corsaro restaurant Maurizio Serra at Terra di Mezzo restaurant Lara Ferraris at Terra di Mezzo restaurant Paola Sanna at Il Rifugio dei Sapori delicatessen Andrea Cerimele and Francesco Sanna Principal Giuliana Orru in her office Annalisa Lecca at Alba farm Sardinian heritage pigs at Alba farm Ignazio Cirronis and computer screen in S’Atra Sardigna store Francesca Spiga in Emporio Bio Matteo Floris

ix

85 88 88 93 103 106 110 111 120 122 127

Map 1  Italy, highlighting Sardinia

Map 2  Sardinia

PREFACE Little did I realize in 1990 when I published “Fieldwork in Sardinia: A Professional and Personal Odyssey” that twenty-­eight years later the odyssey would continue, and I would be writing a book about fieldwork on food activism in Sardinia. It all started in 1968 when I was a study-­abroad student at Stanford-­in-Italy in Florence. Like so many foreigners, I was enchanted by that beautiful city, and I returned after college graduation in 1970 to live and work there for three years, traveling all over the country and making my first visit to Sardinia in spring of 1972. I was struck by the island’s beauty and the people’s vibrancy, and I returned several times— fascinated by the persistence of agro-­pastoral village life that contrasted sharply with the urban rush of Florence. Filled with curiosity about what made Sardinians tick, I entered graduate school in anthropology at the University of Massachusetts in January 1974. Supported by the University of Massachusetts European Field Studies program, I did my first pilot research in Cagliari in 1976 and met many scholars at the university there who became lifelong colleagues, especially Giovanna Caltagirone and Gabriella Da Re, whom I thank deeply for years of generosity and friendship. I pondered a research topic that would be meaningful both to me and to Sardinians. One day I had the classic Eureka moment—food! Since people talk about food all the time everywhere in Italy, I decided that food and culture would be a perfect focus for my dissertation. I did sixteen months of ethnographic research in Bosa, Sardinia, in 1978/9, and completed my doctoral dissertation on Food Culture and Political Economy: Changing Lifestyles in the Sardinian Town of Bosa in 1981. In the early 1980s, I returned to Florence to do an ethnographic study of food, family, and gender based on food-­centered life histories, which came out as Around the Tuscan Table in 2004. In the meantime, I was busy teaching at Millersville University, and I published a collection of my essays entitled The Anthropology of Food and Body: Gender, Meaning and Power in 1999. That title encapsulated my lifelong research interests. From 1996 to 2006, I carried out fieldwork with my husband, anthropologist Jim Taggart, in the Hispanic town of Antonito in the San Luis Valley of Colorado. Jim’s book on that research, Alex and the Hobo, came out in 2004, and mine, A Tortilla is Like Life, in 2009. My research focused consistently on food and culture throughout the years and connected me with Steven Kaplan, a historian at Cornell University, who invited me to join him and several French scholars in launching the interdisciplinary journal Food and Foodways, which published its first issue in 1985 with myself as one of the assistant editors. That collaboration has persisted to this day, and in 2002 I became editor-­in-chief. In the early years, a young French historian of China, Françoise Sabban, was also an assistant editor, and we became friends. She

Preface

xiii

went on to join the editorial board of Slow, the Magazine of the International Slow Food Movement, a beautiful and engaging popular distillation of key issues in food, culture, and politics, published in six languages. Renowned food historian Alberto Capatti was editor-­in-chief. When he asked Françoise Sabban for contacts in the USA to help extend Slow’s presence there, she suggested me, and I happily joined the editorial board in 2003 and stayed until the magazine ceased publication in 2008. Getting to know Alberto Capatti was fortuitous because he was one of the leading organizers (along with Carlo Petrini, president of Slow Food) and the first provost of the new Italian University of Gastronomic Sciences, the Università di Scienze Gastronomiche (UNISG) founded in 2004, which aimed to educate about ecogastronomy—all aspects of food from molecules to taste to sustainability. Professor Capatti invited me to teach an annual short course on the anthropology of food in the international masters program, which I did with great pleasure every year from 2005 until 2016. I was privileged to get to know many inspiring students and colleagues there, including Antonella Campanini, Alberto Capatti, Alessandra Castelli, Simone Cinotto, Paolo Corvo, Paolo Ferrarini, Michele Fino, Michele Fontefrancesco, Roberta Giovine, Piercarlo Grimaldi, Claudio Malagoli, Paola Migliorini, Beatrice Morandina, Gabriella Morini, Ann Noble, Nicola Perullo, Carlo Petrini, Andrea Pieroni, Colin Sage, Cinzia Scaffidi, Peter Scholliers, David Szanto, and Luisa Torri. Food was central to my twenty-­five years of teaching at Millersville University (1987–2012), especially in my courses “Food and Culture” and “World Hunger and Sustainability.” At the same time that I was getting involved with UNISG in Italy, I noticed a growing interest among my American students in food politics. These threads came together to stimulate my interest in studying food activism, which I began when I was invited to be a visiting professor at UNISG for spring semester 2009. I studied the grassroots activism of Slow Food, an international organization founded and headquartered in Italy promoting “good, clean and fair food,” through interviews and observations at several Slow Food chapters in diverse Italian regions, including three in Sardinia. In 2011, Professor Gabriella Da Re invited me to be visiting professor at the University of Cagliari, and I studied ethnographically the Cagliari alternative food sector. I returned to Cagliari for several weeks in 2013 and 2015, invited by Professor Benedetto Meloni, to continue this research, and in 2016 to brainstorm our related projects with his research group on “Food and Territory.” All that led to this book. To all the people mentioned above who helped me along the way, I am truly grateful. In Cagliari, I thank all the passionate food advocates whose work forms the heart of this book and without whose cooperation it would not exist—grazie mille! Thanks also to Cagliari colleagues Giulio Angioni, Marinella Angioni, Francesco Bachis, Gianfranco Bottazzi, Benedetto Caltagirone, Ester Cois, Aide Esu, Domenica Farinella, Alessandra Guigoni, Franco Lai, Marco Pitzalis, Filippo Zerilli, and to Giannetta Murru Corriga, who hosted Jim and me twice in her family’s vacant apartment. Thanks to the visiting professor programs at the Universities of Cagliari and Sassari for sponsoring my visits.

xiv

Preface

Many colleagues have contributed to my thinking, and I thank them for their friendship and insights, especially Meredith E. Abarca, Rachel Black, Susanne Højlund, Alice Julier, Fabio Parasecoli, Penny Van Esterik, and Psyche WilliamsForson. Tante grazie to Valeria Siniscalchi for many good discussions of food activism and for thoughtful comments on a preliminary draft of this book. Deep thanks to the two anonymous reviewers who read it for Bloomsbury and offered invaluable feedback, and to Miriam Cantwell and Lucy Carroll for their editorial guidance. I am especially grateful to my husband, Jim Taggart, who not only did yeoman service in commenting on two different drafts of this book, but who has also read everything I’ve written and contributed immeasurably to my scholarship and my life. For keeping me grounded in the warmth and complexities of human relationships, I thank my sons Ben and Will, my step-­daughter Marisela, her husband Kraig, and my six grandchildren Julian, William, Kristina, Kamille, Katalina, and my birthday-­twin Karmynn. Thank you all!

Chapter 1 E thnograph y of I talian food activism

Introduction This book centers on food activism—people’s efforts to promote social and economic justice by transforming food habits—in the city of Cagliari, capital of the Italian island-­region of Sardinia. In Cagliari, as all over Italy, food has enormous cultural and emotional as well as economic significance, which makes it a compelling pathway to activism. In the 2010s, diverse initiatives were arising to challenge the dominant agro-­industrial food system that had swept Sardinia since the 1980s. Cagliaritani showed some strategies, challenges, and successes in their specific cultural context, which I believe have relevance to food activism elsewhere. Cagliari food activists chose different strategies such as farming organically, forming solidarity purchase groups, shopping at farmers’ markets, participating in urban gardens, joining a Slow Food chapter, and running an organic business. I studied these through ethnographic research based on interviews and observations, which revealed heavy investment of emotions in local culinary culture, engagement of the body and the senses in actions, and desire to build justice through the food system. Three themes emerged throughout Cagliari food activism: the significance of place, or territorio, the appeal of taste as a strategy for action, and the goal of forging community. The book hopes to show the broader significance of these foci to global efforts to transform the food system. But first, I want to describe Sardinia, explain my research, and define food activism.

Context: Cagliari and Sardinia Cagliari was a good place to study food activism because there was a lot of it going on. Sardinia, commonly defined as part of the under-­developed “South and Islands,” or Mezzogiorno, has always had an important agro-­pastoral economy, which has struggled against competition from increasingly globalized foodways manifest in expanding distribution networks and a high density of supermarkets (see Chapter 8). As the regional and provincial capital, Cagliari has been the center of Sardinian history, politics, and commerce.1 In 2010, over two-­fifths of the island’s 9,275 small food stores were concentrated in Cagliari (Floris 2010: 43). With a

2

Italian Food Activism in Urban Sardinia

Figure 1.1  The author and Cagliari, photo by Jim Taggart

population of 156,000 in the city and 563,000 in the metropolitan area, one-­third of the island’s total population of 1,675,000 (ISTAT 2011), its provisioning is central to the island’s food system. Today, Cagliari’s alternative food practitioners— those seeking democratic, high-­quality, and sustainable food—are flourishing. In the period of study, 2011 to 2015, Sardinians were struggling, particularly since the recession started in 2008.2 Sardinian GDP per capita decreased 10 percent between 2008 and 2014, and at € 19,791 was significantly lower than the Italian (€ 26,548) and European (€ 27,400) averages. Sardinia’s unemployment rate has been higher than the Italian average throughout the twenty-­first century, and reached 18.6 percent in 2014. At that time, 75 percent of the workforce was in the service sector, many working seasonally in tourism, 19 percent in industry, and 6 percent in agriculture (European Commission 2016). Almost four-­fifths of Sardinian agricultural lands were pasture, mainly for sheep, with the rest used for crops: wheat and other cereals, fava beans and other legumes, olives, grapes, citrus fruits, and vegetables, especially artichokes and tomatoes (Floris 2010). But Sardinia’s longstanding agro-­pastoral economy was hurting in the 2010s because of difficult labor conditions, poor transportation, and global competition.3 Newspaper reports indicated that the island imported 80–85 percent of its food,4 surprising given the island’s agro-­pastoral pursuits, the quality of its products, and the fact that Sardinians preferred their own local food. An article in the major island newspaper L’Unione Sarda (April 11, 2015) reported on a survey by the Ministry of Agricultural Politics with the headline: “Ready to Pay More for Sardinian and Italian Products.” Of those surveyed, 82 percent were willing to pay a premium for a guarantee of Italian provenance, 54 percent cared about products being “typical,” 45 percent cared about DOP and IGP geographical certifications,5 and 30 percent sought organic products. Luca Saba, the director of the Coldiretti

Ethnography of Italian Food Activism

3

Sardinia farmers’ union, was quoted as saying, “ ‘Eat healthy, eat Sardinian’ is not just a slogan for us but the leitmotif of what we work for every day.” This preference for local food—rooted in the history of tending gardens and vineyards, exchanging with neighbor-­producers, and eating fresh products imbued with familiar tastes— provided a fertile ground for the alternative food movement, which was gaining traction in Sardinia. Food activism in Cagliari was representative of initiatives underway in Italy, but it also had its own Sardinian cast, expressed by one Slow Food member who told me, “we have Sardinianized Slow Food”—“abbiamo sardizzato Slow Food.”6

Food activism This book follows Valeria Siniscalchi’s and my broad conceptualization of food activism as consisting of public efforts to promote social and economic justice through food—the struggle for food democracy (Siniscalchi and Counihan 2014). Food democracy, according to Tim Lang (1999), consists of universal access to good, affordable, nutritious, culturally appropriate food. For Neva Hassanein (2003: 84), food democracy also means representing “all the voices of the food system.” Food activism merits examination because it is growing all over the world in diverse forms and sites (Agyeman and Alkon 2011, Counihan and Siniscalchi 2014).7 I aim to enrich understanding of food activism through my ethnographic research in Cagliari. I use observations and interviews with participants to describe actions, attitudes, and implications for food democracy. Throughout this book, I’ll discuss “food activists,” “food advocates,” and “food rebels”8—people who were promoting tasty, healthy, and sustainable alternatives to the global agro-­industrial food system. In my conceptualization, food activists were more militant, oppositional, and organized; food advocates worked for food system change within existing institutions; and food rebels more sporadically and haphazardly pushed for change. But food activists, advocates, and rebels fell on a continuum, and I use the terms somewhat interchangeably. What they had in common was a desire to resist the agro-­industrial food system that increasingly has dominated food provisioning around the globe (Pratt 2007). That system aims to maximize profits through large-­scale production based on machine labor, chemical inputs, monocropping, far-­flung markets, and transnational corporations controlling food from seeds to sales. The agro-­industrial food system has fostered increased consumption of meat, fat, salt, and processed foods. Many diverse forms of resistance to the agro-­industrial food system come together under the umbrella of food activism, whose proponents aim for fairly remunerated local production and dispersed control of inputs. They promote small-­scale mixed farming with crop rotation and natural fertilizers, short distribution chains, and innovative food acquisition outlets like farmers’ markets and solidarity purchase groups. They favor artisanal food processing and diets high in local vegetables, fruits, and legumes with modest amounts of local meats. Cagliari activists pursued these aims through what Lucy Jarosz (2008: 231) and

4

Italian Food Activism in Urban Sardinia

others have called Alternative Food Networks, or AFNs, which aimed for social, economic, and environmental sustainability.

Methods and subjects I studied the experiences of a range of men and women who were engaged in organized alternative food practices between 2011 and 2015 in Cagliari and the nearby agricultural areas of the Sarrabus, Sulcis, and Campidano. The research project was approved by the Millersville University Institutional Review Board. I conducted and transcribed twenty-­six recorded semi-­structured interviews, took fieldnotes on twice that many non-­recorded interviews, and did many hours of observation and photography in farmers’ markets, restaurants, fields, wineries, shellfish and tomato packing plants, and other sites. I conducted all interviews in Italian and translated them into English. My husband, anthropologist Jim Taggart, accompanied me in the fieldwork, and his questions and insights have been invaluable. Transcribed interviews, fieldnotes, and photographs form the raw material for the book, which relies on case studies and verbatim quotations from the study participants, who were eager to tell their stories. In this book, they speak about what they did, how they did it, and why—telling stories that were both personal and political.9 Foregrounding subjects’ own words and perspectives fulfills Antonio Gramsci’s call for “living theory” born of specific people’s real-­life experiences and their “dialogues of transformation” (Pizza 2003: 36).10 Cagliari food advocates constructed such dialogues in the interviews, and together created a living theory of Cagliari food activism based on their beliefs and practices. This book represents diverse voices from alternative food networks—consumers as well as producers and distributors. Most informants were middle class and employed in the service sector—active or retired office and government workers, teachers, consultants, entrepreneurs, merchants, chefs, restaurateurs, a newspaper kiosk owner, a butcher, a nurse—but several were small farmers, and a few were upper middle class: a doctor, a professor, a business owner, and a retired mine director. Several were under-­employed—working part-­time, scrambling from one consulting job to another, earning too little, or temporarily unemployed. All were native Italians, and almost all were native Sardinians with generational ties to rural agro-­pastoral culture. Few were wealthy, but most could put a little extra into their food purchases. They ranged from food and wine connoisseurs in search of wonderful tastes to activists seeking quality local food for overarching political motivations. This book uses their narratives to fill a gap in the literature by describing a range of alternative food participants and initiatives in an urban setting.11 I found people to interview through friends, websites, visits to markets and restaurants, attendance at Slow Food events, and the snowball method—whereby one study participant suggested others. Friends and colleagues furnished leads and help. Slow Food Cagliari and its head Anna Cossu provided many contacts. Interviewees varied in age from twenty-­nine to sixty-­eight and there were slightly

Ethnography of Italian Food Activism

5

more males than females. They were farmers’ markets vendors and employees, chefs and restaurant proprietors, Slow Food members, farm-­to-school and urban garden participants, organic farmers, and members of Cagliari “Open Circle” solidarity buying group, or GAS (gruppo d’acquisto solidale). Some fit Gramsci’s definition of the “new intellectual”—“builder, organizer, permanent persuader” (Gramsci 1955b: 7, my translation). Many knew each other, forming a loose network of alternative food practitioners. Some had full-­time jobs in the food sector, and others were volunteers or had part-­ time food jobs, with males somewhat higher among the former and females among the latter. Almost all of them lived in Cagliari, though many had been born in rural villages, and most had parents or grandparents who had worked in agriculture or pastoralism. All of them chose to use their real names.

Gender in Cagliari food activism Both men and women participated enthusiastically in Cagliari food activism. Knowing how significant gender is in Italian foodways, I was attentive to gender roles and relations in my research. But I did not often find an explicit gender perspective. This accords with Allen and Sachs’s (2007) finding that there is a scarcity of feminism in food activism in general, although women predominate in numbers and influence.12 In Cagliari, gender rarely came up, and people did not often evoke feminist or other gender-­centered approaches—though they sometimes did, particularly women. There were no big gender battles, and I witnessed little overt sexism. Women occasionally complained about male bias in the workplace—one said, “There is a male hierarchy (una gerarchia maschile) in the world of work.” But in food activism, there were gender differences in roles but not necessarily in power. Moreover, men and women had a common food culture even as they had different positions within it. They shared a commitment to home-­cooked, tasty meals from fresh, seasonal, local, and traditional ingredients; however, women were more likely to do the quotidian work of home cooking, and men were more likely to create and judge taste in the public sphere by being chefs, vintners, sommeliers, and experts. Both men and women accepted a food culture built on a dichotomy of production/reproduction and male/female where women did most domestic work and often were under-­employed outside the home. Their labor force participation lagged well behind men’s—45.3 percent for women versus 69.7 percent for men— and Lombardo and Sangiuliano (2009, n.p.) claimed that “the situation of women and work in Italy is one of the worst in Europe in terms of gendered discrimination.” This disequilibrium in public work was paralleled by an even more severe disequilibrium in domestic duties, or what Saraceno (2011) called “unpaid family work,” including bill-­paying, child and elder care, shopping, cleaning, ironing, mending, and food provisioning. These were allocated to women not just by custom and gender ideology, but also by Italian social policies surrounding pensions, childcare, and old age (Lombardo and Sangiuliano 2009, Saraceno and Keck 2010). Ethnographic, sociological, and historical studies, including my own

6

Italian Food Activism in Urban Sardinia

research in Tuscany and Sardinia, have shown a clear gender division of labor around food and other household tasks.13 Italian men have defined themselves primarily through public paid work and the characteristics necessary to be effective workers and providers, but not through contributions to home and family. According to the Italian government statistical office ISTAT, women did 98 percent of domestic food work when they did not work outside the home, and 90 percent when they did (Lega consumatori 2012). Some men did the shopping (29 percent), but very few cooked or did dishes on a regular basis. University of Cagliari sociology researcher Carla Locci underscored the persistence of the male–female/public–private dichotomy in Italy, and said: “The gender problem always lies beneath everything. Sometimes it is more explicit, sometimes it is less explicit, but it’s always there.” Others I interviewed believed that food activism offered women a way to achieve agency and to balance their longstanding responsibilities for reproductive labor with valued productive work (Counihan 2014b). But in Cagliari, women entrepreneurs did not have it easy, as Chapter 6 on restaurants and Chapter 8 on businesses reveal. Nonetheless, organic food store owner Francesca Spiga denied being hindered by her gender and felt in some ways it was an advantage, in spite of the fact that her supplier dropped her after she and her husband divorced (see Counihan 2014b and Chapter 8). In several alternative food initiatives—for example, the farmers’ markets, the solidarity purchase group (Chapter 5), and the urban garden (Chapter 3)—men held almost all the administrative positions, although women prevailed among the membership. But in the Cagliari Slow Food chapter, the last three leaders and majority of organizing committee members have been women (Chapter 2). Several female interviewees agreed with one who said, “In Slow Food, women have greater influence . . . There are more women and we welcome them because they have a greater ability to build networks.” So although not free of society-­wide gender disparities, food activism revealed some real power-­sharing and opportunities for leadership and agency to both men and women (Counihan 2014b). It fitted in with and built on women’s socially recognized competencies surrounding food, and provided a public arena where they could act even as they coped with precarious employment in the labor force (Fantone 2007). Women could make public and political their private food responsibilities, and men could continue to engage in remunerated food work as they always had. Together, they could do politics, develop relationships, and get educated—building models of gender equality potentially transferable to domestic food labor.

The book The rest of this book explores key issues that emerged from my interviews and interactions with food advocates in Cagliari and the surrounding area. Each chapter addresses a central topic and illustrates it with ethnographic description of several case studies. Chapter 2 explores middle-­class activism and the multiple and holistic meanings of food for Slow Food members in Cagliari, whose descriptions

Ethnography of Italian Food Activism

7

of place, taste, and community set the stage for the rest of the book. Chapter  3 concentrates on the role of territorio, or meaningful place, in Sardinians’ constructions of alternative food practices, and places it in the context of global initiatives for food sovereignty—local democratic access to and control over food (Holt-Giménez 2009: 146). Three case studies anchor the chapter—the grassroots women’s group Domusamigas; a networking meeting about Sardinian beans at the Sardinian agricultural research station; and the Cagliari urban garden. Chapter 4 delves into resistance farming based on small-­scale agriculture, short-­chain sales, typical products, and multifunctionality—showing both successes and challenges. It explores four case studies: the Sardus Pater wine cooperative, the revival of caper farming with support from Slow Food, an organic olive oil producer/GAS supplier, and the multifunctional Su Staì farm. While the sensory properties of food are important throughout the book, Chapter 5 focuses explicitly on how activists think and feel about taste, link it to place, and use it to attract people to alternative food production and acquisition. Case studies include a Slow Food caper tasting, a wine tasting at the Sardus Pater cooperative, and the role of taste in the Cagliari Solidarity Purchase Group (GAS). Restaurants are the focus of Chapter 6, which examines how they can change the food system by being semi-­public sites for alternative eating, supporters of local food and small farmers, and innovators introducing new or forgotten tastes and products of the land. The chapter explores three restaurants with different ways of promoting alternative food: the traditional white table-­cloth establishment Il Corsaro, the vegetarian restaurant Terra di Mezzo, and the local food gastronomia/ delicatessen Il Rifugio dei Sapori. While informal education was ubiquitous in Cagliari food activism, Chapter 7 focuses on the explicit educational goals of a place-­based farm-­to-school program and its efforts to develop critical consciousness through food using appeals to taste and tradition. It explores the diverse perspectives on the program of two Sardinian regional government agricultural experts who directed it, a principal of an involved school, and a participating farmer. Chapter  8 examines three organic food businesses to addresses the challenges of using commerce to promote alternative foodways and the contradictions and compromises that emerge. Case studies are S’Atra Sardigna organic food cooperative, Emporio Bio organic food store, and Bioagrumi di Monteporceddus, an organic food home-­delivery business. The Conclusion, Chapter 9, puts Italian food activism in the broader context of global efforts to promote food democracy. This book highlights insiders’ perspectives on Cagliari food activism and its potential to effect transformation. Interviews with food advocates reveal the multiple meanings of food steeped in emotions and memory, which contribute directly to its political power. They highlight how taste and its associated emotions and bodily experiences motivate change. Many initiatives discussed in the book demonstrate the role of education in food activism and its potential to create alliances for change and develop critical consciousness. Overall, the book aims to deepen ability to imagine and construct greater quality and democracy in the food system, and to forge a “politics of possibility in the here and now” (Gibson-Graham 2006: xxvi).

Chapter 2 F ood, S low F ood, and middle - class activism

Introduction This chapter explores middle-­class food activism through a case study of the Slow Food movement, an important agent of food system change, especially in Italy where it was born and has its international headquarters. I focus on the Cagliari Slow Food chapter, or condotta, and in particular on three members, their heartfelt discussions of the meanings of food, their paths to activism, and their work for Slow Food. I explore what drew people to Slow Food, what they got from it, and what they saw as its principal challenges. Through close description of the Cagliari condotta, I address criticisms that Slow Food is elitist, ineffective, counter-­productive, and self-­serving. I emphasize that Slow Food is a complex entity shaped greatly by how local chapter members put its philosophy into practice. Many Slow Food members invested food with nostalgia, affection, and deep meanings. They rooted food in territorio, or place, and supported local, sustainable producers. They described how the taste of food engaged the senses and the body, and was a channel for education and change. They promoted pleasurable commensality—eating together—to build social connection as both a goal and a strategy of food activism. The interviews revealed how the historic and cultural centrality of the production, distribution, and consumption of food in Sardinia prefigured its contemporary significance in local activism.1 Throughout recent history until the standard of living rose substantially in the 1960s and 1970s, most Sardinians, like most Italians, lived on the edge of poverty and hunger.2 While cuisine varied widely across the island due to diverse traditions, land types, proximity to sea, climate, and altitude, it centered on grains, legumes, and vegetables; meat was rare throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries except among wealthy shepherds or landowners.3 This traditional cuisine meshed well with the local and organic goals of food advocates who often cited it as a source of inspiration.

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Italian Food Activism in Urban Sardinia

Middle-­class food activism I define middle-­class food activism as consisting of efforts by those with financial means, interest, and critical thinking to make consumption choices towards more sustainable and equitable food. Sidney Mintz (1985: 185) claimed that “people can become different by consuming differently.” They can also make a different world, as Matthew Hilton’s (2007) study of consumer unions affirms. He challenges the assumption that consumer movements have tended to solidify rather than challenge capitalist institutions, and emphasizes their focus on “everyday issues which impact upon consumers’ lives” (2007: 135). Roberta Sassatelli (2004: 177) argues that “food consumption is one way in which people start to imagine a different world.” She maintains that it has become an important arena for public, political, moral choices that are “capable of making a difference” (Sassatelli 2004: 189, see Williams et al. 2015). In their ethnographic work, Sassatelli and Davolio (2010) find that Slow Food is an example of critical consumption practiced by middle-­class folks. At the same time, Slow Food’s scope goes beyond middle-­class consumers by defining them as “co-­producers” and casting attention also on production, labor conditions, the environment, and biodiversity. At the heart of middle-­class activism, Sarah Pink (2008) concluded in her study of the Cittàslow movement in England, is constructing spaces of sociability where people can build alliances and new worldviews. These could be committees, events, projects, and everyday meetings; Slow Food importantly adds convivial meals. All are important for creating spaces for activism where, Pink (2008: 163) affirms, “agency is produced through actual local embodied social relationships.”

Slow Food This chapter begins with a brief history, summary, and critique of Slow Food and then focuses on the Cagliari chapter. It is also informed by an unpublished ethnographic project I conducted in 2009 interviewing thirty-­eight members of several Slow Food chapters in diverse regions of Italy (Counihan 2009). Slow Food, centered in Bra, Italy, and led by Carlo Petrini, is a loosely structured global socio-­ political coalition devoted to promoting “ecogastronomy: a recognition of the strong connections between plate and planet, and the fact that our food choices have a major impact on the health of the environment and society.”4 All members belong to local chapters called convivia (condotte in Italy), which are the grassroots vehicles of Slow Food’s mission and are run totally by volunteers who arrange local events and participate in the national organization. A group of northern Italian leftists launched Slow Food in 1986 in a spirited protest against the opening of the first McDonald’s fast food outlet at the foot of the Spanish Steps in Rome. It has evolved into a serious force for change both in Italy and around the globe, due to its appealing message, savvy media presence, global reach, and grassroots organizing.5 In 2018, it claimed to have over 100,000 dues-­paying members hailing from 160 countries and belonging to over 1,500

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local chapters guided by volunteer leaders and organizing committees. Convivia furthered Slow Food’s goal of improving access to “good, clean and fair food”: “good: quality, flavorsome and healthy food; clean: production that does not harm the environment; fair: accessible prices for consumers and fair conditions and pay for producers.”6 Slow Food aims to safeguard global biodiversity, shorten ties between consumers and producers, and raise awareness about the food system. It cites Wendell Berry’s famous dictum, “eating is an agricultural act,” to emphasize consumer agency and alliance with farmers. Slow Food supports sustainable local farmers, foods, and environments by establishing “presidia” and “food communities.” According to the Slow Food website, presidia are endangered high-­quality foods recognized as worthy of protection (see also Siniscalchi 2013b, 2014b), and a food community is “a group of small-­scale producers and others, united by the production of a particular food and closely linked to a geographic area. Food community members are involved in small-­scale and sustainable production of quality products.”7 Safeguarding these foods aims to support jobs, heirloom breeds, and biodiversity, although several studies have shown that results have sometimes fallen short of these lofty goals. Ariane Lotti studied the Basque Slow Food presidium Euskal Txerria pig breed and concluded that “there is a tension between what Slow Food thinks it does and what it actually accomplishes” (2010: 79). For example, it supports local food yet fosters international sales, and it supports agro-­biodiversity yet promotes only one breed of pig in the region. Anthropologists Harry West and Nuno Domingos (2012) criticized Slow Food’s Serpa cheese presidium in Portugal. They found Slow Food’s knowledge of the region and product to be superficial and the presidium production standards to be out of touch with local realities and neither good, clean, nor fair. Valeria Siniscalchi (2013b), in contrast, found that Sardinian fiore sardo pecorino cheese-­makers embraced the Slow Food presidium for providing political legitimacy, distinctiveness, and access to markets. But the challenges faced by small food producers are so large, Rachel Brackett (2011) concluded in her study of Slow Food in Tuscany, that the organization simply could not solve them with a few food communities, presidia, and enlightened co-­producers. In contrast to West and Domingos’s (2012: 122) criticism of Slow Food’s focus on consumption for being elitist and ambiguous, I found it a positive force. Eating together was a keystone of everything Slow Food did. The multiple meanings, emotional charge, and pleasure of commensality enhanced all Slow Food events, from the children licking the luscious lemon sherbet (carapigna) at a salt education event, to the adults consuming course after course of tomato dishes after visiting a tomato cooperative. As Slow Food member Raimondo Mandis said,“The significance of food is what Slow Food emphasizes: conviviality . . . bringing people together in a happy and positive way.” Coming together at the table for congenial consumption of a good meal facilitated networking, learning, and commitment to change. Since its founding, Slow Food has celebrated taste and “the right to pleasure.” Sensory education has been a fundamental pillar of its belief that corporeal engagement leads to changed behavior. Slow Food teaches about taste and its

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Italian Food Activism in Urban Sardinia

relationship to local, organic food by holding producer visits, tastings, “Master of Food” classes, and sensory education workshops. It encourages direct links with producers through farmers’ markets, school gardens, and restaurants. It seeks to expand its networks and markets by holding large international events like Terra Madre, Slow Fish, Cheese, Slow Meat, and Slow Wine.

Slow Food Cagliari There was an active and welcoming Slow Food chapter in Cagliari, one of five in Sardinia in 2018.8 During the research in 2011, 2013, and 2015, Jim and I attended several chapter events and found them fun, sociable, and informative. We met people from different walks of life, including farmers, office workers, bureaucrats, educators, lawyers, a butcher, and retirees, but none were the elite food snobs sometimes associated with Slow Food.9 Many had parents or grandparents who had been peasants or shepherds. Most events were free except for the meals, which cost between €13 and €40 for members (roughly US $15 to $45), prices not accessible to everyone but certainly fair for delicious multi-­course meals accompanied by free-­flowing wine. These are the events we attended and their costs: a free children’s salt workshop and making of carapigna (a traditional lemon sherbet made of ice, lemons, and sugar that uses salt for chilling); a free visit to a tomato cooperative thirty miles from Cagliari in Santa Margherita di Pula followed by an opulent multi-­course dinner based on tomatoes at Il Rubino restaurant in nearby Capoterra (€30 for youth members, €35 for adult members, €40 for non-­members); a Slow Food twenty-­fifth anniversary panel discussion (free) and dinner (€13 for members, €15 for non-­members) under the stars at Cagliari’s Monte Claro Park in 2011; the first anniversary celebration in 2011 of the formation of the Selargius caper food community, with a panel discussion, visit to caper fields, and caper tasting (see Chapters 4 and 5; €5 for the tasting, other events free); the 2015 annual chapter assembly meeting (free) and dinner (€26 for youth members, €28 for adult members, €33 for non-­members); a free tour organized by Slow Food Oristano (60 miles northwest of Cagliari) of the Arborea Fishing Cooperative (Cooperativa Pescatori Arborea) and the delicious fish dinner afterwards at the Grekà restaurant in Terralba (€40 for members, €45 for non-­members).

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The Slow Food Cagliari organizing committee, or comitato di condotta, composed of nine core members (five female, four male), planned and carried out the chapter’s initiatives with occasional help from other members. At the 2015 chapter meeting, Anna Cossu summarized the year’s initiatives, budget, and membership, which oscillated between 150 and 200 people. The chapter activities

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included supporting the six Sardinian presidia-­certified products,10 seeking new quality products, and establishing new food communities for the Gonnosfanadiga watermelon and the Selargius caper (see Chapter 4). They also organized events for Slow Food Day and reviewed restaurants for the best-­selling Slow Food restaurant guide, Guida alle Osterie d’Italia (see Chapter  6). Future hoped­for projects were to collaborate with the schools, increase use of Slow Food products in local restaurants, and create a Slow Food farmers’ market (mercato della terra11). But Cossu noted two big obstacles in carrying out these projects: time and money. The central Slow Food office in Bra paid its 150–170 employees (Siniscalchi 2014a: 81), but all of the local activities were carried out by volunteers, who came and went depending on their time constraints, commitment, and burnout. Slow Food Cagliari member Carla Marcis encapsulated the sentiments of many interviewees when she said that the biggest challenges for Slow Food were “finding the time, the energy, and the optimism, time after time.” Four years later, she had moved on to other interests and was no longer involved with Slow Food. This coming and going was both typical and problematical not only for the Cagliari condotta but also for Slow Food in general.12 Many Cagliari Slow Food chapter members spoke richly about food’s meanings, not surprising given Slow Food’s emphasis on critical eating. I highlight three of the dozen I interviewed—Giuseppe Deriu, Walter Vivarelli, and Anna Cossu— because they represented a range of ages, occupations, and perspectives. They were active in Slow Food and eloquent about why. Their narratives revealed their intense relationship to food and the importance of sustainability, locality, conviviality, and taste.

Figure 2.1  Giuseppe Deriu

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Italian Food Activism in Urban Sardinia

Giuseppe Deriu: Food traditions and Slow Food Giuseppe Deriu was particularly articulate about how his childhood experiences of family food in a rural Sardinian village had a lifelong impact that eventually led him to food activism. When Jim and I interviewed him in 2011, he was sixty years old and had recently retired as director of a coal mine in southwestern Sardinia. He was born in the village of Borore (Nuoro) in the Marghine region of central Sardinia, about 66 miles north of Cagliari. Shortly after his birth, his parents, like so many rural dwellers after World War II, migrated to Cagliari in search of better jobs and education for their children.13 Deriu attained a university degree in mechanical engineering and said, “I studied technology. I studied everything but the land, everything but agriculture. But the tie with the earth has stayed with me as a basic formation . . . I think food is one of the fundamental components of human life.” In 2011, he was an enthusiastic participant in the Slow Food Cagliari organizing committee and kindly drove Jim and me to several events. Giuseppe Deriu described the centrality of food in his family and their practices of frugality and conservation, which meshed well with Slow Food’s focus on ecogastronomy: I know the original flavors of products of the earth . . . My parents and grandparents are all of peasant and shepherd backgrounds. Hence the attachment to the land, to living from the products of the land, is something I have experienced since I was small. This peasant knowledge has stayed with me, as well as the experience of living with little. I was born in 1950 and the war was over but there wasn’t yet the wealth that there is today. I saw from my mother and grandmother what it meant to live with little, to make prudent choices, to not waste anything . . . This type of formation—let’s call it of the fields—this formation of life, has stayed with me . . . Here is how my mother and father organized things. On the food side, the prudent use of resources. My mother could put a meal together with nothing. My father, in addition to doing his paid job, raised chickens at home, he raised rabbits, he raised pigeons, he tended a garden . . . In that garden he grew everything necessary—vegetables, parsley, basil, onions, tomatoes . . . We ate food in season . . . and we put up provisions of canned tomatoes, and tomato sauce . . . We ate meat once a week. Meat was the Sunday meal. Usually on Sunday there was the ritual that everyone, the whole family, gathered together around the table. The ritual was to have homemade Sardinian pasta (gnocchetti sardi)— my mother made the dough and shaped the gnocchetti, she made the sauce. And then there was the meat—usually a chicken raised at home. There was the use of vegetables, minestrone, all these dishes made with fresh vegetables. Today you go to the supermarket, you buy frozen minestrone, in five minutes you cook it, but I want to say, from the point of view of taste, it’s totally different. From the point of view of really appreciating something that you know everything about because you planted it, you took care of it, you

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harvested it at the right time, and then you used it—look, all these memories have been implanted in me.

Deriu had positive memories of a past diet that was tasty, local, and embedded in family rituals. These recollections served as a basis for becoming a food activist and resisting the “nutrition transition” underway in Sardinia since the late 1950s (Tessier and Gerber 2005), with greater consumption of fat, salt, sugar, meat, and processed foods.14 Like many food advocates, Deriu cared about maintaining the traditional diet and local specialties: I am trying to learn all the old ways of doing things from my mother who is still alive. I’m trying not to lose her traditions, the abilities that she had and still has. She is very pleased that I ask her how to make a certain dish, or homemade pasta. These are memories of my childhood: the flavors that I memorized and that cannot be extinguished, and so it gives me great satisfaction to manage to reproduce them myself.

The search for genuine flavors of childhood reflected deep feelings of affection and nostalgia for a mythical, better past and an imagined, possible future: Clearly when you speak of food, . . . you speak of relationships with others. Look, that is something very important to which I’ve always given great value. Even though I have lived in the city since I was very young, up until I was fifteen or sixteen I spent every summer in the village of my birth, Borore, which I remember well. One of my most important memories was about my grandmother’s house where I spent my summer vacations. It was on the edge of the village. The whole neighborhood, all the houses nearby, made up a big family even though they were not related. I remember that very often the neighbor woman who lived next door, or the one who lived across the street, arrived with a dish she had prepared that day to have the neighbor try it. There was this constant exchange, a solidarity, a way of living let’s call simple but also very beautiful. If someone was in difficulty, the others came to help, something that in the city does not exist . . . The city brings an imposing solitude. That’s why as soon as possible I am going to try to return, to return to a simpler life.

Reciprocal exchanges of tasty local food were typical of rural village life, but relationships could be more competitive and tense than Deriu’s rosy picture (see Pinna 1971). He lamented this lost Eden not only for its close social relations but also for its closeness to nature. Deriu bemoaned the contemporary industrial pollution and degradation of the Sardinian environment,15 which, as a former mine director, he knew well, regretted, and wanted to ameliorate by changing the food system. Sardinia is—was—an agro-­pastoral region. In some areas the establishment of industry has caused desertification—just look at the area of Ottana, the area of

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Italian Food Activism in Urban Sardinia the Sulcis, the area up north of Porto Torres . . . And there is the [agricultural] model the international oligopolies have imposed that is terrifying. The use of fertilizers and chemicals, the destruction of local economies, the war of prices that forces small producers to go under—these have a very important social impact . . . So it’s necessary to think about this problem and understand if it is possible to reverse it, beginning with principles of food sovereignty, to affirm the tie between food and territorio, the recovery of traditions, and an agriculture that has respect for the earth.

Awareness of the destruction of the environment and the local agro-­pastoral economy along with memories of past foodways spurred Deriu to food activism: All these roots, all these concerns motivated me to join Slow Food. When I came in contact with Slow Food, it was natural, when I heard the leaders of Slow Food talk, when I participated in Slow Food initiatives, everything they said was as if I had said it myself and I felt immediately part of these values that they were carrying forward.

Not only did he share Slow Food’s approach and values, but he also appreciated the educational and personal development opportunities it afforded: Why do I belong to Slow Food? Let’s say that there are two very important reasons for me. The first is that belonging to Slow Food means having better opportunities to come in contact with a new world, to discover a lot of things that otherwise I would not have discovered. For example, I discovered that we have a Sardinian breed of pig that is raised in some small regions of Sardinia. I was able to enter into contact with a world that I thought was gone but that perhaps isn’t and that perhaps probably is getting a second wind. So there is this continual curiosity to come into contact with and learn about so many things. I was really glad to join Slow Food because they have a very strong commitment to education around the question of reclaiming the capacity to sense, to taste, and hence to perceive difference . . . The fact that the food industry has imposed tastes on us so that in the end, even us, even those of us who are aware, in some moments we fall into their trap . . . so it is very important that instead we have this educational activity that brings us back to understanding how to taste . . . Slow Food provides so many experiences not only in Sardinia but also on the national level and in the future I think on the international level too. Whatever happens, I remain very curious about these things. Slow Food is an organization that enables one to move in the whole regional and national territory and to participate in initiatives of other regions and of other convivia; there is a constant exchange of information. Slow Food offers a great possibility of education, of experts who are open to learning because it is necessary to keep learning to carry these things forward.

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I like to communicate these things to others and this leads me to be involved in a quote unquote leadership role in the organization: to be on the chapter committee, to work for the construction of a regional organization in Sardinia, to participate in important national Slow Food events—they are all things that in the end come together. I want to learn—not to have it just for me but so that this knowledge becomes the property of more and more people. I am convinced that this is a concrete, active, effective way—not to stop or reverse the system that we are living in—but at least to start putting the brakes on it. And we see that in recent years these themes of environmentalism and the problematics of food are becoming increasingly the property of ever more people . . . So there are also very strong idealistic motivations that are not only tied to food itself but also to everything involved in defending food sovereignty, defending the tie between food and territorio, and defending tradition. This does not mean refuting new technologies, absolutely not, but it means using them correctly. That is, man is not master of the world but man is a creature of the world. He must live together with the rest of the animal and vegetable world.

In 2011, Giuseppe Deriu explained how Slow Food provided a way to put into action his ecological philosophy that was born out of his emotional attachment to the foods of his childhood. But in 2013, he was no longer involved and people said he had moved away from Cagliari. That someone so passionate drifted away from Slow Food when his life changed shows, I think, the fragility of middle-­class food activism in spite of its magnetism.

Figure 2.2 Walter Vivarelli with the beef of the red steer of the Sardo-Modican breed

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Italian Food Activism in Urban Sardinia

Walter Vivarelli: Bridge between consumer and producer Butcher Walter Vivarelli’s ties to Slow Food were built on economic interests and shared philosophy. “Food,” he said, “should be lived in its total simplicity, and in the huge, enormous potential that it has to enable us to still live in a relationship with the earth.” He explained how he came to food activism: The birth of my daughter really got me thinking about what we are giving our children to eat, and this really worried me, especially because of what I know about the world of meat . . . This really scared me because we are giving our children food to eat we know nothing about. This led me to deepen my awareness not only about the world of meat but all the products I choose to stock in my shop.

He radically altered his meat business, quit selling imported beef from feedlot cattle, and sold only beef from the Slow Food presidium red steer of the SardoModican breed (bue rosso della razza sardo modicana) (see Vagnetti 2012). Small producers in the Montiferru region of central Sardinia raised about 3,000 cattle on open-­range pastures until they were sixteen to eighteen months old, when they spent their last two months in a stall fattening on good-­quality feed free of silage, animal parts, or GMOs. Vivarelli said: In 2004 I began a process of revolution and I cut off completely the umbilical cord to the agro-­industrial food system, choosing to sell only products from small producers, exclusively local and regional, made with attention to the health and care of the animal, from birth to slaughter. Also to know who produced it, with what criteria it has been raised, and what type of feed the animal had.

Vivarelli was adamant about the need to protect local products and gave an example of a Sardinian pasta: Maloreddus are our typical pasta, but unfortunately today there is the problem that maloreddus are recognized only when they are the [multinational] Barilla gnocchetti pasta. Those are not maloreddus, they are nothing but a scam. Maloreddus are when you make the typical pasta with the ridges but from Sardinian wheat. Then you call them maloreddus, if not, it does not make sense. And this happens in many sectors, just like in the world of meat. They say it is Sardinian because the animal arrives alive in Sardinia and they butcher it here and say the meat is Sardinian . . . We are trying to protect and safeguard our Sardinian products.

Butcher Walter Vivarelli believed that local food production could sustain the Sardinian culture and economy. Global agribusiness, inequality, wars, hunger, and waste threatened the planet. Salvation, he felt, lay in the local economy, small producers, and food sovereignty: “many small producers united can create a large

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production system and this could be of great support to a region, to a nation, to every land, every place—they can take care of themselves and sustain themselves with their own production.” That was what he tried to do by providing a market for small Sardinian herders of heritage beef backed by Slow Food’s seal of approval. At the Slow Food twenty-­fifth anniversary celebration at Cagliari’s Monte Claro Park in June 2011, Vivarelli was an articulate panelist who educated about the Slow Food presidium of the Sardo-Modican red steer. The meat was healthy and genuine, but producers faced difficulties on the market through competition with cheaper imported beef and issues with consumers. Vivarelli said some did not understand what was so special about the red steer beef, why it was more expensive, and why preferred cuts were not always available.16 He explained he had to sell the entire steer to make a living for himself and the producers, whereas agro-­industrial confined animal feeding operations (CAFOs) could sell the lesser cuts to the massive pet food industry (Nestle and Nesheim 2010). Vivarelli lamented that people did not understand the food system: “we are poisoned by the products of big industry, and people don’t have a compass for finding good meat . . . Sardinians themselves no longer know the products of their own land.” The Slow Food event gave him the chance to educate the panel attendees about local food through information, and the diners through taste, because his beef was the main item in the Slow Food communal meal outdoors in the park after the panel. Vivarelli joined the one hundred or so commensals who were sitting at tables together, discussing the day’s events, and eating delicious dishes made of Sardo-Modican red steer beef: meatballs (bombas), stew (spezzatino), and a black stew (spezzatino nero) made with dark ale. Commensality forged connections between the ranchers, the territorio, the butcher, and the diners, reinforcing the messages transmitted through the panel.

Figure 2.3  Anna Cossu at the Slow Food twenty-­fifth anniversary celebration

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Anna Cossu: Slow Food leader Anna Cossu was the leader, or fiduciaria, of Slow Food Cagliari from 2011 to 2017. The term fiduciario/a emphasizes that the chapter leader has the trust, or fiducia, of the national organization to carry out its mission (Siniscalchi 2014a: 76). Along with Vivarelli and others, Cossu was part of the panel and commensal meal at the Slow Food anniversary celebration in Monte Claro Park, one of many events she helped organize and energize. Born in 1974 in the village of Uta, twelve miles west of Cagliari, she moved to the capital at age eleven to attend the Salesian Brothers middle and high schools, and then university. She declared herself “sarda sarda” because both her parents were Sardinian, her father a police officer and her mother a housewife. She felt that her village roots gave her good understanding of local food and its challenges. She had a law degree from the University of Cagliari and worked as a consultant for European Union local development projects in Sardinia, but in 2011, when I first interviewed her, she was between jobs due to the economic crisis and the drying up of funds for projects. This meant she had time to throw herself into her volunteer job as the newly elected leader of Slow Food Cagliari, a job she loved and was very good at due to her wit, intelligence, and affability. I interviewed her again in 2015 just after she had been elected to a second term as fiduciaria. When I asked her what led her to work with Slow Food, she replied: Well, fundamentally I am a lover of good food (una buongustaia). Luckily I come from a family in which there has always been attention to good food, and hence to the culture of good food and rural life, the importance of food in season, respect for biodiversity, and above all the preference for local food. This line of thought was implicitly transmitted to me from childhood . . . Then I found myself saying, “Yes, I love good food, but what is behind good food, what are the criteria to locate it?” And so I approached Slow Food.

For Anna Cossu, the senses were an important motivation to and strategy of action: Taste is central . . . I grew up here [in Sardinia], hence I am used to certain tastes, strong tastes that are characteristic of here, so when I travel to another region or another country, I suffer. I suffer because I am totally used to a high quality range of foods, and I realize that I seek strong tastes that are typical of a very sun-­ drenched land, of a land that is isolated and so also has certain products that are not available elsewhere.

In addition to being a powerful personal motivator and tie to her homeland for Anna Cossu, taste was central to many activities organized by the Cagliari Slow Food condotta (see Chapter 5). For example, one of Cossu’s first initiatives was a three-­part beer program. First, they had an evening when a Sardinian brewer came and taught how to home-­brew beer. On another evening, they held a beer-­tasting,

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with an expert beermaster and several different local beers to try. Last, they held a dinner organized around Sardinian craft beer and appropriately paired foods. Cossu explained: The senses are the protagonist . . . Discovering flavors means above all paying attention to who is tasting . . . to give voice to the sensitivity of each of us, which is perhaps weakened over time because humans have gotten away from these traditional tastes . . . Hence it is the taste of one’s own culture, . . . the taste of one’s own culture because it is a recognition of the centrality of people in all this . . . It is a continual fibrillation with stimuli coming from several points of view. And that means growing together, synergistically. And hence we work on this.

Another event the chapter organized was a visit to the S. Margherita di Pula tomato cooperative, which was followed by a multi-­course meal centered on tomatoes. The message, Cossu said, was “biodiversity, and biodiversity that is transmitted at the table.” The event mixed education and conviviality around one of Sardinia’s principal crops and dietary staples, the tomato. Approximately twenty people arrived in several cars and gathered at the cooperative at 4 p.m. Ignazio Manca, the marketing director, led us on a guided visit of the packing plant, where male farmers delivered their tomatoes every morning and female workers sorted and packed them for shipment to several EU countries. We toured the experimental greenhouse where the tomato cooperative safeguarded seeds and experimented with hybrids. Anna Cossu facilitated the visit, chatted with everyone, and connected people with each other. The last event of the day was a festive dinner at Il Rubino restaurant based on several varieties of tomatoes. After touring the plant and fields for several hours and absorbing lots of information, people were tired, hungry, and ready to relax at the table. Over the long eight-­course meal lubricated with plenty of wine, Jim and I had an excellent time talking with several diners we’d never met before. We made contacts for three subsequent interviews—showing network formation in action and fulfilling Cossu’s goal of building community and combating alienation. She said: It’s sad, today everything is impersonal, mechanical, ascetic. Slow Food is doing a lot to counter this. We give value to all human relations, they make a difference . . . At our events I want everyone to have met each other by the end of the night . . . to have talked to each other . . . The conviviality is very strong, beginning from the plate but also in a much broader way that absorbs all aspects of the person. You must leave happy, not just because you have a full belly but because you have made some potential friends.

For Slow Food, the critical and convivial consumption integral to middle-­class activism was part of building a political movement and changing people’s behavior. Cossu said:

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With Slow Food, we have turned our perspective upside down, beginning with the producer, and informing consumers that their choice can be decisive for the local economy, with an immediate return in the local economy. I choose tomatoes from near my city, not those from China, not because these last are bad but because I am making a political decision. I choose to give an economic boost to my land and at the same time I also control what I eat, and know the path that the products travel, which is without a doubt shorter. If I want, I can even visit the producer. And so I tie myself more tightly to the territorio.

That tight tie to the territorio through food was at the heart of Cagliari food activism and led from taste to economic choices and political priorities. Cossu said: The farmers have experience, the fundamental farming experience, which is what we in Slow Food seek to recuperate, the local identity made of tastes, of traditions, that is what we must go and find and diffuse to today’s youth . . . This is a serious challenge, a big challenge.

Cossu elaborated, So, what is the role of territorio in all this? Territorio is the starting point and the end point. It goes without saying. It is the starting point because what the territorio offers me I see it from the producers, I see it from the culture. I affirm often this culture of identity because both producers and consumers are born in a land, live in a land, and are brought together by the demands of that land. So they speak the same language, but they have two different perspectives—the producer and the co-­producer . . . The consumer chooses and thus contributes to shape the system. If nobody buys strawberries, I challenge any producer to continue to grow strawberries . . . So territorio is the starting point in this sense, but it has triple dimensions. It is the starting point, the instrument by which the action takes place and by which it is conditioned, and it is the arrival point—the landing is always the territorio.

Commitment to taste, territorio, and conviviality made Anna Cossu a great fit with Slow Food. She said, “In Slow Food I found written down all those principles that I already had in my mind, that I already practiced, so it was beautiful because I found an organization that functions for those objectives, giving them a systematic structure.” She stepped into that structure and molded it to fit Sardinian local issues and realities. She helped strengthen and extend the alternative food network of producers and consumers. But she identified challenges in her work: first, in communicating the knowledge of local foods to young people who lacked ties with the land; second, in “giving voice to producers” to press for their economic interests and networks; and third, in managing all the work there was to do as a volunteer.

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Conclusion Slow Food was interesting to study because it was a form of middle-­class activism focused on consumption politics tightly tied to production conditions. It offered the opportunity for individuals to change food choices, create coalitions, and have economic impact. Narratives of three members of Slow Food Cagliari highlighted the significance of place, taste, and community in effecting personal and societal change. The achievements of Slow Food Cagliari—like that of all convivia— depended on the energy of its leader and other volunteers who did a great deal of work to spread Slow Food’s mission, but who sometimes became worn out and left the group. Members knew, valued, and promoted the territorio, its producers, and its products. They practiced taste education, farm and factory visits, and focused dinners. Although Slow Food faced challenges from lack of funds, volunteer burnout, misguided initiatives, and too much to do, it did offer people a chance to learn about and participate in food system change while building relationships with like-­minded folks. They produced small but real benefits for self and others while participating in a mild and accessible form of middle-­class food activism based on changing consumption. Their experiences counter criticisms that Slow Food is elitist and exclusivistic, but not those that it fails to fully address the difficulties faced by small farmers, a question explored later in the book. The next chapter looks at how other Cagliaritani focused more specifically on territorio as a strategy of activism.

Chapter 3 F ood and t e r r i t or i o : P lace , identit y, and activism

Introduction This chapter addresses the role of territorio in food activism in Sardinia and places it in the context of local food movements in the USA and around the globe. In an interview, Teresa Piras, a retired teacher engaged in food activism through the group she founded called Domusamigas, said that “territorio means you have a place in the world, you are part of something.” It expressed the strong grounding Sardinians— and many Italians—felt in particular places that provided a fundamental identity and belonging. I define territorio most succinctly as “meaningful place,” but it was an important concept in Sardinian food activism, and carried rich and complex meanings. This chapter examines activist strategies based on territorio and asks whether they can advance the overriding goal of food activism—the promotion of food democracy. It explores territorio’s deep emotional resonance, its economic repercussions, its link to environmentalism and the local food movement, and its inclusionary and exclusionary dimensions. It examines three case studies: a project on seeds by Teresa Piras’s group Domusamigas, an educational and networking meeting on Sardinian bean varieties, and Cagliari’s urban garden. It asks if these engagements with territorio contributed to a more tasty, just, and sustainable food system, and explores whether they reflected nationalistic impulses and exclusionary attitudes toward immigrants.

Territorio as meaningful place What is territorio? It is difficult to translate a concept with so many meanings. The English word “territory” is much narrower, so in this book I have left the term in Italian. The word territorio was ubiquitous in my interviews, both when I asked directly about it and in response to a range of issues. I discussed it with colleagues in Benedetto Meloni’s research group at the University of Cagliari who have undertaken a multi-­year project on “food and territorio.”1 The widespread use of the word appears to be fairly recent and to have been launched by public institutions and rural sociologists.2 Moreover, Slow Food has used the term extensively to stand for local food, promoting its use among activists.3

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In Sardinia, territorio encompassed the land, the landscape, and one’s “own vital space,” as one dictionary put it.4 Territorio meant the homeland and its culture, identity, and history. It evoked emotion and memory, which endowed it with particular force as an organizing strategy, intensifying people’s ties to the food movement. The centrality of territorio in Sardinia was confirmed by a survey conducted on identity by political scientists and sociologists who found that “the most important identifying characteristic for the interviewees was precisely with the territorio: the environment they lived in and their own culture” (Paganetto 2013: 207, my translation). In her study of cheese-­making using natural rennet, anthropologist Giannetta Murru Corriga concluded: “there has been a growing affirmation in Sardinia of the ‘rediscovery’ of local products and of a politics of valuing the identity of the territorio and its resources” (2015: 238, my translation).5 Local and typical products were embedded in the territorio and its traditions. In my research, however, people rarely used the terms “local” and “typical,” and almost never mentioned “heritage” or patrimonio (Counihan 2014a). This contrasts with what Cristina Grasseni (2017) found in her work on local cheeses and their “heritigization” in the Bergamo region of northern Italy; she devoted an entire chapter to “heritage and typicality” (patrimonio e tipicità).6 Slow Food Cagliari member Carla Marcis perhaps spoke for many when she said, “I only use ‘typical product’ out of laziness because it’s ready for use. It is something you hear often so it’s easy to use but not because you think a lot about it—it’s convenient.” In my research, territorio was the most salient concept and locale and tipico were far less common. People were generally vague about what “local” meant and the concept had a strategic geographic elasticity that extended from “zero kilometers” to include the province or region. An explicit example of how Sardinians felt rooted in their territorio came from an interview with Giuliana Orru, elementary school principal in Villacidro, about thirty miles from Cagliari (see Chapter 7). She described the town government’s initiative of “a tree for every birth.” Each year, the town acquired seedlings from the Forest Service and organized a planting day in an area where new trees were needed because of forest fire, windstorm, or construction. The parents and their newborns, along with a group of elementary school children, “made a home for the plant”—by putting it in the ground and labeling each one with the name of the newborn. Orru said this created “a strong identity for the parents, for the young couples”—it is a memory, a recalling—a direct connection to the territorio that “calls people back” through the trees. A similar practice obtained at “The Big Garden” (l’Ortu Mannu), which Alessandra Guigoni took Jim and me to see, near Villamassargia, about thirty miles from Cagliari, where the centennial olive trees had family nameplates (Guigoni 2010b). These examples underscored that time and human investment were crucial to defining and claiming territorio.

Territorio, foodways, and emotions Emotions were central in people’s connections to their food and their territorio. Sardinian region agricultural technician Andrea Cerimele, who was involved with

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the farm-­to-school programs (see Chapter 7), said that traditional dishes are those that come from “the productive potential of the territorio . . . in which there are components tied to feelings.” He linked emotions to bread, but not the durum wheat bread of good times: Among our traditional products there are some—like bread made with acorns, bread made with clay, bread made with millet—that have their origins in periods of severe hunger—fame nero. They are traditional out of desperation. Those who still have the historical memory of having eaten them not as a culinary curiosity, but out of necessity because there was nothing else, have everything but a good memory of having eaten that bread. That bread signifies the cold, it signifies having slept under the trees, and who knows what other things. So “traditional” implies a whole range of emotions in the population.

Yet, although people linked difficult emotions like suffering and hunger to food, they more often emphasized positive associations. For example, thirty-­ seven-year-­old organic producer and distributor Matteo Floris said, “Food is above all pleasure, pleasure of being at the table, pleasure of rites and rituals, and also the pleasure of cooking.” The enjoyment of eating good food, the memories associated with consumption, the place-­based relationships, and the whole gamut of emotions at play enhanced the relevance of territorio to the work of food activism. I suggest that territorio provided “an emotional, a spiritual, and a physical glue” that DeLind (2006: 125) argued was necessary to the local food movement. This fits with the claims made by Fernando Bosco (2006) who studied the civil protests of the mothers of the Plaza de Mayo in Argentina against the massive disappearances of their children during the 1970s and 1980s. Bosco (2006: 343) found that “the emotional dimensions of social networks . . . are crucial for the emergence, sustainability, and cohesion of activists in social movements.” Moreover, those emotional ties were often centered in places, which, he said, “are themselves often layered with emotional content” and can help “cement affective bonds.” Emotion, passion, and commitment to territorio and its foods formed a compelling basis of community formation and activism in Cagliari, and many other places around the world (Counihan and Siniscalchi 2014). When I asked Emporio Bio organic food store owner Francesca Spiga if territorio was important in her work, her reply displayed strong feelings: For me it is very important. I live in San Sperate which is a small town. I was born in the midst of orchards—of peaches and oranges. I suffer deeply in San Sperate because people are abandoning the land. If you go around the countryside, you want to cry—I suffer deeply from this, deeply. Because I think that even if there are all kinds of difficulties, the territorio is our salvation.

But the challenges to making a living through commitment to the territorio were many. Although it provided an emotional connection between people that linked

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them into loose “communities of resistance” (Pratt 2007), these were not always sufficient to effect food system change.

Economy and place in Sardinia For Cagliari food activists, supporting local producers was a fundamental goal. As Slow Food organizing committee member Carla Marcis said, promoting territorio farmers and foods were entwined goals that ensured both cultural heritage and economic sustainability. She said, “territorio sells” and “has perhaps above all an economic value,” not only to Sardinian consumers but also to tourists and foreigners. Food historian Massimo Montanari (2013: 62) supported her claim by arguing, “ ‘typical,’ ‘traditional,’ ‘genuine,’ ‘authentic’ are labels used for selling, especially to tourists,” but they also offered continuing evidence of the viability of past traditions and their contemporary relevance.7 There were several challenges in supporting local producers. Small-­scale farming has declined radically in Italy, as it has elsewhere in the European Union and the developed world. The percentage of the Italian population employed in agriculture dropped from 47 percent in 1930 to 4 percent in 2008, and “the hardest hit have been small farmers. They have been squeezed out of a living” (Pratt and Luetchford 2013: 27). This decline has not only reduced small farmers’ economic clout but also their visibility in Italian culture, although Montanari (2017) has argued that after centuries of disdain their status has recently improved. There are some new farmers starting out, as we shall see in Chapter 4, but they and the small farmers who persist are often not well organized to provide a reliable supply. Organic food store owner Francesca Spiga wanted to source Sardinian products as much as possible, but told me it was difficult to find reliable local suppliers of organic eggs, chickpeas, and other products. Supermarkets burgeoned in Sardinia at the end of the twentieth century and undercut local food (Porcu 2011), which people preferred but which was sometimes more expensive and difficult to access (see Ferretti and Magaudda 2006: 164). Moreover, Cagliari food activists noted that modern consumers, especially those born and raised in the city, have lost knowledge about local products and were subject to the “scams” of multinational corporations that appropriated and marketed a false local identity like the maloreddus butcher Walter Vivarelli decried in Chapter 2. An important goal of food activists was to educate consumers about products of the territorio in the hope that they would buy them and thus sustain the local economy and culture. In this effort, it was important for the activists to know their land and its products. As Slow Food Cagliari chapter leader Anna Cossu said: Ideas come to you from knowing the territorio . . . That’s what makes the difference in the end. I who am Sardinian know the problems of my land, because first of all I live here, I understand when the producers complain, I can understand better than someone who comes from outside. I have lived it. I know the issues because I share them.

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Figure 3.1  Teresa Piras

Activists can use their knowledge of the land to advance projects rooted in the territorio, like the initiative to promote local seeds sponsored by a small grassroots women’s group called Domusamigas.

Teresa Piras, Domusamigas, and seeds I interviewed sixty-­eight-year-­old Teresa Piras in 2011 and again in 2015 about the women’s group she co-­founded, Domusamigas, or “house of women friends.”8 They aimed to develop new ways to strengthen ties to the territorio, local culture, and food democracy. In the Sulcis-Iglesiente province west of Cagliari, they started the Center for Self-Development Experimentation (Centro di Sperimentazione Autosviluppo). Piras was a retired teacher who had earned a pedagogy degree from the University of Cagliari with Aldo Capitini, who was dedicated to non-­ violence and introduced conscientious objection to Italy (Capitini 2000). Piras said, “he gave me the instruction and the heart” for activism, which she focused on food. She taught middle school for years and already had a school garden in the 1990s. From her teaching days, she already knew producers, had partnered with civil society institutions, and had formed “a social fabric in the region—I already held many threads.” When she retired from teaching, she used her networks to start Domusamigas. It was composed of about a dozen women—one active and three retired teachers, a farmer, an accountant, a doctor, a retired herbalist, a children’s literature expert, a bed-­and-breakfast proprietor, and several recent college graduates. They met regularly and developed projects focused on revitalizing the territorio.

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Italian Food Activism in Urban Sardinia

Teresa Piras said of her group,“we start from below”—from people’s experiences and needs. Their goal was to live as much as possible from products of the territorio, working for “self-­development” by creating links between consumers and producers from the region. One project was “olden furrows” (antichi solchi) to support biodiversity through revitalization of threatened species. The members held a “grafting party” inspired by one of their families who had many heirloom varieties of pear trees. When the time was right, in the late winter, they gathered the scions (the buds used in grafting), and about one hundred people assembled to graft the diverse pear varieties onto wild pear trees along an abandoned rail line. While they were doing this, they met a shepherd who invited them to harvest the pears from his heirloom trees. They decided to have “a party of pears” where they harvested the fruit, used old recipes to make all kinds of cakes, and held a great commensal feast to spread knowledge of local products in an enjoyable setting. In 2011, Piras and her group organized a class by Maurizio Fadda from Nuoro on how to build a no-­till raised bed garden (orto sinergico) based on permaculture, the same method taught by Tore Porta at the Cagliari urban garden described further below. Composed of organically rich soil and planted with a rotation of crops, these gardens maintained fertility and repelled pests. Piras said that the guiding principle was “self-­fertilization, like a forest.” For her garden, she created a raised mound about 1.8 by 1.5 yards wide, with good dirt and compost to make “a bed for the plants.” She used hoses to create a drip irrigation system and covered it all with straw. She said, “The principle is that the garden must be self-­sufficient and you must create synergy among the plants, placing things together that reinforce and protect each other.” She planted beans because they fixed nitrogen. She planted marigolds, to keep pests away. Around the bed, she planted garlic because that too protected the plants, and then at both ends of the raised bed she planted aromatic herbs—sage, mint, basil, parsley, and rosemary. She also planted tomatoes, eggplant, peppers, and zucchini. Piras said, “I feel responsibility to my garden just like a child,” and caring for it intensified her connection to the land. Forty young men and women, mostly unemployed recent college graduates, signed up for the three-­day class on permaculture organized by Domusamigas. The first day was “theory” and the second and third days were “practice”—preparing a garden on the land of a young farmer transitioning to organic production. This class was an example of how food activism was rooted in the territorio, fostered education, propagated alternative agriculture, and expanded networks. Piras’s group established a “type of GAS”—a “solidarity purchase group” (see Chapter 5)—to buy fruits and vegetables directly from a local woman farmer who brought the orders to their weekly meetings. There, they also provided fair-­trade coffee, tea, sugar, and chocolate for purchase “to support the concept of fair trade here in Sardinia.” While a primary goal of the group was to connect consumers with local producers, they also acquired fair-­trade products from global suppliers because their work was “not a form of closure but of solidarity with all small producers . . . We want to support the sharing of wealth.” Their aim of promoting Sardinian territorio products did not preclude fostering global food democracy.

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In 2014, Domusamigas inaugurated a new project on Sardinian wheat— safeguarding, developing, and propagating high-­quality strains. This connected with the island’s long history of growing and exporting grain—documented at least since Roman times (Bouchier 1917). It was famous for its excellent durum wheat (grano duro) used in making pasta and bread, but people also grew soft wheat (grano tenero). Piras told me her group was cooperating with the renowned geneticist Salvatore Ceccarelli (2013), who worked with farmers doing “genetics in the fields” in various countries including Egypt, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Jordan, Syria, and Iran, as well as Italy. He was working with Domusamigas to test and select seeds, practicing what he called “participatory scientific research.”9 In November 2014, with the collaboration of the Sardinian regional government offices of AGRIS (the Sardinian Center for Agricultural Research)10 and LAORE (the Sardinian Regional Agency for Agricultural Development),11 Domusamigas members planted three experimental fields in the Sulcis-Iglesiente province west of Cagliari with forty test plots each. They used seventeen different varieties of wheat, both durum and soft, planted in different and precise combinations in different types of terrain to see if they could come up with the best seeds. Some were old autochthonous ones that they got from the Center for Biodiversity of Vegetables (CBV) at the University of Sassari (whose bean research is discussed below), some they got from AGRIS, some Ceccarelli gave them, and some were widely used commercial seeds. Piras said that their goal was the “birth of new biodiversity” for Sardinian wheat farmers. In May 2015, Ceccarelli returned and helped them carry out an assessment of the different types of grain, doing visual observation and rating the grain along a scale of one to five. Then they did more precise measuring of the grain along ten characteristics including growth, size, and pest and drought resistance, and statistically evaluated quality. The goal, Piras said, was “to put control of the seeds back into the hands of the farmers, strengthen their autonomy, and return them to their age old competencies.” This was a step towards Sardinian food sovereignty and self-­sufficiency. Piras said their ultimate goal was “seed democracy”—“democrazia del seme.” Piras and a small group of other women aimed to “reterritorialize” agricultural practices to be more ecological, locally controlled, and grounded in what Van der Ploeg (2010) called “co-­production” (different from Slow Food’s concept)— agriculture sensitive to balance in the human–nature relationship (see Chapter 4). They transformed their market participation by purchasing collectively and directly from small farmers, benefiting both. They practiced food education of children and youth, and helped propagate local heirloom varieties, literally transforming the landscape with flowering pear trees, bounteous wheat fields, and sustainable gardens, and supplanting industrial products with local foods. They built cooperation with other local people, with a globally renowned mainland scientist, and with government agencies. One of these was AGRIS, which held an educational event in June 2011 attended by Teresa Piras and several other food advocates I had met in my research.

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Italian Food Activism in Urban Sardinia

Beans, territorio, and networks Beans were the center of the event in June 2011 organized by AGRIS, the Sardinian Regional Agency for Research in Agriculture, in Uta, twelve miles west of Cagliari, which brought together an excited and diverse group of about thirty food advocates. Beans and other legumes (especially favas and chickpeas) were historically a mainstay of the diet in Sardinia (Counihan 1981). They threw into relief some interesting characteristics of territorio, for they were not autochthonous but rather came from the Americas (Guigoni 2009). What defined them for inclusion in the Uta collection was longevity—there had to be proof they had been cultivated in Sardinia for at least forty years. In her ethnographic and historical research on vegetables imported from the Americas to Sardinia, Alessandra Guigoni (2009, 2015) found beans to be one of the key foods. In addition to a black-­eyed bean originating in Africa and known on the island since Roman times, three main types imported from the Americas proliferated and adapted to the diverse climate, topography, soils, and hydrology of the island (Guigoni 2015: 72). In 2011, AGRIS was growing over one hundred different varieties of Sardinian beans. Yet, Guigoni pointed out to me, at that time there was not a single legume in the official government list of 170 traditional products for Sardinia (whereas there were many legumes in the Tuscany list, by contrast). The AGRIS event aimed to bring local beans out of the shadows to claim their rightful importance in the Sardinian landscape and cuisine. Interestingly, the fourteenth

Figure 3.2  Map of Sardinia made from 120 bean varieties at the AGRIS Bean Research Institute

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update of the traditional products list published in 2014 included three legumes for Sardinia: fassobeddu corantinu, fagiolo bianco di terraseo, and fagiolo tianese.12 The email about the June 2011 event announced the cooperation between AGRIS, the University of Sassari Center for Biodiversity of Vegetables (CBV), and LAORE. It invited people: to the fields to examine 120 local bean varieties, climbing and dwarf, suitable for fresh consumption and/or for drying. Passed along through the years thanks to a few farmers, the seeds come from the entire regional territorio and are conserved in the CBV seed bank. The visit to the experimental field aims to increase information but also contacts and debate among the diverse parties— teaching farms, agrotourism businesses, farmers, etc.—who could benefit from knowledge and use of this important agricultural-­cultural heritage that belongs to and characterizes the diverse island communities (my translation).

Several members of Slow Food Cagliari attended the event, including anthropologist Alessandra Guigoni, retired mine engineer Giuseppe Deriu, and the chapter leader Anna Cossu. In addition, there were other people I had interviewed: Teresa Piras and several of her collaborators from Domusamigas; Angelo Corona, the farmer whose wife supplied produce to the Domusamigas purchase group and to Francesca Spiga’s Emporio Bio (see Chapter 8); and caper producer Marco Maxia (see Chapters  4 and 5), who worked for AGRIS as an agricultural technician and was one of the organizers of the bean event. People commented on how vigorous the bean fields were and how important the AGRIS collection was for biodiversity, cultural traditions, and commerce. The scientists talked about how they had managed to get 120 different bean seeds from all over Sardinia—plains, mountains, inland, coasts—from visits to farmers, chats with old folks, and people recommending others. AGRIS was “activating the concrete phase” by planting the seeds, studying their growth patterns and genetic make-­up, registering the types, and investigating their “commercial potential.” They said the regional government insisted on “the creation of a data base and a regional register of the varieties.” Marco Maxia and Alessandra Guigoni stressed the need to pass the Regional Law on Biodiversity, which would protect seeds as intellectual property.13 Without this law, any multinational corporation could take and patent the seeds, steal Sardinia’s heritage, and violate the integrity of the territorio. “The law is indispensable,” Maxia said. There was a man in the group of visitors from Indena corporation, a company that makes pharmaceuticals from plants, who said they were looking for beans with an especially high protein content as a possible way to combat diabetes.14 The AGRIS people responded that this could be a way to increase the value of the beans and the territorio; another would be including such a bean in agro-­tourism meals. Marco Maxia said another strategy to add value was through marketing, and he demonstrated small attractive packages of beans that rendered a high price per pound, and at the same time described the varieties, their genetic and nutritional properties, and their history and uses.

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Italian Food Activism in Urban Sardinia

Figure 3.3  Visitors in the bean fields at the AGRIS Bean Research Institute

The AGRIS scientists asked the public to keep their eyes open for new types of beans and, if they found one, to conserve it and contact the University of Sassari, AGRIS, or LAORE. Anthropologist Alessandra Guigoni urged people: “when you collect the seeds, also collect the knowledge”—the names, planting practices, beliefs, recipes, etc. Time was running out, she said, the farmers safeguarding the seeds were old, “there was no time to lose.”15 AGRIS scientist Dr. Maria Barbara Pisanu said that this meeting aimed to be an opportunity to exchange knowledge about beans and create networks of enthusiasts, and it clearly succeeded. Follow-­up possibilities emerged; for example, Antonio Maccioni from LAORE said that he wanted to have a Biodiversity Festival to permit people to come together and exchange seeds. Teresa Piras supported his idea and suggested they combine it with a “grafting party” to share the cuttings and disseminate knowledge about heirloom fruits in danger of extinction. The bean event generated energy and networks by deepening ties through food to the territorio and fostering the goals of food activism. Interestingly,

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Figure 3.4  Some of the 120 bean varieties at the AGRIS Bean Research Institute

anthropologist Jeff Pratt observed that class-­based social movements have consistently “developed organizational forms based on territory—what have been called communities of resistance” (Pratt 2001: 306). “Communities of resistance” aptly described the loose networks of people in Cagliari like those who attended the AGRIS bean event—people whose allegiance to the territorio expressed opposition to the global agro-­industrial food system and supported local foods. Another such group of people came together at the Cagliari urban garden.

Making place and community at the urban garden A small but heartfelt initiative to make place in the city was the nascent urban garden in a former quarry near the expansive Monte Urpinu park on the southeastern edge of Cagliari. The group “Agri-Culture: We Cultivate Relations” (Agri-­culture: coltiviamo relazioni) established and managed what was in 2015 the city’s only community garden. It was one of many thousands of urban gardens and farms that have proliferated worldwide over the past few decades, founded by grassroots groups like theirs, community organizations, NGOs, and government agencies (Mougeot 2010). Substantial scholarly literature has noted both the contributions and challenges of urban gardens.16 Evan Weissman (2015: 357) summarized their benefits: education and employment for children and adults, increased food security, improvement of the urban environment, and “social benefits including social integration, recreation, and community health.” In her research on Cittàslow activism, Sarah Pink (2008) underscored the social importance of urban gardens through their creation of physical and social places where people could gather,

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Italian Food Activism in Urban Sardinia

Figure 3.5  Urban garden in the shape of a butterfly

work together, and generate new relationships and identities. Criticisms of urban gardens have noted their lack of inclusiveness of non-­white populations (Mares 2014); their lack of political support and precarious claims to land (Lawson 2007); their fostering of a neoliberal, market-­based approach to solving social problems (Weissman 2015); and their lack of inputs including water, tools, seeds, and fertilizers (Flynn 2005). As described by its organizers, the Cagliari urban garden shared these benefits and challenges. I interviewed co-­founders Tore Porta, vice president, and Paolo Erasmo, president, on March 31, 2015, when the Cagliari garden was just awakening from its winter quietude. They explained that they had started the garden in August of 2012 after several years of effort, discussions with the city and regional government, and struggles with the bureaucracy.17 They were unable to get access to public lands and experienced the challenges of boosting an alternative economy against the inertia of an entrenched political system—something Giovanni Orlando (2011) highlighted in his study of the Palermo farmers’ market. The Cagliari urban garden proponents finally attained 10,000 square meters of private land on loan from the proprietor of a former quarry with the conditions that they use it for agriculture, not build any permanent structures, and not sell anything. The area had been a stone quarry and later a dump for building materials, so they had to remove piles and piles of stone, concrete, wood, metal, plaster, and the like. Then they cleared the weeds by extirpation and burning, and finally were ready to make the raised bed garden plots based on the concept of the orto sinergico— “synergistic garden” (discussed above). This is known also as natural farming or permaculture, and was developed, Porta said, by Japanese farmer Masanobu Fukuoka (2009) and Spanish farmer Emilia Hazelip (2003), whose influence has spread around the globe. It was notable that Porta used this international method to

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Figure 3.6  Paolo Erasmo and Tore Porta in the urban garden

guide gardeners’ relationship with the urban landscape of Cagliari and is an example of what Clare Hinrichs (2003: 36) calls “diversity-­receptive localization,” showing territorio does not necessarily entail nationalistic and exclusivistic beliefs. In fact, the garden aimed at inclusion to the extent possible. Together with Porta and Erasmo, there were seven people on the garden executive committee, thirty-­four garden plots, and sixty-­four members, with many more requests to participate than they had room for. They had no water at the site, so people had to carry it from home, and hence cultivation was limited. Lack of water also prohibited them from doing “social agriculture” (agricoltura sociale), the catch-­all name for farming used to provide work and social integration to ex-­convicts, troubled juveniles, disabled people, or immigrants.18 They hoped to be able to dig a well so they could intensify their efforts, and the owner of the land was willing to do it, but gaining permits from the bureaucracy was glacially slow. Both Erasmo and Porta rooted their passion for the urban garden in their childhoods growing up in agricultural villages. Erasmo said that they thought of themselves as “farmers by day, intellectuals by night.”19 They wanted to revitalize their farming roots and experience territorio—but in the city where they lived, and where they could reach their gardens easily, relate to nature, and build community. Erasmo said: We don’t want lands thirty kilometers from Cagliari, no, we want the people who live up there in that apartment building to be able to come down here on foot and cultivate their gardens. This is what we want and we are trying to make it happen. This place is just one example of what we can do to strengthen the relationship between citizens and the space by their home, and we can then apply it to other zones of the city where there are spaces to cultivate . . . It means

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Italian Food Activism in Urban Sardinia not to use the car, not to pollute. It means to socialize with people who are in the same neighborhood but who don’t know each other. It means all these things together: to return to being a collectivity which today does not exist.

Territorio was not just the home place but also the community and culture that formed there. Erasmo said, “Territorio means belonging to that territorio and above all it means living in that territorio.” He and Porta spoke back and forth about how territorio was not just the land (terra), but also the landscape (paesaggio), plants (piante), and history (storia). Erasmo emphasized, “Look territorio is this too—to keep history alive when possible, the important things representing the work of the people”—like agriculture, pastoralism, herbal knowledge, and cooking. Tore Porta underscored the historical dimension of territorio by emphasizing the urban garden’s roots in the island’s land-­centered past: We can tie ourselves to the history of Sardinia, which is based on agriculture and animal-­rearing . . . But in the last thirty or forty years of the twentieth century, the tendency was to abandon the fields for the factories, and farmers turned to work in metallurgy and the chemical industry. But then we discovered that the results were not what they had promised, and the chemical industry is dead, and we have returned to the land. We who are here at the urban garden, we are children of that history of the last forty years. We are unemployed, we no longer have jobs, we no longer have identity.

Porta linked the eclipse of the agro-­pastoral village economy to the decline of the sardo languages, which had been “almost forbidden” (quasi proibito) in the 1950s but which were recovering.20 The revival of sardo, Porta said, was a “return to our roots,” and Erasmo chimed in, “It’s reappropriating ourselves.” Porta continued, “Yes, reappropriating ourselves is our activity here and in the larger context; it is also reappropriating seeds and knowledge of the earth . . . Our garden here takes us back—I feel really strongly about this—takes us back to our origins.” Tore Porta pointed out the link between the permaculture they practiced in the urban garden and pre-World War II rural farming practices, and thus linked city and country, past and present, through the land. During his workshops about permaculture farming, he said someone always commented, “My father was already doing that,” referring to fallowing, composting, mulching, and fertilizing with manure. Porta said he would reply, “I know your father did that, why don’t you?” He added, “This always touches me inside because it is a way to bring people back to their own roots.” Paolo Erasmo spoke of how the garden anchored them in the land, “This has brought us together to put anew our feet on the ground, and with our feet on the ground, to get our hands in the dirt.” Urban garden president Erasmo and vice-­ president Porta had a passionate commitment to claiming land, growing food, building community, and delighting the senses. They hoped to overcome the obstacles imposed by the political bureaucracy and eventually gain public land and water to much more effectively produce food, territorio, and community at several gardens in Cagliari.

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Producing community through working the land was integral to the garden’s mission, as Tore Porta underscored: “Not for nothing our association is called ‘Agri-­culture: we cultivate relationships’ (Agri-­culture: coltiviamo relazioni). We really like this because agriculture is a way to create gatherings of people.” They purposely chose the English word “agriculture” because it implied both “culture” (cultura) and “cultivation” (coltura), whereas the Italian word agricoltura lacks the connation of “culture.” To foster community, the urban garden regulations posited that all members had to work together to plant, weed, and clean the public spaces of the garden. As Porta put it, “These jobs have to be done by all of us together precisely because those who come here must know each other, must talk to each other, must help each other out.” The urban garden facilitated community formation on the land in other ways as well. The members had turned an inviting sheltered space in a corner of the garden into an outdoor amphitheater where they could hold meetings, dinners, poetry readings, and musical events with space for over one hundred people. Erasmo described one gathering, “there are a poet and a writer among the members. The writer delivered a monologue about agriculture and the poet recited one of his poems. Then we toasted bread over coals, drank a glass of wine, and had a good chat.” Of course, at the heart of the urban garden was growing food. Tore Porta promulgated seed-­saving to revitalize territorio heritage varieties, optimize taste, and attain food sovereignty. Like Teresa Piras and Domusamigas, he decried the growing monopoly and standardization of seeds by a few huge multinational corporations (see Kloppenburg 2014), and he extolled the benefits of saving seeds from his own plants, linking the concept of territorio to time on the land and tending by human hands: This year I did not buy seeds, I did not buy starter plants. I used only seeds that I produced in past years, actually returning to varieties that are no longer used

Figure 3.7  Amphitheater for social gatherings in the urban garden

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Italian Food Activism in Urban Sardinia and that we are losing the memory of, like the tomatoes that live without water . . . I experimented last year and used my own seeds to grow them. For here, they’re ideal . . . It is a folly to buy tomato seeds—it is easy to collect the seeds and have them for the next year—from your own tomato, a tomato already acclimated to that environment, that you like, that is genuine, that you know: you have confidence about what you are eating.

Saving seeds and growing food rendered many benefits, Tore Porta said: “Producing your own food, knowing psychologically that you can produce your own food and sustain yourself physically is really important. Then if you do it with a collective spirit, with many other people, it also becomes interior nourishment.” Moreover, Porta said, growing one’s own food was a political act, and he supported what others have called food sovereignty, defined by Eric Holt-Giménez (2009: 142) as: “people’s right to healthy and culturally appropriate food produced through ecologically sound and sustainable methods, and their right to define their own food and agriculture systems.” Porta put it thus: “We follow another politics, which is to be independent. In Sardinia, 85 percent of the food we eat comes from outside the island. For a region that has an agricultural and pastoral vocation, to have food coming from off island is an incredible folly. Among other reasons, many of us here are unemployed, without a job . . .” He tied the crushing of the agro-­pastoral economy to unemployment and the loss of food sovereignty. Porta saw many benefits from reviving Sardinian agriculture and gardening: “Growing your own food today is very, very important from the point of view of both health and interior well-­being . . . Food gives us a psychological boost as well as health.” The garden’s sensory beauty was integral to that search for inner wellbeing and to feeling physically connected to the territorio. Porta said: The gardens have been designed to be pleasing to the eye, such that . . . the garden is in the shape of a flower, and so it has the petal, and also the center of the flower— the agora, . . . the meeting place . . . The gardens are not perfect little squares the way the town government presented them—to us they looked like prison cells! So we divided them so that each of these petals is a garden . . . It looks like a butterfly with wings . . . It is all a flower of food. Look, this is the aesthetic aspect, because you are in some way content with what you see. Or better, if what you see pleases you, you are happy inside . . . So the senses, the senses. When we are there in the gardens, we see the profile of the Castle neighborhood (Castello), the ramparts (Bastione), and the Elephant’s Tower (Torre dell’Elefante). It’s fantastic. And then touch, you can perceive it from the wind, here we have wind, you can feel it now, right?

Porta’s emphasis on the senses cohered with Hale et al.’s (2011: 1853) study of the relational nature of community garden aesthetics, which they found “awaken the senses and stimulate a range of responses that influence interpersonal processes . . . and social relationships.” Tore Porta said they had designed the gardens not only to be pleasing to the eye, but also to the nose. “When you walk through here there is a whole system with

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Figure 3.8  Urban garden with scarecrow and panorama of Cagliari

the aromatic plants along the walkways so that when you pass by you brush against them and smell their fragrance.” As we walked around the gardens, Porta kept picking leaves from various plants and having us smell and taste them—two types of arugula, wild thyme, mastic tree, rosemary, and several flowers. Moreover, permaculture meant that some of the plants regenerated year after year and had a particularly good flavor. Porta said, “I’d like to go over there and try Paolo’s fennel, which is the child of last year’s plant. With this [permaculture] system we use . . . it continues to bear fruit and has a special taste—we’ll try it.” The call to the senses as well as to the intellect and passions enhanced the depth of connection with the territorio, the urban garden experience, and its mission of growing both food and community. The Cagliari urban garden had commonalities with The Stop Community Food Centre’s urban agriculture program in a low-­income area of Toronto, Canada, studied by Charles Levkoe (2006). It aimed to transform “consumers” into active “citizens” aware of how their food was produced and how diverse farming methods affected taste, health, and justice. The garden was “a magical green space in the center of downtown Toronto where people c[a]me to play, to rest, and to reflect” (Levkoe 2006: 93). Levkoe concluded that Toronto urban agriculture accomplished many goals the nascent Cagliari urban garden aimed at: food self-­sufficiency, sustainability, education, networks, and seed-­saving.21

Territorio, terroir, and the local food movement My discussion of territorio, its meanings, and its ability to promote food democracy relates to questions about terroir and the local food movement, both amply studied in the USA, Europe, and Latin America.22 Terroir, a French word, originally

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referred to the characteristics of wines that came from specific combinations of land, climate, and technique. Small French producers used terroir instrumentally to protect their economy by forging geographical place of origin designations— also known as “geographical indications,” such as the French AOC—Appellation d’Origine Contrôlée (Daynes 2013, Garcia-Parpet 2014). Over time, terroir has evolved to indicate the “taste of place” with a broad inclusion of culture and history, and has been applied to other geographical contexts, particularly the USA (Trubek 2008). According to Guigoni (2014: 89), territorio in Sardinia took on the holistic meaning of terroir as the ensemble of place, culture, history, climate, topography, land, and human know-­how. In her research on Vermont artisan cheese production in North America, Heather Paxson (2010b) defined two discourses about terroir. In the first, terroir encapsulated “material qualities inherent to a locale; this is the taste of place imagined as cultured nature.” In the second, terroir invited “consumers to join producers in creating place by fostering rural economic revitalization.” The three case studies discussed here demonstrated that both meanings held for Sardinia—territorio as a material place and as a strategy for change. Moreover, reclaiming territorio opposed the agro-­ industrial food system, which, as Guigoni (2014: 89) said, was characterized by “a deterritorialization of agriculture, the disassociation of farm and territory.” In the Local Food Movement (LFM), terroir has become a powerful rallying cry in its focus “on reconnecting people to their food supply” (DeLind 2006: 122). In the USA, the LFM has included farmers’ markets, community-­supported agriculture, farm-­to-school programs, school and urban gardens, and so on. There have been many studies and critiques of the LFM around the globe.23 On the positive side, scholars have noted that the LFM can stimulate the local economy, revitalize culinary traditions, improve food quality and health, and educate about food. Laura DeLind (2006) went further and argued for transcending the merely rational economic dimensions of local food by injecting emotion into the relationship with place—she pleaded “for the value of the emotive, the cultural, the spiritual . . . in support of local food.” Sardinians, my interviews clearly showed, had strongly emotional relationships with place encompassed in the word territorio and tried to enact them through diverse alternative food pathways: the beans, the wheat seeds, and the urban garden. Critics have claimed that the LFM is too heavily consumer-­based without attention to working conditions for producers; that the movement is very small with a limited impact; and that it involves only superficial changes in a few shopping habits. Moreover, some have decried its promotion of a putatively universal food imaginary that marginalizes immigrants and minorities whose tastes may be different (Cavanaugh 2013, DuPuis and Goodman 2005, HayesConroy and Hayes-Conroy 2010, Hinrichs 2003, Markowitz 2010, Pratt 2007).

Inclusion and exclusion Big questions about the Local Food Movement have centered on who participates and which pathways to joining are open. Scholars of the LFM have found tensions in

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realizing a community open to people of diverse race, class, gender, and national origin. For example, Teresa Mares (2014) found Latinos under-­represented in Seattle’s extensive urban agriculture system. DuPuis and Goodman (2005: 360) suggested that localism “can provide the ideological foundations for reactionary politics and nativist sentiment,” and Pratt (2007: 292) noted that the emphasis on local, authentic, and traditional food provided fertile ground for “homelands and anti-­immigrant” rhetoric. What about Cagliari’s alternative food groups—were they communities of inclusion, open to people of diverse class, gender, and national origin, or communities of exclusion, limited to a small group of homogeneous consumers? Anthropologists at the University of Cagliari have found immigrants marginalized in Sardinia whether legal or not (Bachis and Pusceddu 2013a, 2013b, Contu 2013, Sias 2013, 2015), and none participated in any of the alternative food initiatives that I observed. The urban garden was ideologically open to all people, but had only a smattering of non-Sardinians. Tore Porta said, “In addition to we Sardinians from here, there is a Nigerian woman, a German man, there was a Colombian man who has returned to Colombia and immediately started a garden there . . . There is a man from Tuscany, one from Milan, and one from Rome who live in Cagliari. These interweavings unite us socially and I think they are important.” Although the numbers of non-Sardinians were small, Porta and Erasmo felt that there was definitely a space for immigrants in urban agriculture, and they mentioned an initiative in Sassari, northern Sardinia, to integrate immigrants by providing garden plots to enable them to work and support themselves. Such initiatives have succeeded in the Maramao farming cooperative for refugees in Canelli (Piedmont), Italy (Marshall 2016) and in the United States, where Somali immigrants have found sustenance and social integration through urban gardens in Lewiston, Maine (MacQuarrie 2015). I saw no immigrants in Cagliari food activism, but their overall numbers in the city were still low, estimated at 6,658 in 2012, 4.25 percent of the city’s population (Comune di Cagliari 2012). In 2014, immigrants numbered over 5 million in Italy, 8 percent of the population of 61 million (Tayler 2014). But the influence of their cuisines on Italian diets was minimal, Cinotto (2009: 670) averred, because of racism, Italian culinary chauvinism, and the cultural resonance and economic benefits of local foods, benefits that Brasili and Fanfani’s (2010) statistical analysis of agrifood districts supported. Hinrichs (2003: 36) offered a useful perspective on thinking about territorio and food democracy in defining two tendencies in food activism: “defensive localization and more diversity-­receptive localization.” Food exchanges have at times effected positive connections across ethnic groups. The Punjabi Sikh immigrant women interviewed in Cagliari by Alessandra Guigoni (2013: 242–5) said that they welcomed the chance to have food stands at important festivals (Ethnikà, Appetitosamente, Monumenti Aperti, Elmas Etnica), not only to earn some money but also to project a positive public image of their community. Their numbers were gradually increasing as Sikhs found work in agriculture, dairy cattle-­ rearing, and restaurant kitchens. Guigoni (2013: 257) was optimistic about their culinary acceptance due to Sikhs’ entrepreneurship in starting “some small commercial and restaurant businesses in the historic neighborhoods of Marina and

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Villanova,” and her belief—contrasting with that of Cinotto (2009) and others—in “Italian curiosity about exotic cuisines.” Vegetarian restaurant co-­owner and chef Lara Ferraris expressed that curiosity and presented an inclusive vision of locality: “It is beautiful that there is diversity between the different regions, between different peoples, no? Everyone has their own history. It is beautiful. I think that this diversity is something that must be preserved.” While many Italians were open to diversity and sympathetic to immigrants, many were not, as social scientists have documented and the victory of anti-­immigrant political parties in the 2018 elections revealed.24 Extreme localism obscured immigrants’ important contribution to the farming, harvesting, and processing of “Italian” foods—for example, the Romanians and Albanians sheep-­herding in Sardinia and producing IGT (“typical geographic indication”) lamb (Contu 2013, Sias 2013). An important goal of the alternative food movement was to connect producers and consumers through farmers’ markets, purchase groups, and other short-­chain sales, but these trust-­building encounters were more likely to include the farm owners rather than the farm laborers, whether immigrant or native-­born. At the Cagliari Mercato Campagna Amica farmers’ market organized by the Coldiretti, Italy’s largest farmers’ union, all the producers were ethnically Italian. There, I talked with two Coldiretti employees about farm workers, among other topics. They told me that Sardinia had Romanian, Indian, and Senegalese farm workers who almost always had visas and work permits because the fines for hiring illegal immigrants were steep. However, when I reported what they said to other people in Cagliari, they were skeptical. Moreover, recent race riots in Calabria, Italy, between Italians and undocumented immigrant farm workers from the Maghreb and sub-Saharan Africa highlighted the exploitative conditions and low pay for immigrants in agriculture and the racial hostility of some Italians towards them (Immigration 2010). But at the same time, numbers of migrant farm workers have been growing, and the Coldiretti farmers’ union in 2015 estimated that there were 322,000 in Italy, and that “almost a fourth of Italian agriculture [wa]s in the hands of foreigners (stranieri) in terms of labor contribution.”25 Noted migration scholar Maurizio Ambrosini has examined Italian policies towards immigrants and concluded that Italians have accepted immigrants into the lowest levels of the labor force but have not accepted them socially.26 Ambrosini found that many local governments enacted exclusionary policies towards immigrants in “defense of the cultural identity of the territory” (2013a: 179). Promoting local food could also be exclusionary and a form of “gastronomic racism,” as Jillian Cavanaugh (2013) noted in her research on Italian attitudes toward kebab vendors in Bergamo, Lombardy—a way to deny the reality that Italy “is becoming more and more multi-­ethnic” (Ambrosini 2013a: 191).

Conclusion Territorio discourses in Cagliari food activism reflected a range of perspectives. Some emphasized the connections between humans and nature and the potential

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for food sovereignty, while others stressed national and local identity and exclusion. Claims about territorio could mobilize support for local products, economies, and knowledge about foodways, and demonstrate Katie Lynn Crosley’s (2013: 54) findings that “the food justice movement is firmly rooted in explorations of place.” Territorio discourse, however, was not so easily inclusive of non-­local cuisines, cultures, and laborers. But it inspired multiple ideas and emotions in locals and could unify them into communities of resistance. These, so far, were small and had a limited impact, but they seemed to be growing, and they did redirect food dollars towards local, organic, small farmers. Territorio discourse gave value to practices and products that were part of Sardinian culture. But the impact seemed precarious because much more political support and economic investment were necessary to truly change the Italian food system (Orlando 2011, Brackett 2011). Food activists needed greater access to political institutions and more work like that of AGRIS and its preservation of beans or Teresa Piras’s collaborative seed initiative. Urban gardeners Porta and Erasmo were hoping that some of the decommissioned military lands27 that had passed to the Sardinian regional government would be allocated for community gardens, with access to water, so many more city-­dwellers could grow food. These were small steps towards food democracy and sovereignty—local people sharing control of and access to their own land and food supply. In the next chapter, we will look at some efforts by new and evolving small farmers to make a living by producing food in the Cagliari hinterland.

Chapter 4 R esistance farming and multifunctionalit y

Introduction This chapter describes four farming initiatives in the Cagliari area to discuss the important production sector of the alternative food system and its contributions to food democracy. It builds on the research of anthropologist Alessandra Guigoni (2014) and sociologist Benedetto Meloni and collaborators who have applied Jan Douwe van der Ploeg’s (2010) work on resilient small farming to Sardinia.1 Van der Ploeg (2010: 1) has argued that an evolved form of peasant agriculture based on re-­territorialization and multifunctionality can provide a living for farmers and feed the world sustainably. In her article on contemporary foodscapes and small farming, Guigoni (2014) decries the economic distress of contemporary Sardinian agriculture and promotes positive examples of re-­peasantization (ricontadinazione) and resistance (resistenza). Following van der Ploeg, she proposes a model of agriculture based on re-­territorialization, innovation, connection/cooperation, and multifunctionality. Re-­territorialization denotes farming and markets grounded in territorio, local knowledge, and typical products.2 Innovation means responding to changing consumer preferences and market conditions in flexible ways, sometimes creating anew (innovation), and sometimes reconfiguring old practices and products (retro-­innovation; see Stuiver 2006: 163, Siniscalchi 2015: para. 13). Resistant farming takes an “agro-­ecological approach,” based on co-­production or reciprocity between nature and humans (van der Ploeg 2010: 13) and aims to build networks of cooperation between producers and consumers. Multifunctionality refers not only to what van der Ploeg (2010: 8) calls “pluriactivity”—working both on and off the farm—but also to practicing diverse “income-­producing activities” on the farm, including many found by Meloni’s research group such as agro-­tourism, direct sale at farm stands and markets, teaching programs, and processing raw materials into value-­added comestibles such as jams or vegetable pâtés (Locci 2013, Meloni and Farinella 2015a, 2015b). This chapter will explore how four Sardinian alternative farming initiatives fulfilled to greater and lesser extent re-­ territorialization, innovation, connection, and multifunctionality. The four enterprises tried to produce food sustainably, make a living from the land, and buck the trend of declining employment in agriculture, which in

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Italy dropped steadily from 56.1 percent of those employed in 1921, to 42.2 percent in 1950, to a meager 3.6 percent in 2013.3 Yet in 2015, the Coldiretti farmers’ union found there were 70,000 young farmers in Italy, a record 35 percent increase over the preceding year4—a statistic also confirmed by Dolci and Perrin’s (2017) study of new farmers in Sardinia that shows the cases examined here were part of a bigger trend. The chapter starts with the Sardus Pater wine cooperative and follows with the revival of Selargius caper farming. Then it explores the experience of third-­generation farmer Gianfranco Deidda, who had transitioned to organic olive oil production and supplied the Cagliari GAS (Solidarity Purchase Group). It ends by discussing Su Staì farm cooperative in Sanluri Stato, about thirty miles north of Cagliari, which was an excellent example of multifunctionality and its challenges. The goal of this chapter is to display some alternative food producers in the Cagliari area and their contributions to high-­quality, just, and sustainable food. It will consider farmers’ reliance on local products and knowledge, and the ways they innovated in response to market demands. It will examine their networks of cooperation with other producers, consumers, political institutions, and nature; and explore their multifunctional practices—“peasant-­like engagement[s] in multiple circuits of reproduction,” which Van der Ploeg (2010: 9) believes are crucial to the survival of European farming.

Overview of Sardinian agriculture Alessandra Guigoni (2014) summarized the gloomy state of Sardinian agriculture from the 2010 Agrarian Census performed by the Italian Institute of Statistics (ISTAT 2010). Between 2000 and 2010, cultivated land in Sardinia fell from 107,000 to 60,000 hectares, family gardens declined from 17,000 to 10,000 hectares, and over half of the vineyards disappeared, dropping from 41,000 to 18,000 hectares. Durum wheat production in Sardinia dropped from 18,000 to 10,000 hectares. The small grape, olive, vegetable, and citrus farmers I interviewed were swimming against the tide. Pastoralism of sheep and goats fared somewhat better than farming, but small operations declined and big ones increased (Guigoni 2014, Meloni and Farinella 2015d: 179). Sardinia had over 50 percent of the nation’s sheep, with more than 12,000 enterprises, many small cheese-­making workshops (minicaseifici), and about 60 large cheese factories. Between 2000 and 2010, sheep-­herding businesses fell almost 13 percent from 14,500 to 12,600; those with fewer than 100 sheep declined and those with 500 or more sheep increased. Numbers of sheep grew 7 percent from 2.8 million in 2000 to just over 3 million in 2010. Guigoni (2014) concluded that the numbers attested to the “industrialization” of sheep-­herding paralleling the overall decline of smallholder farming. But Guigoni (2014) claimed that “at the same time there were good practices of resistance” to these trends,5 as the four agricultural ventures I studied displayed. Let us explore how they practiced some of the characteristics of multifunctionality, connection, innovation, and

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re-­territorialization, and begin with the largest and most specialized—the Sardus Pater wine cooperative.

Alessandro Pedini and the Sardus Pater wine cooperative In April of 2015, I was in my third stint of ethnographic research on food activism in Cagliari, following periods in 2011 and 2013. I was a visiting professor in the Department of Social Sciences and Institutions at the University of Cagliari hosted by Benedetto Meloni. One Saturday, a young sociologist in that department, Domenica Farinella, invited Jim and me to accompany her and visiting University of Kentucky anthropologist Ann Kingsolver to the Sardus Pater wine cooperative. We drove to the small island of Sant’Antioco, a few hundred yards off the southwest coast of Sardinia, about an hour’s drive west of Cagliari. We spent the day with Alessandro Pedini, Sardus Pater marketing consultant and a former student of Meloni and Farinella, learning about the cooperative’s history, territorio, cultivation practices, and wine-­making.6 Sardus Pater wine cooperative’s efforts to promote small farmers’ wellbeing through a high-­quality local product steeped in Sardinian history placed it within the alternative food sector. During my research, I looked at three other cooperatives: S’Atra Sardigna organic food (see Chapter  8), Cooperativa Pescatori Arborea shellfish, and the Sapore di Sole greenhouse tomato. Sardus Pater was a good case study to show the place of cooperatives on the continuum of food advocacy initiatives. Pedini himself was an interesting example of participants in the alternative food movement. At thirty years old, he had only recently finished his university studies, getting a masters degree in sociology of the territory at the University of Cagliari and then following with a one-­year specialized “Master of Wine” course in an effort to make himself more employable. He was part of the “return to farming of young people” (ricontadinazione dei giovani), which Alessandra Guigoni (2014: 88) saw as a form of resistance to industrial agriculture. Pedini said, “this phenomenon is happening here too,” a claim supported by a front-­page article in the Sardinian newspaper L’Unione Sarda (April 11, 2015) spotted by Ann Kingsolver on the very day we visited Pedini, which claimed that between 2012 and 2014, the number of “under 30” farming enterprises on the island almost doubled from 252 to 470.7 Pedini described his own trajectory to viticulture. His grandfather, a miner in nearby Carbonia, cultivated a small vineyard in his spare time and thus created “a little treasure” (una piccola ricchezza), which augmented his income and formed an inheritance for his children. Pedini’s father, like so many in the post-­war period, eschewed agricultural labor, landed a comfortable state office job, and abandoned the vineyard. But for Pedini’s generation, unemployment stood at 38.5 percent (La Stampa 2013), and cushy office jobs were rarely available; they had to face the fact that the economic security they thought a university degree would bring them did not exist. As Pedini put it, “So the young people said, ‘What are we going to do? We

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Figure 4.1  Alessandro Pedini in a Carignano vineyard

have a resource in this land, let’s try to make use of it.’ In the end, necessity has forced us to develop new skills.” Although new young farmers faced challenges, Pedini was optimistic. He said: I personally think I am more fortunate than my father, even though he had a public sector job and a guaranteed income for life. I don’t have this guarantee, but . . . this has given me a stimulus, I have had to figure things out for myself. Otherwise I would have made do, I would have waited for my paycheck, and I would have learned nothing. Instead, I was forced to find something to do, to develop a profession.

And fortunately for Pedini, he found a profession in the wine sector that he loved and that gave him a job as marketing consultant and prospects for a future. Yet

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many jobs in the alternative food sector were precarious—part-­time, seasonal, low income, or volunteer. Desperation and desire were driving young people back to the land. Some, like Pedini and his Sardus Pater enologist colleague Roberto Mazzeu, were getting into viticulture; others chose fruit, olive, or vegetable farming, like Matteo Floris (Chapter  8), Marco Maxia (below), and Gianfranco Deidda (below), as well as animal husbandry, cheese-­making, bee-­keeping, and other agricultural activities. However, Pedini noted challenges: Unfortunately, agricultural policy is not made for entering farmers but for those who are already established and who want to expand their activity . . . [EU] agricultural legislation is leading to the abandonment of hidden agriculture, the agriculture of hobbyists, towards professional and industrial agriculture. It may work well in many European countries. In Spain that is the model, in France that is the model, but in the South of Italy that is not the model; the model is the small farmer who often farms as a second job and for whom it is nonetheless a source of income.

Van der Ploeg (2014: 1024) supported Pedini’s claim about EU agricultural policy when he wrote, “The explicit objective of the Mansholt Plan (which aimed at the large-­scale modernization of European agriculture) was to replace peasant farms by newly created, large-­scale entrepreneurial farms.”8 While the statistics confirmed Pedini’s picture of the industrialization of agriculture, the recent upsurge in young farmers was perhaps a sign that Van der Ploeg’s resistant peasant farming model was growing in Sardinia. The bias toward big farmers had recently emerged in regulations about the use of chemical products on the vineyards, Pedini said. He went to purchase some sulfur for his own small vineyard. The vendor told him that after November 25, 2015, he would not be able to sell Pedini any phytosanitary chemical products (e.g., insecticides, fungicides, herbicides) unless he had a green license (patentino verde), which he and most hobby farmers did not have. He said, “I’m the person who passes his Sundays in the vineyard—and without the green license you cannot buy anything, not even the smallest amounts for little vineyards like mine.” Another significant challenge to small producers was accessing the market, and joining a cooperative was one important strategy. Sardus Pater was one of many cooperatives in the agro-­pastoral sector in Sardinia, which Gabriela Vargas-Cetina (1993, 2011) studied in depth. They emerged in the nineteenth century with “many different ideologies and working principles, but the basic idea behind them all was to benefit their members and improve their living conditions by protecting them from the unbridled forces of the market” (Vargas-Cetina 2011: S128).9 The Sardus Pater cooperative was founded in 1949 with government funding to provide income to small wine-­makers by centralizing production and selling bulk wine (vino sfuso). They sold it locally or exported it in container ships to France, northern Italy, and Tuscany where it was used as blending wine (vino da taglio) due to its strong color, tannin, and alcohol content.

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In the 1980s, the nearby Santadi wine cooperative began to bottle some of its wine. It hired a “very important enologist” named Giacomo Tachis10 who immediately realized the importance of the local wine called Carignano, which was one of few wines in the world produced from the ungrafted rootstock (piede franco).11 The sandy soils of Sant’Antioco protected Carignano vines from phylloxera, the disease that devastated Europe’s grape production and wine industry in the late nineteenth century and resulted in the widespread use of the American rootstock (vite americana) onto which producers grafted their autochthonous grapes (Gale 2011, Robinson 1994: 725–8). Some wine experts believed that piede franco wines were superior to grafted ones,12 and Sardus Pater promoted this belief to enhance the reputation of Carignano wine. As soon as the Santadi cooperative started bottling, Pedini said, it had “enormous success.” This inspired Sardus Pater to start bottling wine in the 1990s, to decrease quantity, to improve “organoleptic quality,” and to resist industrial production. Sardus Pater aimed to increase the value of the wine produced by its 200 members who were working a total of around 200 hectares (500 acres), with plots averaging one hectare but with many being even smaller. This fragmentation (parcellizzazione) of holdings was typical of Sardinia where partible inheritance has long dominated and has divided land holdings into ever smaller plots with each successive generation.13 Pedini saw the pros and cons of this fragmentation: On one hand it is a negative because from an economic point of view it is more complicated to manage many separate plots than one contiguous plot. On the other hand, it guarantees an enormous quality, because clearly the grape grower who works a half acre is often a hobbyist who works with enormous passion and cares for his vineyard as if it were a garden of grapes. So the quality is surely higher but the cost is also higher compared to those who use mechanized production elsewhere in Sardinia.

Because it was quality wine made from an autochthonous grape grown on its own ungrafted rootstock in a bounded territory, Carignano was able to attain Protected Denomination of Origin (PDO) or Denominazione di Origine Controllata (DOC) status through a complicated certification process that assured a distinct identity and a certain level of quality.14 Pedini said, “We are one of the few really small DOCs that have been able to safeguard their own grape varietal . . . If you want to make Carignano, you can only make it here if you want to call it Carignano . . . We have a consortium . . . and we work not only to protect the brand but also to reach foreign markets, to make Carignano known, and we all do it together.” Pedini highlighted some important characteristics of the alternative food sector in Sardinia: Cooperative production and connection to diverse markets, a focus on a high-­quality local product literally rooted in the hot, dry, sandy land, and a marketable past. The choice of the name and trademark Sardus Pater (Latin for “Sardinian Father”) harked back to the island’s long history. Pedini explained:

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Who was Sardus Pater? He was a mythological figure . . . In Antas, not far from here, is the temple of Sardus Pater. Back even before the [Bronze Age] nuragic period he was a divinity who was represented as a hunter, a warrior.15 The Antas temple has various strata for each historical period so we have the nuragic stratification, the Phoenician, the Roman, the Punic, and the Medieval. Why? Because all the people who came took this local divinity as their own god, and so the Romans in the time of Julius Caesar in addition to allowing the worship of Sardus Pater allowed the inhabitants of Sant’Antioco to mint a coin and this coin carried the effigy of Sardus Pater. So our firm chose this coin as our symbol.

Their wine embodied not only history, but also territorio. As Pedini said, quoting enologist Giacomo Tachis, “every land is the cradle for a unique child.” Pedini wanted to give value to that unique child of his home place: Carignano wine. Speaking in English, he defined both an ideal and a business model: My idea is to build a new company, really small, but just for top level grapes from these little growers . . . I am developing a network on Sant’Antioco island to have a new company . . . to save this kind of grape, to save this kind of work. I think that the future is to put in the market just top level wine in a few quantities, and it is the way we can save this kind of work against the policy of the European Community.

His approach involved concentrating on small quantities of excellent products, attaining denomination of origin designation, educating consumers about the product, and building a market share and price that could sustain small producers. Cristina Brasili and Roberto Fanfani’s (2010) research on Italian agrifood districts showed the potential wisdom of Pedini’s strategy by demonstrating the competitive advantage on the global market of typical food products. They were unique to Italy, “non-standardised,” and “closely linked to the place of origin,” which made them more impervious to competition from “emerging economies such as China and India than are textiles, fashion and furniture” (Brasili and Fanfani 2010: 13). But one challenge to selling Carignano wine was the area’s reputation for pollution due to past mining, a concern the winery tried to dispel and which the gorgeous landscape of sea, sand, and vineyards appeared to rebut, but the local newspaper did not, commenting on the heavy metal and hydrocarbon pollution in the Sulcis-Iglesiente-Guspinese region, close to the Carignano terroir (L’Unione Sarda, April 16, 2015, p. 2). The Sardus Pater wine cooperative aimed to find a place in “the global hierarchy of value” (Herzfeld 2004) and to be a successful business, but it also demonstrated some forms of resistance to industrial agriculture. It re-­territorialized wine by revering the land and giving value to its heirloom grapes. It aspired to benefit economically its small hobby farmers whose wine production was an example of multifunctionality. The cooperative structure depended on and fostered collaboration and connection with other members as well as with consumers

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locally and beyond. The next section shows how independent caper farmer Marco Maxia shared the strategy of focusing on the unique local product of capers and benefited from a different kind of collaboration through the networks of Slow Food.

Slow Food, Marco Maxia, and capers16 The bush-­type caper plant and its edible buds have long had a definitive identity in the Sardinian territorio and an intensely local association with the community of Selargius where Marco Maxia raised them, just five miles from Cagliari. Capers grow throughout the circum-Mediterranean area, in arid regions of North Africa and the islands of Pantelleria, Santina, and Sicily, as well as Sardinia. Alessandra Guigoni (2010a) meticulously documented caper history in Sardinia: the first records of culinary and medicinal uses were from 1725.17 The Dentoni family, originally from Liguria near Genoa on mainland Italy, launched modern production in Selargius in the mid-1800s, and capers helped people survive when phylloxera wiped out vineyards in the early twentieth century. Former producer Stefanina Dentoni reported that her family had 1,300 plants in the mid-­twentieth century, which rendered two metric tons per year. Caper production fell along with the entire agricultural sector in the 1970s due to job opportunities elsewhere

Figure 4.2  Marco Maxia

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Figure 4.3  Caper bushes growing on Cagliari’s ramparts

and competition from lower-­priced globalized capers. But the plants withstood twenty to fifty years of abandonment and just needed weeding and pruning to get back into full production in the new millennium. Capers fit the local soil and climate perfectly, for they were sturdy and resistant to the wind and aridity typical of Sardinia, with roots that could reach ten yards or more deep (Guigoni 2010a). Caper farmer Marco Maxia said they were easy to propagate by inserting a cutting into the earth, and they needed irrigating only in the first few years.18 The plants could grow to a yard and a half in height and three yards in diameter and live over a hundred years. In Selargius, capers thrived in the context of extreme land fragmentation, and they were an integral and enduring part of the landscape. People planted them along roads, as land boundaries, with fruit trees, and near the grapevines that produced the vinegar used to pickle capers (which were also salted). Never did I see a whole field of caper bushes, as in other parts of the Mediterranean, such as

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Pantelleria.19 In April 2013, the young farmer Marco Maxia took Jim and me to visit his caper operation in Selargius, and we spent an afternoon touring several small caper fields, or caperetti, which averaged fifty caper plants each, while he talked with passion about his decision to revitalize this significant local crop and the challenges he has faced. Born in 1976 and the first in three generations of his family to farm, Marco Maxia was another example of the return to farming of young people (ricontadinazione). He developed a passion for the land after working in restaurants for a few years and went to school to become a perito agrario, or agricultural expert, and eventually landed a job with AGRIS (the Sardinian Regional Agency for Agricultural Research). He worked there from 7:30 a.m. until 2:30 p.m., and then he went home, had lunch, and in the afternoon worked his own land—mostly the capers, but he also cultivated a small vineyard, some fruit trees, and a vegetable garden. He valued the job at AGRIS for its steady pay regardless of the weather or the crops. But he preferred working on his own land, which was “more risky but more satisfying.” Combining the two jobs was an example of “pluriactivity” (Van der Ploeg 2010) that enabled him to survive financially. Marco Maxia had fourteen different caper fields that he cared for and harvested; all were small, at most an acre or two. They contained in all about seven hundred bushes dispersed around the Selargius countryside. Each plot had a name, e.g., bobo, angioletto, mini, oliveto, mandorleto. He paid rent for only two of them, around 100 euros a year each, and for the others he gave the owners some capers, wine, vegetables, figs, or almonds. Maxia plowed the fields to make them porous to rainfall and extirpate weeds, and then he pruned the plants in late winter or early spring to stimulate production. The caper harvest started around mid-May and went through to mid-August. A caper (cappero, bocciolo) was the bud of the plant before it flowered, and the smaller the buds, the more prized they were. Maxia said, “the more you pick, the more it produces.” Towards the end of the season, he would leave some to flower and produce the caper fruit known as capperone, which was also pickled and commercialized, especially for cocktails. At the start of the season, the pickers went to each plant every five or six days, but as the days got longer and warmer, they picked every two to three or four days. Maxia estimated that he got anywhere from 700 to 800 grams (1.5 to 1.8 pounds) per cutting per plant, up to 2 to 3 kilograms (4.4 to 6.6 pounds) per cutting of the biggest plants at the height of the summer’s longest days when they were most productive. The older and bigger the plant, the more it produced and the better the quality, but even new plants would produce in the second year. Marco Maxia and his wife rented their first caper plot in 2000, a small field with 44 plants. In the first year, they produced 45 kilograms (100 pounds) of capers, the next year 100 kilograms (220 pounds), the next 200 kilograms (440 pounds), and in 2012 they produced 900 kilograms (almost 2000 pounds), grossed 26,000 euro, and ran out before they could satisfy the demand. This success was hard won after eight difficult and discouraging years during which their production was low, sales were limited, and they kept working at a loss.

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But then a newspaper article came out in the Messaggero Sardo (Marras 2006) that helped publicize them. Capers were recognized by the Agricultural Ministry (MIPAAF—Ministero Italiano Politiche Agricole Alimentari e Forestali) as a “traditional product” in 2007. Maxia won a national “Oscar Green” prize in 2009 for recuperating traditional production. All these diverse forms of recognition helped stimulate interest and sales. But perhaps the biggest boost came from Slow Food, which got involved with capers in 2004 and gave pride to Maxia, who said, “Before that a person was almost ashamed to talk of capers.” Each year, he was ready to quit, but each year held off, until 2008 when he went to Slow Food’s renowned biannual food exposition Salon of Taste (Salone del Gusto) in Turin, thinking that this might be the last chance to make a go of it. Things did not go well, and he came home really discouraged, but then suddenly orders started coming in, and then more and more, and they sold all their production. Since then, things have continued to pick up and it has become a viable business. “Selargius is unbeatable for capers,” said Maxia. I asked if producing them was worth it financially, and he said, not really, because there was a lot of work and the income was modest, but there was satisfaction. Maxia was experimenting with diverse ways of preserving and packaging the capers to add value, for example salted, in vinegar, in a pâté with olive oil, and in combination with other products, such as the renowned Sardinian cracker-­like bread pane carasau. In 2012, Selargius capers sold for 10–13 euro per kilogram (approximately $5–$6.50 per pound) in bulk, and for 20–40 euro per kilogram (approximately $10–$20 per pound) in small jars. A 100-year-­old plant could produce 9 kilograms (20 pounds) of capers in a year. Maxia said, “it’s beautiful to pick them,” for it was tranquil in the evening as the sun set and it cooled off. They picked until 9 or 9:30 p.m., sometimes later, when they had to shine the car headlights over the fields to finish the picking, to keep the buds from flowering so the plant would keep producing. The pickers were mainly Maxia and his father, and his wife, mother, and cousin sometimes helped. “It’s hard work,” he said. His wife and mother ran the workshop (laboratorio), processing the capers. This multifunctional, pluriactive strategy using family labor to farm and process capers, combined with off-­farm employment, was essential to the success of the business. He said, “Without my parents, I could not have done anything.” Yet they faced difficult challenges. The biggest one was “the bureaucracy . . . a person goes crazy . . . the problem is not the work, it’s the bureaucracy.” For example, it took Maxia two years to get his small caper-­processing workshop set up and approved. Another challenge was acquiring land. In contrast to Dolci and Perrin’s (2017: fn. 11) calculation that the average price of land in Sardinia was less than 1000 euros/hectare, Maxia said that agricultural land in Selargius in 2013 was going for 40,000–50,000 euros ($50,000–$60,000) per hectare, an impossible sum for most, and then the costs of all the paperwork were formidable, up to a third of the purchase price, choking off young farmers like Maxia who were trying to get back to working the land. Another challenge was getting people to pay enough for the labor-­intensive capers so that their production was economically sustainable; building networks through Slow Food brought customers.

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The Slow Food Cagliari chapter deemed capers so important in terms of taste, quality, and place in history that they established a caper “food community” in 2010 to recognize caper production and give it a much-­needed stimulus. I attended the first anniversary of the founding of the caper food community at the Casa del Canonico Putzu in Selargius on June 12, 2011, and was able to see Slow Food’s support in action. There were around fifty people who participated in the afternoon’s events. We arrived at 5 p.m., just in time for the panel discussion on the history, significance, and current status of caper production in Selargius. Slow Food Cagliari fiduciaria Anna Cossu opened the panel by welcoming everyone and briefly describing Slow Food’s principles of “good, clean, and fair food” and support for revitalizing caper production. After the panel, we all walked a few hundred yards down the street to a field where an expert botanist spoke about capers. We strolled around the caper field for a while, learning about the plants and chatting informally with each other, and then walked back to the Casa del Canonico Putzu for a caper tasting (described in detail in Chapter 6). We sat at tables of eight to ten people in a very relaxed and convivial setting—tasting capers, nibbling on tomatoes and crispy pistoccu bread, cleansing our palates with water and wine, and chatting ever more animatedly about capers, the process of tasting, the plants we had seen that day, and their place in local culture. Slow Food Cagliari fiduciaria Anna Cossu summed up the goal of the caper food community when she said, “That’s what we must aim for—local identity. You cannot implant alien models from outside . . . You have to have the capacity to understand what the identity is and give it new life, perhaps in an innovative way, with new methods, even didactic ones.” Her words summed up how Maxia’s caper initiative fit van der Ploeg’s model: It focused on a special historically important product grounded in territorio, it used innovative processing and marketing, it was part of a multifunctional farming strategy including off-­farm employment, and it built networks through Slow Food and other local supporters.

Gianfranco Deidda, olive oil producer and GAS supplier Gianfranco Deidda represented a different farming trajectory from those of Pedini and Maxia. He was not new to agriculture—his ancestors had been farmers or shepherds for many generations, but he carved out his own road into organic olive oil production and grain farming. He came from Villacidro, thirty miles northwest of Cagliari, and had fifty hectares, eighteen of which his wife had inherited from her father, a shepherd. Deidda’s grandfather had herded goats; Deidda’s father produced wine on seven hectares. Deidda cultivated organically ten hectares of olive orchards and forty of field crops—durum wheat, peas, barley, and oats. He had about one and a half hectares of grapes producing 2,000 to 3,000 liters of wine per year that he sold locally as bulk wine. He also hired out to work the land of others with the four tractors he had bought over the years. Deidda sold his products directly to neighbors from

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his house. He supplied the Cagliari Solidarity Purchase Group, or GAS (Chapter 5), as well as one in Emilia-Romagna on the mainland. He demonstrated the multifunctionality characteristic of contemporary small farmers in the diversity of his products and short-­chain sales channels. He started in the fields in 1967 at age fourteen, when he finished his compulsory education, and he said, “at age twenty-­four, I went out on my own,” separating from his father and starting his own business from scratch. When I asked how things were, he said, “I have to say good, I gave it my all.” He worked hard all those years, seven days a week. In fact, he liked coming to the thrice-­weekly GAS markets in Cagliari—even though it was thirty miles each way and some days he sold little— because it was a nice break from farming and gave him a chance to socialize with customers and other producers. In response to my question about whether his eighteen-­year-­old son might farm, he said: “There’s little desire to go into farming. It’s hard work, you’re alone a lot, and you have to face all the calamities that the Lord sends you.” His wife labored with him in the fields and the two of them did most of the work. His wife liked farming enough, but sometimes expressed a wish for a nice office job with her own income, benefits, and a good pension. But she knew Deidda would never do anything but farm, so she joined him in the fields. He said, “I am really happy with my choice,” and he has done well. He built his house, bought four tractors, increased his land holdings, and had everything he needed. He had traveled all over Italy, he said, and feared that as a farmer he might feel lowly compared to others, but realized that he was doing as well as anyone. Deidda raised organically three types of Sardinian olive trees on ten hectares: Bosan (bosana), Villacidro black (nera di Villacidro), and Gonnosfanadiga black (nera di Gonnosfanadiga). The first two were just for oil, the third was delicious for

Figure 4.4  Gianfranco Deidda with olives and olive oil at the GAS market in Piazza Islanda

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both eating and oil. The main pests for olive trees were flies (mosca mediterranea and mosca olearia) which attacked starting about mid-August when the trees bore fruit. There were industrial chemical sprays against the olive flies, but Deidda refused to use those. He tried commercial organic traps, but they were very expensive, so he did research through friends, on the internet, and through trial and error, and he came up with a do-­it-yourself trap (trappola fai da te).20 On each tree, he placed a plastic one-­and-a-­half-liter water bottle. He put holes about two-­ thirds of the way up, filled it half full with water and a sardine or two and a bit of ammonia, and that did the trick. The sardines putrefied and the smell attracted the flies to enter through the holes into the bottle where they were trapped and drowned. Deidda said this method was more expensive and time-­consuming than using chemical sprays, but it was worth it to avoid poisoning the olives, the oil, the land, and the water. Furthermore, there was increasing interest from consumers in organic products (see Chapter 8). Deidda said that the EU gave a contribution of 400 euros/hectare for organic olive production, and 200 euros/hectare for field crops. This was not a lot, but it helped make up for the increased costs and lower production of organic fields. Deidda said he had always been opposed to the use of chemicals; “I sell less but I’m healthy, I don’t breathe poison, the bees are healthy.” He said organic worked well for his crops—olives, grains, and legumes—but it was harder to raise fruits organically because they had more pests. His biggest problem was “the bureaucracy” and what would help him most was “less bureaucracy, fewer state workers, being left in peace.” Although he needed help in the fields on occasion, he rarely hired day laborers because “the bureaucracy puts a stick through our wheels,” and labor costs were high because of all the deductions, taxes, and so on. The only government money he got was the EU subsidy for organic. He said it cost him 30,000 euros to build the workshop (laboratorio) for bottling, labeling, packing, and storing his olives and oil, and there were many regulatory hurdles. But in spite of the challenges, Deidda’s farming enterprise seemed to be flourishing. He practiced multifunctionality by growing diverse field crops, olives, and grapes—all rooted in the territorio’s distinct identity—and by working for others with his tractor. He added value and respected the natural environment through organic production of high-­quality olive oil. He maximized his profits by selling directly through short chains to the Cagliari and Emilia-Romagna GAS and at his farm. He innovated by making do-­it-yourself traps and saved money by using mostly family labor. In his case, the model of farming proposed by Guigoni and Van der Ploeg seemed to be working. Let us now turn to a larger multifunctional cooperative farm.

Su Staì farm21 Agriturismo Su Staì, Fattoria Didattica, Podere Valbella—hereafter called Su Staì farm—was an excellent example of well-­developed multifunctionality. It was a

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full-­fledged working farm cooperative, agro-­tourism site, event center, and teaching farm. It produced an extensive range of crops and animal products. It had bread-­baking ovens, a small butchering facility, and a cheese-­making workshop. It was on land that had once been a malarial swamp and was reclaimed in the mid-­ nineteenth century. It was settled after World War I by farmers from the Italian mainland regions of Veneto, Lombardy, and Friuli. In 1978, a group of young farmers started the Strovina ’78 cooperative there, and I interviewed one of them, Marco Pau, who was a long-­term collaborator with LAORE. He had worked at the failed petrochemical plant in Ottana before he came back to Sanluri and helped found the cooperative in 1978. The farm grew “everything”—several types of cereals, legumes, fruits, vegetables, olives, wine and table grapes, saffron crocuses, herbs, and more. It raised sheep, goats, cows, horses, pigs, and chickens. In 1998, the cooperative got major rural development funding from the European Union, which helped them build the whole complex. There were about twelve people working on the farm, divided between the animal-­rearing, farming, agro-­tourism, and teaching. Su Staì farm was part of the Satu Po Imparai network of thirteen teaching farms in the Medio Campidano province (see Chapter 7), and Marco Pau said that for at least ten years previously they had had a similar initiative called “the school on the farm.” He despaired of the educational system and its lack of interest in agriculture, but, he said, “we are willing to go to the schools.” He wanted to engage the children in a serious educational pathway rather than a one-­time outing to the farm in nice weather. For example, he suggested “the cycle of bread,” which would have the students read three simple articles about grain and bread and then participate in ten to twenty hours of farm education. The students would visit the farm four times: in November for the planting, in spring when the grain was growing in the fields and the kernels were ripe, in early summer for the threshing, and last for milling the grain and making the bread. Pau said that even in Sanluri, a small town in the countryside, the children had lost the knowledge of agriculture and the historical memories related to food. The farm was very well set up for education because it had a large dining room in which to feed the students; it had a small grain mill, bread-­making room, and wood-­fired oven; it had a small butchering facility for slaughtering animals and processing the meat into sausage, salami, and prosciutto; and it had rooms for making pasta and cheese. It was all very clean, spacious, and well lit—a welcoming and functional teaching space. Marco Pau also showed us the experimental vineyard and orchard. He collaborated with the University of Sassari to revitalize autochthonous varieties of grapes and fruit trees. In the recent past, the agricultural authorities urged farmers to extirpate the local varieties because they had relatively low yields, were not well known, and thus were not highly marketable. But recently people had become interested in bringing back the heritage varieties because they evolved in the climate and land, were resistant to pests and drought, and were especially tasty. The University of Sassari provided Su Staì with scions for grafting. In the vineyard were seven hundred and fifty grapevines, seventeen of each type of

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Figure 4.5  Experimental orchard at Su Staì farm

autochthonous variety. In the fruit orchard, Pau had grafted several heirloom varieties—for example, the seven-­hundred-year-­old su piricoccu basucciu apricot, sa limuninca susina colla spina plum, su melappiu apple, sa sagomusinia pear, and other varieties. We walked past another tree, and he said it was a mulberry, whose leaves were food for silk worms. He planned to get some silk worms and produce silk to enhance the teaching function of the farm. We passed a dried-­out saffron crocus field, which they had harvested in season. Just walking around the farm was an education in the holistic potential of Sardinian agriculture. The aims of the farm were to produce quality products, get them on the market, and forge links with other farms, schools, and consumers. Pau said that it was important to make agriculture appealing to young people, which meant increasing the income and status of the farmer, and improving the sociability of the job. All this was necessary to counter the devastating depopulation of the countryside and the consequent threats to Sardinian rural culture. An important strategy the farm followed, Pau said, was to produce niche products that sold for about a third more than standardized products. He admitted that these were products for wealthy people, but said they had to target this market “to preserve the farmlands and preserve biodiversity.” The farm was just starting another initiative, born in northern Italy, known as “your garden at a distance” (orto tuo a distanza).22 The farmer divided the fields into plots and allocated them to participating city dwellers who paid in advance (e.g., 600 euros per year for 30 square yards), and the farmer planted it according to the desires and specifications of the client. The farmer did all the work and brought the produce to the city dweller once a week. The idea was that through direct short-­chain sales, the prices were higher for the grower and lower for the consumer. It involved a long-­term contract during which the farmer and the

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Figure 4.6  Marco Pau at Su Staì farm

consumer came to know, rely upon, and literally become invested in each other. It was similar to the Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) that has gained popularity in the USA.23 Su Staì farm also had an agro-­tourism operation, with several small bungalows for tourists and a meeting hall for cultural events. Pau said they occasionally organized theme dinners tied to book presentations such as “yellow book, yellow dinner” (“yellow books”—gialli—are mystery novels). He planned to organize more formally an initiative that he had done informally in the past—“the pig party.” He spread the word to friends and relatives that he was going to butcher a pig and sold shares of the meat in advance, in twenty-­pound packages at a set price. Again, the idea was to shorten the distance between consumer and producer and favor both. When we walked outside, he stopped at a bush and asked us to smell the lemony leaves. It was a citronella bush that reminded him of his grandmother because she had used the leaves as deodorant, clothes refresher, and mosquito repellent. Then we walked to the vegetable garden, and he showed us an area of “social farming” where autistic children had planted vegetables of their choosing and placed placards with their names. He said, “my philosophy is that we are all just passing through and I want to do some good.” Marco Pau described a multifunctional farm whose mission stretched beyond production and education to being a place of remembering, connection, and cultural preservation.

Conclusion The four small farms described here used some forms of re-­territorialization, innovation, connection/cooperation, and multifunctionality. They practiced what

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Van der Ploeg (2010: 16) described as a sustainable new peasant farm economy “distinctively different from entrepreneurial and capitalist agriculture.” But anthropologist Chaia Heller (2012: 13), who studied multifunctional small farmers in France, cautioned “only a fraction of these well-­intentioned smallholders will earn a livable wage by signing on to multifunctionality schemes.” The cases examined here—Sardus Pater wine cooperative, caper farmer Marco Maxia, olive grower Gianfranco Deidda, and Su Staì farm—were getting by through adding value to products of the territorio, linking them to Sardinian history and place, seeking both local and extra-­local markets and direct sales, forging formal and informal networks of support, and multifunctionality. They contributed to food democracy by enhancing access to quality local food. Their products were fresh, tasty, and sustainably produced. Some of the producers were earning a fair wage, while others were struggling, and they insisted that their prices to consumers were fair, even if higher than industrially produced foods, because of their top quality. Farmers’ biggest challenges were bureaucratic obstacles, gaining access to land and other resources, and enlarging markets locally and globally. One way that they and other food advocates aimed to expand adherents and markets was through acclaiming taste, a topic the next chapter explores.

Chapter 5 T aste activism and the emotional pow er of food

Introduction “We grab them with the senses,” said Slow Food member Carla Marcis, encapsulating the role of taste in the Cagliari alternative food movement: It attracted people to seek good food and knowledge about it. Activists mobilized taste and the senses to support local, fresh, organic, small-­scale, and democratic food, and to strengthen community through its convivial consumption. In Italy, taste was very important; it was a central topic of family mealtime conversations which encouraged children to develop sensory awareness and to identify with familial and cultural preferences (Ochs, Fasulo, and Pontecorvo 1996). Sardinians formed tastes at home and in public through exposure to foods and spices, the ways they were cooked, and the meanings they carried. The search for good, familiar, local tastes was a hook that recruited many to food activist causes where the senses were an important path to learning about local and global food systems. Here, I define taste broadly as the multi-­sensorial experience of food involving flavor, smell, sight, touch, and even sometimes sound. Anthropologists have shown that people develop taste preferences through repeated acts of commensality in family and other social groupings.1 Taste can communicate identity and hierarchy by the association of certain tastes with exalted or vilified social groups (Bourdieu 1984, Guthman 2003).2 In addition to affirming entrenched hierarchies, taste can also be a channel for critical consciousness through its ability to mobilize body and mind in oppositional understandings (Abarca 2006, Hayes-Conroy and Hayes-Conroy 2008, Pérez 2014). Recognizing this, food advocates work to construct friendly and fun as well as educational opportunities for people to taste food together. The social, sensual bodily engagement with food can be a wellspring of civil society participation. I call this taste activism. It is realized through what anthropologist Sarah Pink calls “embodiment,” whereby the body is “a source of knowledge and subsequently of agency” (Pink 2009: 24).3 Italian food activists engaged emotionally as they learned about and ate delicious local foods associated with home, place, family, and identity. This emotional involvement, inspired by taste and commensality, was essential to sustaining social movements because it kept people engaged and created bonds

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with others (Bosco 2006). It entailed what Sardinian-­born Marxist Antonio Gramsci called for: “Movement from knowing to understanding to feeling and vice versa from feeling to understanding to knowing . . . you cannot make history and politics without passion” (Gramsci 1975: 451–2, my translation).4 Food via the senses and ingestion wove together mind, sentiment, and body; it inspired passion in many and led some to oppositional politics. This chapter will focus on how Cagliari food activists constructed taste— the language they used, the practices they described, and the meanings they employed—to explore the sensory joys and material challenges of forging culturally meaningful democratic food systems. It will look at taste through three case studies: A Slow Food caper tasting; Alessandro Pedini’s discussion of the taste and quality of Sardus Pater Carignano wine; and the role of taste in the GAS, the Solidarity Purchase Group. The chapter will use these cases to illustrate three themes about taste and the senses: They were central to activism; they expressed an emotionally deep identity and belonging; and they could lead to oppositional political consciousness. The chapter will close by reflecting on the Sardinian case in the light of cultural constructions of taste in other global settings.

Slow Food caper tasting Taste and education about it were integral to Slow Food’s mission to advance “good, clean, and fair food” and were entwined in Slow Food’s roots (Hayes-Conroy and Hayes-Conroy 2008, 2010, 2013, Siniscalchi 2018). It started in 1983 as Arci Gola (Petrini and Padovani 2005: 301)—with Arci referring to the left-­leaning Italian association for recreation and culture (Siniscalchi 2014a: 75), and Gola meaning desire for and love of food (Counihan 1999: 180).5 One member of the Slow Food Cagliari organizing committee, forty-­seven-year-­old Luca Galassi, was in charge of conviviality, which was integral to every Slow Food event. After a day of learning, he said, it was critical “to bring the members together at the table to share this learning and transform it into sensory knowledge of the products.” For Luca Galassi, pleasurable, experiential, sensual practice was essential to fostering intellectual growth, and its unfolding in the context of commensality enhanced its impact. He emphasized that: “Food as pleasure will always be at the center of my presence in Slow Food . . . I think we have to link whatever activity we do in Slow Food with the chance to know sensorially what we are talking about . . . Let’s talk about a food, let’s do a day on the caper, then let’s eat the capers . . . The cognitive, cultural, solidarity aspects have to be accompanied by the tasting aspect.” His approach reflected sensory anthropologists Howes and Classen’s (2013: 3) claim that “ideas are communicated through sensory impressions all the time.” At the June 2011 Slow Food first anniversary celebration of the caper food community described in Chapter 4, after the panel discussion and visit to the caper fields, Galassi put into practice Slow Food’s belief in corporeal learning by leading a caper tasting to inform people about the varieties of capers and their organoleptic properties, with special attention to the local ones (see Counihan 2018). At the

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Figure 5.1  Capers and tomatoes at caper tasting

Casa del Canonico Putzu in Selargius, Slow Food volunteers had set several tables with capers arranged on paper plates, like numbers on a clock, for participants to taste. Each table had crusty pistoccu bread, baskets of tomatoes donated by the tomato cooperative of S. Margherita di Pula (which Slow Food Cagliari had toured a few weeks earlier), and bottles of mineral water. Slow Food volunteers went around pouring wine, which people welcomed enthusiastically, and Luca Galassi led the tasting, which I digitally recorded. It was all very festive and sociable, especially as the wine flowed. Each table had eight to ten people who chatted about the capers as they tasted them and tried to identify flavor differences and preferences. Luca Galassi began the tasting thus: This is very simple. You have in front of you a plate with a cycle like a snail, which is the symbol of Slow Food. Your reference point is the hour twelve on the clock and from there we will proceed clockwise, tasting several different capers. We will make comments and present information, and after tasting the capers you can clean your palate with the water . . . On the plate you will find capers that are very different from each other, in provenance and preparation . . . We begin with the Selargius caper which you can see is much smaller than all the others, and if you try to squash it, it releases much less water than the others . . . When you taste it, try first to smell its fragrance and then put it in your mouth and taste it.

Over the next hour, Galassi guided us around the plate, having us taste a Slow Food presidium caper from the island of Salina, one from the island of Pantelleria,

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Figure 5.2  Luca Galassi guiding the caper tasting

“a supermarket caper,” one pickled in vinegar (rather than salt like the others), and finally the capperone, or caper fruit. This was a clear example of the belief that knowledge delivered socially and sensorially could affect people’s experience of taste and hopefully their subsequent purchasing actions. Galassi encouraged a holistic experience of taste by engaging not only people’s olfactory sense and mouth feel but also their attention to visual appearance and texture. He said, “Selargius capers are more full and they have a more complete rotundity . . . Let’s pay attention to the shape . . . and they always have the stem, which is gone in the others . . . I invite you to feel it for a second between your teeth, how it is more crunchy (croccante) than the other capers that absorbed so much water.” He called on producer Marco Maxia to comment on the lack of water, and he said, “The particular contribution of this lightness is above all to flavor, there is a good flavor that you can taste.” The tasting was very sociable, and at our table conversation did not lag as people chatted about the different capers, which ones they liked and did not, how salty they were, how hard or easy it was to differentiate them, and various related topics. Galassi did not try to impose a taste hegemony but rather encouraged sensory awareness and group discussion, which fostered positive relationships with diverse people around the fun and instructive topic of a unique local food. Comments at my table included: “I can’t tell the difference,” “there is a strange aftertaste,” “this one is salty,” “this one is saltier,” “this is the saltiest,” “look, these are the ones with the stem,” “this is good, finally one that doesn’t taste like salt, you can taste the vinegar,”

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“it’s good, really good,” “it tastes of red pepper and garlic, the ones in vinegar are delicious.” Cagliari chapter leader Anna Cossu described the processual nature of taste education: It has happened to me in our tastings that the tasting leader says, “oh this is like . . .” and everyone says, “yes, yes, that’s true.” However, I have noted that those who have done not one, but two or three tastings begin to say, “No, not me, I do not smell this, rather I smell that.” This is a great result, it means that they are already becoming critical about taste, they are growing. The more people are curious, the more they go into it. In turn often our members propose new products to us, they say, “I tried this cheese from this producer—do you know it?” And so this leads to a constructive dialogue with our experts and means that maybe if we didn’t know that producer, we begin to say, “Oh, there’s also this producer, why don’t we go visit his cheese-­making workshop?”

Cossu valued the agency of consumers and their ability to develop an informed and critical approach to food through taste education. It was a key strategy of food activism, because it was a way to lead consumers to become more purposeful about their food, to think about eating and shopping, and to support good local products. The caper tasting lasted about an hour and was a pleasant culmination of a day of sensory, social, and cognitive learning. We all went home a little more aware of what “good, clean, and fair food” was and having experienced the truth of Geneviève Teil and Antoine Hennion’s (2004: 25) claim that, “taste is a way of building relationships, with things and with people.”

Tasting Sardus Pater Carignano wine But what defined good taste? This varied from person to person, but there were also clear social constructions of taste through exposure and evaluation—in Cagliari, as elsewhere (Pedersen 2015, Lahne and Trubek 2014, Sutton 2010, Teil and Hennion 2004). The visit to Sardus Pater wine cooperative discussed in Chapter 4 culminated in a wine-­tasting designed to demonstrate the connections between the taste of the wine, the territorio of the vineyard, and the vinification in the cellar—taste as the product of land, labor, and knowledge. When Jim Taggart asked Sardus Pater marketing director Alessandro Pedini how he defined “quality,” he replied: We work a lot with drinkability (bevibilità). For us it is very important that when you open a bottle, you want to finish it. This is fundamental and so drinkability is one of the things we work on most. The second element we pursue is typicity (tipicità). Someone who tastes our wine, a person who visits the island of Sant’Antioco, goes for a walk, and smells the perfumes of the sea, the perfumes of the Mediterranean scrub, the perfumes of the vineyards, has to be able to say,

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Italian Food Activism in Urban Sardinia “This wine comes from here.” So this is the second element: typicity, the congruence with the place of its birth. The third element is elegance (eleganza). The wines have to be pure, we prefer that they have no defects, that even a highly educated palate will have no reservations. These are the three things that make a quality product: drinkability, typicity and elegance.

Pedini’s answer focused on the rather abstract concepts of drinkability and elegance; only typicity was linked to specific fragrances of the wine—the salty sea smells; the rosemary, broom, and juniper-­tinged perfumes of the Mediterranean scrub; and the grapey fragrances of the vineyards. Quality reflected place, culture, and skill. He continued, “Everyone has to work with their own material, and we have Carignano on the ungrafted vine of the island of Sant’Antioco, and that is what we have to work with. In my opinion, we produce quality if we make the most of this product . . . I think that quality for a cooperative is also to give value to the grape, and hence to maximize the value of the members’ labor.” For Pedini, as for many food activists, the path from land and labor to taste was direct. Pedini continued, “the wines produced by these farmers here in this territory are very typical, very territorial wines.” I asked him if they had a distinct taste profile, and he answered at length: Yes, absolutely. The specificity [of taste] is given from the fact that we are in a clearly delimited area, an island, the island of Sant’Antioco, which has a unique soil and climate that we find nowhere else. Then we have the unique element of Carignano, where we do not use French genetic stock but rather the autochthonous one, truly autochthonous. Then there is the third element, the age of the vineyards. These vineyards are very old. Roberto [the enologist] put this field back into production a few years ago and we found in the vineyard cadastre that it was planted in 1935, hence it is eighty years old. When a vineyard is that old, its production is very low. We’re talking about a vineyard that produces thirty quintals per hectare when normally a vineyard produces seventy quintals per hectare. This means that these grapes have a high organoleptic concentration. Imagine with so few grapes per plant, it concentrates all its efforts. Furthermore, Giacomo Tachis and many other international enologists say that the plant that suffers gives the best fruit. And these plants suffer terribly. Imagine, we’re only in April now and it is this hot, imagine in August. Don’t forget that these plants have no irrigation, so in summer they go into hydric stress and have no source of water—so the plant reaches a point where it can hardly survive. And we do not help it, we want this kind of stress, because it gives us an exceptional quality of grape. Clearly this quality is expressed in the wine. And we work only with 100 percent Carignano grapes. We do not blend with cabernet or merlot, which almost all the companies do because those grapes are more familiar to the international markets. We work only with our varietal so this means we have a distinct organoleptic profile, because we have a particular territorio, a particular grape, and a process that respects the grape . . . It is a truly delicate product but it gives an exceptional fruit.

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It was notable that in responding to my question about its taste profile, Pedini talked about land, grape varietal, age of vineyard, and climate but not about specific properties of the wine. He also highlighted the significance of the long view in vinification: It’s time that really makes the wine . . . A well-­planted vineyard needs five years to reach production and probably five more to reach quality. To achieve quality the wine needs a year to rest in the stainless steel tank, another year in the wooden cask, and maybe another four or five months in the bottle . . . You can understand the value of this product—imagine that you got the idea of planting a vineyard and that maybe fifteen years pass before you have the finished quality product . . . The value of this work is that you have to have a long-­term perspective.

Pedini pointed to the role of time in constructing taste, in altering the organoleptic qualities, as he said, but it is also important in shaping the consumer’s perception after repeated tries, as Anna Cossu pointed out above and scholars have shown (Teil and Hennion 2004: 22).6 Throughout our interview, Alessandro Pedini was enthusiastically teaching us about the cooperative’s mission, wine, and terroir, which culminated in a tasting of several Sardus Pater wines—all Carignano grapes but of different years, age of vineyards, and vinification processes. This tasting demonstrated a key strategy of food activism—to use the body as a source of knowledge and agency. He said, “After going to the Carignano vineyards, you need to understand what it means to work those vineyards in the way I explained to you and what fruit they give.” Pedini had us try four Carignano wines—from a very young wine not aged in wood and thus having the most Carignano flavor, to more refined wines aged longer with time in wooden casks. Throughout the tasting, he described the characteristics and flavors of the wines, using terms like rozzo (rough), elegante (elegant), astringente (astringent), carciofo (artichoke), vegetale (vegetable), delicato (delicate), soffice (soft), rude (coarse), un altro naso (another nose or odor), spigoloso (prickly), maschio (male), femmina (female), morbido (soft), dolce (sweet), equilibrato (balanced), autenticità (authenticity), and complessità (complexity) to guide us to reach deeper into our sensory range and understand the wine more fully. In the following excerpt from the digital recording of the tasting, Pedini articulated a complex conception of taste: Here’s something important, you’ll feel it now, when you put the wine in your mouth, pass it quickly through your mouth and you will taste its astringency, it’s a little like when you eat an artichoke, it has a vegetable sensation, and the wine also has that vegetable sensation. The interesting thing is when we taste these two wines, they have the same vegetable sensation, that sensation of astringency, but the second wine is much more delicate, much more soft, much more elegant. This first one is the younger version so it is a little more coarse . . . Now with this second wine we begin to smell—it’s another nose. This begins to be different, eh. There is no longer that prickly sensation that we had with the

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Italian Food Activism in Urban Sardinia other . . . Something that is very important in judging wine is balance. If you taste a wine that has a lot of alcohol or is really tanniny or is very acidic, it’s not good, it’s out of balance. So this means that a good wine has balance, it has alcohol, acidity, sweetness—but a wine that is too sweet is not good—it is a combination.

Pedini went on in this vein as he poured us four different wines to taste. As marketing consultant, his job was to sell the Carignano wine, and as a food advocate he came to the job with passion and conviction. He educated all of our senses as well as our minds as he furnished descriptors, concepts, and information to guide us to know the wine more fully. Taste was the final encounter with the wine and completed our holistic mind–body understanding of it.

The “Open Circle” Solidarity Purchase Group: GAS Cagliari Circolo Aperto Sardus Pater cooperative demonstrated the significance of taste in making, distinguishing, and selling local wine, but it was also important in food activist recruitment, community-­building, education, and politics. This multi-­faceted power of taste was evident in the Cagliari GAS, or Gruppo d’Acquisto Solidale—a “Solidarity Purchase Group” founded in 2010 which had 250 to 300 members who paid 20 euros to join. The first Italian GAS formed in 1994 in Fidenza (Parma), and by 2015 there were over 1,600 GAS throughout Italy, though a mere handful in Sardinia.7 Cristina Grasseni (2013) did a deep ethnographic study of a GAS in Bergamo (Lombardy), and Maria Fonte (2013) examined one in Rome, but neither focused on the role of taste in GAS member recruitment or choice of producers, although taste was often discussed in the Cagliari GAS. GAS are groups of people who come together to purchase locally and organically produced foods from small farmers on the basis of solidarity, expressed through commitment to fair prices and long-­term relationships. Volunteers handle all the logistics of selecting producers, ordering, picking up, and distributing to members. According to Grasseni (2013: 5), GAS promote “co-­production as transformative practice” and support solidarity with farmers as a political principle as well as a path to better food at better prices. Between 2011 and 2015, I interviewed several times fifty-­six-year-­old Lucio Brughitta, president and co-­founder of the Cagliari GAS, and I interviewed formally and informally several other GAS members at the office, at the three outdoor GAS markets, and on a wild herb-­gathering expedition in the countryside. Lucio Brughitta knew well the historic Villanova neighborhood of Cagliari where the GAS had its office because he has run a newspaper kiosk in a quiet shady plaza there for years. He and a group of about ten friends decided to start the GAS to revitalize the economic and social life of the neighborhood. They wanted to do something “outside the political parties, outside the parish, and outside the trade unions.” The GAS members studied by Grasseni (2013) also espoused this wish to undertake civil society participation outside of usual channels.

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Figure 5.3  Lucio Brughitta at the GAS market in Piazza Giovanni XXIII

The aims of GAS Cagliari were to attain good food at good prices, to support small farmers and quality production, and to create social relationships and community—all facilitated by taste. Brughitta said, “The official goal is to enable our families to make informed and thoughtful purchases at competitive prices . . . Another goal of the GAS is to move towards small producers who do not have openings on the market and who thus find themselves constantly having to choose between maintaining a level of quality taught by their ancestors or the deterioration of the level of quality that the market is now imposing.” Quality meant good taste and local and organic production. These attributes led to economic support for local farmers, which Brughitta said was: “fundamental. In our GAS group we privilege local producers, producers of the territorio, typical products of the territorio, because our objective is to privilege the local producer, because the family must have a just income. Otherwise we will cease to exist as Sardinians.” Brughitta’s insistence that Jim and I try the GAS biodynamic strawberries illustrated the role of taste in defining quality and recruiting members. He said, “the strawberries have the fragrance of nature, they are tasty, they are juicy.” He made a special telephone call to the GAS biodynamic farmer to order some for us. When I tried them, I felt in my body the truth of the GAS message about the quality of local organic food: They were deep red, fragrant, sweet, complex, and delicious. They carried us along Gramsci’s path “from feeling to understanding to knowing”—and thence to changing behavior, for we immediately joined the GAS. For Brughitta, taste indexed the natural: “Food without flavor and without taste displays its artificiality. Natural food is tasty, natural food has flavor.” Because taste was located in a specific territorio, it was an expression of identity. Brughitta declared:

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Figure 5.4  GAS biodynamic strawberries

Taste means to recognize ourselves, because in all the regions of the world, all the regions of the nation, even all the regions of the island, the taste of products changes, and also changes the identity of the community that produces that product and identifies with that taste. So in Sardinia we have many breads, we have Campidanese bread, we have Nuorese bread, we have Gallurese bread, and in the taste we identify tradition, goodness, genuineness, and provenance. This holds for wines, it holds for everything we consume. And it is only through taste that we find our communal identity.

Linking identity, community, taste, and local food production engendered Brughitta’s critique of the capitalist food system: The industrial product has no taste, and it has no identity. It is really ugly to have food without taste and without identity, because it alienates us as human beings, it alienates us, and it leads us to eat only to stay alive. But what is the point of staying alive to produce, to continue to work, to continue to create capital, which is then accumulated and taken away from us, and is also accumulated through food? It is much, much better to have a taste identity (gusto identitario).

The GAS actively contributed to developing a taste identity in public events such as the thrice-­weekly GAS outdoor market that rotated through three different plazas of Cagliari (Piazza Islanda on Thursday afternoon, Piazza Garibaldi on Friday afternoon, and Piazza Giovanni XXIII on Sunday morning). There GAS producers sold fruit, vegetables, olives, olive oil, and wine while disseminating the tastes of local food. Brughitta often found himself explaining the origins, techniques, and economic logic of the GAS products. One April Sunday in 2015,

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I observed him chatting about olive oil with customers at the GAS market in Piazza Giovanni XXIII. He had two kinds, one made of Bosan olives and one of black Villacidro olives. A woman asked the price for the five-­liter cans, and he said the Bosan was 45 euros, the other 35. She looked shocked and shook her head. She asked Brughitta why some supermarket olive oil cost only 15–20 euros for five liters. He described the big tanker ships that arrived in Puglia, southern Italy, full of oil from who knows where, which was then bottled in Italy as so-­called 100 percent Italian olive oil. “It is fraud and that’s all,” he said, echoing Walter Vivarelli’s disgust about industrial pasta being called “Sardinian.” Brughitta then called out to the GAS olive oil producer Gianfranco Deidda (discussed in Chapter 4) who was selling his products at the market and asked him how much he spent for the bottles, labels, bottle caps, gasoline for the tractor, and so on. Brughitta pointed out that to make small-­batch Sardinian olive oil was more expensive than to import industrially produced oil from elsewhere, but argued that the taste was worth it. Sociologist Benedetto Meloni dropped by the GAS stand and told Brughitta about a farmer he knew who made a more mild olive oil that went well with fish, which Meloni thought was overpowered by strong oil. This constant informal discussion of taste in the public sphere constructed meaning, educated clients, linked producers to consumers, and created markets. Taste education established economic value, quality, and uniqueness. The same strategy was used by the Sardus Pater wine cooperative producing the unique Carignano piede franco wine, and by farmer Marco Maxia revitalizing caper production. One April Thursday in 2015 at the GAS market in Piazza Islanda, I was digitally recording Brughitta’s explanation about olive oil when a customer happened to join the conversation. I said to Brughitta, “I’m interested in the issue of taste.” His long reply flowed off his tongue and was an example of informal taste education: Just as there are many types of grapes that give so many different kinds of wine, so there are many types of olives that give different kinds of oil. So a Spanish olive oil is distinguished from a Turkish one, just as an olive oil from Lake Garda in northern Italy is distinguished from those of the south. In Sardinia we have some autochthonous varieties of olives and others have been recently imported, but they are all cultivars that are perfectly adapted to the climate of Sardinia. In addition to the skill of the single farmer, in addition to the expertise and honesty of the single olive miller, we already have at the outset different plants, and different olives with different characteristics.

Brughitta went on to describe those characteristics and their grounding in territorio: We have the high foothills olives which have a very light and delicate taste, not usually very piquant (piccante); we have oils from the south of Sardinia that are extremely piquant, strong, flavorful, and very fragrant. In between these categories are a thousand variations. So people can have a mixture of oils to reach the right taste that each one desires. Here we have Gianfranco Deidda’s oil.

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Italian Food Activism in Urban Sardinia Gianfranco last year won the first prize for organic olive oil . . . in an important island exposition where only the best participated, so it was a great outcome. His oil was a mixture composed of 50 percent Bosan olives (bosane) and 50 percent Gonnosfanadiga round olives (tondo di Gonnos), and he obtained a product that is very balanced, very pleasing, and excellent for local tastes. This year he won again the first prize, this time for one sole cultivar, Bosan olives, a very spicy oil that lights up the palates of the best gourmets. Those who are passionate about strong oil from the Bosan olives know what they are getting. So there is choice, you can choose a light oil with a light taste or stronger and heavier oils.

Intrigued by the notion that information could affect consumer choice, I asked Brughitta, “How do you educate people about these oils?” He replied: In the family there is an age-­old education about olive oil, about wine, about bread; already in the family people acquire tastes and ideas. For those who live in the city, we try to conduct food education giving out this basic information even in occasions like this afternoon. This is a small market, we have a small stand, but a special stand. We talk about how the olive oils are made. We know that the oils have to have a certain level of acidity, never more, and this depends on how the olives were picked and when they were pressed because they have to be pressed within eighteen hours of the harvest . . . There are a thousand shades of taste . . ., but good oil, remember, must always be fragrant, must be bitter, and must be piquant. From the thousand shades of taste, people pick their own, but if the oil is sweet, that means it is old. If it is not fragrant, it is not olive oil. If it is not piquant, it is not olive oil.

An older female shopper who had been listening demonstrated the immediate impact of Brughitta’s speech when she said, “Great, a good lesson, certainly, because I have pure olive oil and I said to myself, ‘It’s a bit bitter (amarognolo), this olive oil.’ And look, it should be a bit bitter, a bit piquant. I felt it here in my mouth a bit piquant.” Brughitta’s lesson about olive oil transformed specific taste characteristics that the client recognized but was unsure of into greater appreciation of local heritage olives and quality production practices. Former GAS member and university researcher Carla Locci was a strong proponent of the thrice weekly open-­air GAS markets because they afforded an important opportunity for the “ritual of shopping,” which, Locci said, was a multisensory interactive experience critical to some people’s relationship to food. She expounded: I have to touch the food, I have to see it, I have to smell it. It’s not only a question of trust, it’s also the ritual of shopping: go, get, touch, know, speak—it’s enjoyable, it’s part of shopping, and the GAS doesn’t permit this if you order on line. [You order], then you go and get it, and that’s what you have. But with the market in the square, you have the chance to see the food and especially to know the producer.

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Figure 5.5  GAS market in Piazza Islanda, Cagliari

Locci’s emphasis on the importance of the rich interpersonal and sensory experience of shopping added a layer to the role of taste and the senses in food activism. Employing the senses encouraged an agentive relationship to the body to counter alienation and spark activism, and it was also a basis for the GAS’s goal of fostering community. Sociability was at the heart of the GAS—which was by definition solidary (solidale). I asked several people what solidale in Gruppo d’Acquisto Solidale (GAS) meant, and Carla Locci’s reply was a good summary: I mean solidarity towards the producer, to guarantee a just price, to respect his work, and also solidarity in the sense of consuming together, of deciding to make certain buying choices together with other people whom you meet there and realize that you have other things in common with . . . Inside the GAS I met people who shared with me the idea that you could make food yourself. This was really beautiful, we shared all these things.

GAS president Brughitta also emphasized its social goals: The secret objectives of the GAS are to find a group of friends, to find a group with whom to share a choice of sociability, to find a group who satisfies our basic needs like that of eating. So we try to offer each other the best of ourselves. This is the hidden goal, the secret goal, the unconfessed goal. Everyone knows it—the pleasure of coming here to find good food but also to find good friends, even for those people who up to yesterday did not know each other at all.

The GAS regularly organized visits to producers to foster taste education and friendship. Thanks to a ride from GAS members Paola Puggioni and Gianfranco

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Tore, on Sunday, April 27, 2013, Jim and I joined about twenty-­five GAS members in Barrali, twenty-­five miles north of Cagliari, on a wild greens-­gathering outing with a farmer and forager named Bastiano who supplied the GAS. We spent about three hours in the morning wandering through the fields near his home. Bastiano was continually showing, picking, and giving people samples of plants while talking about their distinctive characteristics and uses. We found wild celery, cardoons, wild mustard, watercress, wild garlic, dandelion, valerian, wild asparagus, and several varieties of wild chard. Bastiano talked the whole time about the plants, their symbiosis with wild animals, the health benefits of eating in season, and the many different flavors. We wandered around the fields spotting, rubbing, sniffing, and nibbling on greens. Around 1 p.m., we assembled back at Bastiano’s hut where someone lit a fire to heat previously cooked lentils with fregola, a unique Sardinian round couscous-­ like durum wheat pasta. Some of the men assembled tables and benches from planks and chairs, and people shared the foods they had brought—some homemade, some purchased. There was homemade egg frittata with peas, fresh ricotta, Gruyère cheese, packaged prosciutto and salami, homemade pasta with asparagus, homemade pasta with wild greens, several kinds of red and white wine including Vernaccia and Malvasia, a cake, oranges, and more. Dishes of food and bottles of wine circulated around the table, and people helped themselves. They ate and drank with gusto, commented on tastes, chatted animatedly, and got to know each other in the positive social arena of commensality. The visit to the producer Bastiano brought people together in a convivial setting, strengthened ties between producers and consumers, and educated about tasty wild foods and the territorio that engendered them. All of this contributed to the activist potential of food and reflected Howes and Classen’s (2013: 5–6) claim

Figure 5.6  GAS wild herb-­gathering expedition near Barrali

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that “Our ways of sensing affect not only how we experience and engage with our environment, but also how we experience and engage with each other”—exactly what the wild herb-­gathering expedition tried to shape. Lucio Brughitta emphasized the broader goals of that event and all the work of the GAS: Food is the most political thing there is today. Food signifies autonomy, it signifies liberation, it signifies revolt against the multinationals that determine our food and our wallet. So no matter how small we [of the GAS] are, we are acting in an arena that is simultaneously economic and political. We buy from small producers who are cut out of the large-­scale distribution, and this is a relevant economic dimension but it is also a relevant political dimension because sustaining the families of our producers means sustaining our social life.

The GAS used taste and sociability to foster the economic goal of supporting small farmers, the political goal of forging solidarity between consumers and producers, and the personal goal of eating better food at better prices. The GAS deployed taste and the senses in diverse ways to attract members and grease the path to learning and change, demonstrating that, as Teil and Hennion (2004: 19) affirmed, “Taste is an activity and not a passive or determined state.” Taste was one part of the complex whole that food constituted: It was intimately involved in giving value to the territorio, the local farm economy, sociability, and changed consumption—important components of food democracy.

Conclusion Among Cagliari food advocates, taste and the senses in general provided an opening towards the “feeling, understanding, and knowing” that Gramsci deemed crucial to revolutionary praxis. For Sardinians, taste was embedded in place, family, labor practices, and culture. It engaged individuals in a holistic and social relationship to food. Howes and Classen (2013: 1) claimed, “The ways we use our senses, and the ways we create and understand the sensory world, are shaped by culture.” This raises the question whether taste is an equally powerful strategy and motivation to activism in other cultures besides Italy. Evidence of the different social salience of taste appears in Ochs, Pontecorvo, and Fasulo’s (1996) study of family meals in American middle-­class households in Los Angeles and Italian ones in Naples and Rome. They found that the Italians spoke about taste a great deal at meals, linked taste to pleasure, explicitly valued children’s gustatory preferences, and socialized children into an appreciation of taste as an expression of individual and family identity. North Americans’ table talk, in contrast, hardly dealt with taste at all and emphasized food’s nutritional content. Nor was taste an important concern among the Samburu pastoralists of Kenya studied by anthropologist Jon Holtzman (2009: 157). He commented on the “simplicity” of the cuisine and the “near-­total lack of epicurean sensibility in

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consumption,” reflected in the paucity of “Samburu taste vocabulary.”8 These cultural differences in the construction of taste suggest that it may vary greatly as a motivator to food activism. In France, for example, taste was very important and attitudes towards it were deeply embedded in place and culture. Wendy Leynse’s (2006, 2008) research on French school children’s socialization into their culture’s food habits confirmed the claims of Amy Trubek (2005), Marion Demossier (2011), Susan Terrio (2000), and others that taste mattered deeply in France, where it has served to buttress the local food and wine economy. Leynse (2008: 338–9) found that elementary education involved numerous formal and informal moments of teaching the links between food and “sensory pleasure,” “civilized mealtime sociability,” balanced and varied meals, local culinary practices, and terroir. Moreover, schools conveyed the belief that industrialization has produced “taste-­less food.” They implicitly supported a political economy based on the smallholder, and multifunctional farming espoused by the militant and influential French farmers’ federation, or Confédération Paysanne (Heller 2012). In Italy, fixating on taste sometimes led to uncomfortable excess. For example, the aforementioned eight-­course tomato dinner at Il Rubino restaurant had so much food that after the third course, people simply could not eat any more and only picked at the later courses. Diners lamented wasting food and losing the ability to appreciate taste. That dinner revealed tensions between valuing good food and being disgusted by excess. Another issue surrounding taste in food activism was the tendency to universalize notions of “good” tastes—notwithstanding the ample evidence that people make all kinds of conflicting gustatory judgments. What would happen if at the Slow Food caper tasting some people found the cheap globalized supermarket capers tastier than the local artisanal Selargius ones? The motivation to buy local would collapse, and would disagreements threaten the social solidarity engendered by shared “taste identities,” to use GAS president Brughitta’s term? This did not happen at the caper tasting, where disagreements contributed to the lively discussion. But geographers Alison Hayes-Conroy and Jessica Hayes-Conroy (2010) highlighted the alienating effects of Slow Food San Francisco’s imposition of universal tastes without regard to how they were embedded in race, class, and gender hierarchies that obscured cultural difference and erased minorities’ preferences. They wrote, “by not tapping into or, worse, eliminating the validity of already existing wisdom(s) in many bodies of color, Slow Food physically turns off many of these bodies to the possibility of feeling alternative foods in empowering ways” (Hayes-Conroy and Hayes-Conroy 2010: 2964). While this example shows the dangers of absolutist taste discourse, the case studies from Cagliari revealed ways that taste could be a channel for critical consciousness and food democracy. Sensory anthropology has showed how activists socially constructed and individually experienced taste in formal and informal public tastings and discussions. In the next chapter, we explore taste further by looking at the multiple ways restaurants contributed to changing people’s food habits.

Chapter 6 R estaurants : S ites of activism , local food, and taste - ­ma k ing

Introduction Restaurants are significant but understudied cultural institutions that merit a place in scholarship on food activism. Restaurant owners and chefs are potentially important food advocates because of their ability to project and practice resistant ideologies and identities through the food they serve and the ways they source it. They are key links in the chain between producers and consumers; they exert economic influence in choosing which products to buy, from whom, and at what price; and they exert cultural influence in their dishes. Moreover, restaurants can become places for building community and developing new practices, for example eating vegetarian, organic, or local. This chapter will describe three restaurants in Cagliari based on observation and interviews with their chefs/owners. They fell at various points on the continua of formality, price, longevity, ideology, oppositional politics, and commitment to local food. Together, they showed ways restaurants could participate in the alternative food movement and the challenges they faced. I will examine the restaurants along three axes. First, I will focus on how restaurants can serve as sites of food activism. They are public places where clients and proprietors can meet in pleasant sensory environments and communicate identity, encounter new foods, practice change, form community, and educate. The second axis of study is the role of restaurants in promoting local foods, that is, foods of the territorio, and in mediating ties between producers and consumers in establishing networks and markets. Third, I will discuss how restaurateurs are “taste-­makers,” and can display agency by affirming traditional or new dishes and ideologies in their daily practice.

Restaurants, ethnography, and activism There has been a steady trickle of social science studies of restaurants;1 nonetheless, anthropologists David Beriss and David Sutton (2007b) concluded they were under-­studied, a pity given their cultural importance. Their own edited volume

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(Beriss and Sutton 2007a) contributed several original ethnographic articles about restaurant labor, cuisine, and power in diverse cultures through examination of space, menu, provisioning, and work. In their informative introduction to that volume, Beriss and Sutton (2007b) suggested that restaurants enact ideologies of consumption, which gives them a potential role in food activism, illustrated by the few studies on this topic.2 Restaurants as sites of activism Restaurants’ adherence to a certain cuisine, cost, and decor can communicate beliefs and identities (Beriss and Sutton 2007b: 3). For example, Jennifer Hubbert (2007) found that “cultural revolution restaurants” in contemporary China erased the difficult past of deprivation and hunger by exalting abundant meals and decorating the walls with business cards of visitors to celebrate modern entrepreneurship. The fact that restaurants are “highly sensory environments” (Beriss and Sutton 2007b: 3), and usually places of relaxation, pleasure, and conviviality, enhances their ability to communicate and transform ideology. Restaurants are public spaces open to all that establish a sense of intimacy and belonging inside their walls (Sammells 2016). In this, they are like the nursery schools that Anne Allison (2013) studied to write “Japanese Mothers and Obentos: The Lunch Box as Ideological State Apparatus.” Allison brought into food studies Louis Althusser’s (2001) concept of power in capitalist societies, which can be usefully applied to restaurants. Althusser (2001: 92–6) distinguished the coercive power of the repressive state apparatus of government, police, armies, and the judiciary from the persuasive power of the ideological state apparatus carried out by the media, schools, religion, literature, family, and—we can add—restaurants. Through the ideological state apparatus’s ability, as Allison (2013: 155) put it, “of indoctrinating people into seeing the world a certain way and of accepting certain identities as their own within that world,” these institutions claim power “by ideology,” while those of the repressive state apparatus do so “by violence” (Althusser 2001: 97). By uncritically serving factory-­farmed beef, for example, restaurants uphold and foist on consumers’ hormone- and antibiotic-­laden meat produced through rainforest destruction, massive water consumption, and global inequality. Restaurants and chefs can oppose the ideological state apparatus by espousing vegetarianism or local food and concomitant beliefs in animal rights, sustainability, and food democracy. Such beliefs were manifest in the short-­lived Black Cat Café, locus of the “punk cuisine” studied from 1993 to 1998 by anthropologist Dylan Clark (2013). Punks operating and frequenting the Black Cat Café built a counter-­cultural community and politics while eating and conversing in its grungy, cluttered space. They condemned the agro-­industrial food system, its exploitation of the Global South, and its factory-­farmed, cash-­cropped, and processed food. They chose to source food from local farmers, backyard gardens, or dumpsters, where the food was cleansed of capitalist pollution, though not necessarily of other contaminants. For five years, the Black Cat acted as an oppositional space by feeding and educating a

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loose community of food rebels. This was similar to the weekly vegan dinner organized by the environmental NGO Gaia in Lisbon called Jantar Popular, or “People’s Dinner,” studied by Le Grand in 2009. Le Grand (2015) defined the dinner as a “Temporary Vegan Zone,” a liminal space where eating became a political act through the self-­conscious consumption of vegan food and where the eater was “temporarily free to experience an alternative food reality.”3 Restaurants and local food An important counter-­hegemonic initiative restaurants could undertake was to promote local food because it was more sustainable, had fewer environmental costs, and supported the regional economy and culture. Restaurants could be a key link between territorio, farmers, and consumers. Leslie Duram and Mary Cawley examined chefs’ efforts to source local food in Galway City, Ireland, where there was not a rich food culture—a sharp contrast to Cagliari. Duram and Cawley (2012: 16) concluded that restaurateurs could be important “in promoting the use of local foods and supporting producers,” yet they were understudied, a lacuna this chapter aims to redress. Michael Broadway (2015) built on the work of Rebecca Sims (2009, 2010) to study restaurants’ use of local food in Ireland’s one and only “Slow City,” Clonakilty. Like Duram and Cawley (2012), he found that restaurateurs had to be flexible and nimble in their food sourcing and respond to season, cost, customer preferences, and availability. Chefs practiced as necessary “the geographic stretching of local food” (Duram and Cawley 2012: 16) beyond a fifty- or hundred-­mile radius to include quality artisan products produced far afield in all of Ireland and even Europe. The Cagliari chefs/owners I studied were also flexible in their menus. They aimed to buy local, but also to maintain quality and diversity of offerings while keeping food costs down. They merited study because, as Duram and Cawley (2012: 16) affirmed, chefs’ “conceptualization of local food can influence con­ sumers’ perceptions, knowledge and geographical awareness.” Restaurants forging networks Restaurants could not only stimulate the local food economy, but also build relationships and networks with producers and consumers. They were a key force in Slow Food’s mission to promote “good, clean, and fair food” fostered through its best-­selling annual guidebook Osterie d’Italia (Belasco and Signoroni 2015), which reviewed the small, humble restaurants called osterie that served inexpensive, local, home-­style fare.4 For almost twenty years, Slow Food has published the guide featuring what its volunteer reviewers deem the best restaurants in every region of Italy serving meals for less than 35 euros. According to Slow Food Cagliari member Luca Galassi, the reviews coordinator for all of Sardinia, Osterie d’Italia has been important in making Slow Food known and in stimulating business for restaurants, a claim supported by Siniscalchi’s (2014a) study of three Slow Food-­affiliated osterie in diverse regions of Italy.

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Slow Food tightened ties with chefs in 2009 by establishing “The Alliance between Italian Cooks and Slow Food Presidia” (L’Alleanza tra i cuochi italiani e i Presidi Slow Food). Together, the guidebook and the Alliance have aimed to promote restaurants sympathetic to Slow Food, to give attention and markets to presidia foods, and to extend Slow Food networks (Siniscalchi 2014a). Slow Food claimed that, although it wanted its work with restaurants to reap positive economic rewards, its foremost goal was not “to make money” but to open up “new political spaces” and “expand the base of the movement” (Siniscalchi 2014a: 81, my translation). Although the chef/owners I interviewed in Cagliari were not affiliated with Slow Food, they too recognized the political and economic significance of forging networks with local producers. Restaurateurs as taste-­makers Restaurateurs were both literally and metaphorically “taste-­makers,” as Duram and Cawley (2012: 16) noted in their study of local food restaurants in Galway City, Ireland. Chefs could display agency in their choices about the food they sourced and the dishes they cooked.5 Those I interviewed drew on their training and inspiration to shape raw materials into delicious meals, and they aimed to delight the senses, create a community of diners and producers, earn a living, and transmit a more or less oppositional ideology. I conducted participant-­observation and interviews with four proprietors/ chefs in three Cagliari eating establishments: Two restaurants and a gastronomia, a delicatessen selling cooked food for take-­out or eat-­in. In the following pages, I will discuss each of the restaurants in terms of the three axes of analysis: As sites of food activism, as purveyors of local food, and as taste-­makers capable of effecting change to the food system. They represented varying commitment to and enactment of food system change and showed the opportunities and difficulties in this sector.

Chef Stefano Deidda and Dal Corsaro restaurant In 2011, I examined Dal Corsaro (At the Corsair), a traditional white tablecloth restaurant run by the Deidda family since 1962. I interviewed twenty-­nine-year-­ old family member Stefano Deidda who had recently taken over as head chef after training at the renowned Alma cooking school in Colorno (Parma), Italy, and apprenticing at several distinguished Michelin-­starred locales.6 He aimed to revitalize his restaurant’s cuisine and feature local food to the extent possible without sacrificing quality or innovation—all of course while succeeding financially. Chef Stefano Deidda’s paternal grandfather founded Dal Corsaro and developed it into an important Cagliari restaurant that hosted celebrities from all over the world. Deidda’s parents ran the restaurant but eschewed the kitchen and discouraged him from pursuing his passion to be a chef. Eventually he prevailed,

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Figure 6.1  Stefano Deidda at Dal Corsaro restaurant

went to Alma cooking school, finished first in his class, and went on to win several prizes as one of Italy’s foremost young chefs, for example the Premio Scacchi Chef Emergente 2009 and the Guida Sole 24 Ore Chef Emergente 2010.7 In 2009, he returned to Cagliari after his studies and apprenticeships in mainland Italy and took over the kitchen of the family restaurant. While Deidda’s foremost goal was to make a successful business by creating delicious and sensorially rich food that respected tradition, innovation, and the culinary arts, he also wanted to support local producers, link them to consumers, and contribute to a better food system. Deidda’s cooking aimed for “the highest quality and respect for the identity of the territorio.” He recognized that establishing a community of diners who would appreciate it was a precious and precarious endeavor because “accepting food from someone who offers it to you is absolutely an act of trust.” Clients trusted the chef

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to produce tasty, appealing, and hygienic food. As “transformers of raw materials,” Deidda said, chefs were an important link between producers and consumers. Deidda was committed to local food as long as it was the highest quality but would not hesitate to source foods from elsewhere in Italy to fulfill his goals of culinary excellence. He said, “I have the duty of choosing the best product, so if our fish is the best, I will use our fish. If the Sardinian lobster is, as everyone knows, the best, I’ll use the Sardinian lobster, but when products of other regions are better I won’t necessarily defend the Sardinian product . . . I’ll use another.” He mentioned many typical Sardinian foods that he did use in his cooking: The prized dried mullet fish eggs (bottarga di muggine), a stretched-­curd cows’ milk cheese called casizolu, beef from the Sardo Modican red steer, ravioli stuffed with potato filling (culurgiones), a couscous-­like pasta (fregolina sarda), Villagrande prosciutto, and Sardinian thorny artichokes (carciofi spinosi). But he encountered problems of dependability and accessibility due to poor distribution networks, a complaint echoed by several other interviewees and an impediment to the local food movement in Sardinia. Chef Deidda shaped his menu based on what the territorio offered, what was in season, and inspiration. He commented at length on the importance of using local products: I believe that food tells the story of a territorio in the sense that certain products come from a region and . . . are determined by the climate, the territorio, the flora, and the fauna of that region, and so they reflect the configuration, the morphology, and the identity of the region. I believe that products that contain an artisanal knowledge, a knowledge of the techniques, what is called knowledge of the hands, are really interesting because they communicate a cross section of a way of life that today is unfortunately being forgotten . . . For example, filindeus,8 an extraordinary pasta made in Lula, in the Barbagia area. Because of the difficulty of making it and the patience and care needed, it is one of those pastas that are unfortunately disappearing. So clearly these artisanal realities must be defended, protected, and helped, because the techniques are on the road to extinction. If we lose these techniques, lose these realities, if they are not handed down from generation to generation, we are going to lose some of our identity, our culture . . . With all the difficulties they face, small producers need to be helped to continue their work, . . . so that all this is not lost and on the contrary becomes ever stronger.

One of the ways Stefano Deidda maintained simultaneously his commitment to the territorio and to the highest standards of his profession was to find new ways of cooking traditional products. He gave the example of goat rennet (caglio di capretto), made by killing the kid after it had nursed, removing the stomach full of milk, and letting the stomach enzymes ferment the milk into a creamy, tart rennet that was the coagulant to make cheese but that could also be used in cooking: I find it really interesting to make new protagonists out of Sardinian products that have gone into oblivion like for example . . . goat rennet, a kind of cheese-­

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like paste that has a really piquant, really strong taste . . . It has been difficult to legitimize it, to enable others to appreciate it, especially those from outside Sardinia, because there were no [palatable] dishes, and eaten by itself it was too strong. So the idea was this: to recuperate this product . . . and make it a new protagonist, put the spotlight on it in a new way, in restaurant dishes that propose a different cuisine—modern and also innovative in the pairings. So I used the goat rennet with fregolina sarda, cooked like risotto, with some pennyroyal and raw red shrimp.

This recipe was an example of how chef Deidda was a “taste-­maker,” bringing local products like goat rennet and fregolina into broader use by cooking them in creative ways that enhanced their appeal, educated consumers, and stimulated the local economy. While he took inspiration at times from home-­style dishes and modes of preparation, he said that “our recipes are always absolutely original, and they reflect the personality and philosophy of the cook . . . They express our taste and aesthetics.” Crucial to every dish prepared by chef Deidda was its sensory complexity. He said: When I plan a dish . . . I try to stimulate as many senses as possible, because I believe that obviously taste plays its part, one of the most important parts, but not the only one . . . So [I stimulate] the sense of touch with temperature differences in the same plate, or differences in consistency to render the dish more complex and interesting. Or the olfactory sense . . . the dish should announce its characteristics and its complexity even before putting a bite in the mouth. I hold absolutely that the more senses a recipe manages to stimulate, the more it becomes interesting and complex and the more it has something to say.

Chef Deidda lamented how “fast-­food and the agro-­industrial food system flattened tastes,” and he countered with artful dishes to educate consumers “to appreciate food, to know food, to know its characteristics, to know how to evaluate it, to understand what is quality and what is not.” This goal of educating consumers to know and consequently choose better food was widespread throughout alternative food initiatives. Deidda affirmed: The clientele can be educated, it can be educated in taste, it can be educated to appreciate particular foods and the quality of food. In this the chef succeeds if he has the opportunity to tell his clients about the nature of a food, its production, where it comes from, how it is realized, what is its history, so that the client has all the instruments to evaluate autonomously if that food is a good food or not a good food, above all for its taste, for the palate, and for its complexity.

Chef Stefano Deidda aimed to shape the cuisine of his family’s long-­standing restaurant towards innovative and tasty food that reflected the Sardinian territorio and educated clients. While his mission was not as radical as that of the vegetarian

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restaurant featured in the next section, he nonetheless supported local foods and consumer awareness of their provenance and economic implications.

Lara Ferraris, Maurizio Serra, and Terra di Mezzo vegetarian restaurant Lara Ferraris and Maurizio Serra founded Terra di Mezzo (Middle Earth), Cagliari’s first vegetarian restaurant, in 1999, when they were twenty-­six-year-­old university students. They imagined a space to offer vegetarian cuisine and to educate

Figure 6.2  Maurizio Serra at Terra di Mezzo restaurant

Figure 6.3  Lara Ferraris at Terra di Mezzo restaurant

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consumers about it. Their broad mission was to promote respect for the earth, sustainability, animal rights, and local vegetarian food. When I interviewed them in 2011, they were both thirty-­eight years old and had been running Terra di Mezzo for twelve years. They recounted many difficulties but remained committed to their vegetarian mission. Chef and co-­owner Lara Ferraris described their decision to open the restaurant: It was Maurizio’s idea. It had been churning in his mind for a while, and one day when we were taking a walk he said, “What do you think about us trying this?” I replied, “It would be beautiful.” Here in Cagliari there was not a single vegetarian locale . . . and so he thought it would be great to have a place where vegetarians could come to eat and other people could come see that vegetarian cuisine is delicious . . . And so the idea was born like that, partly as a game, and then we threw ourselves into it and saw what we could do, and the years have passed.

Ferraris and Serra ran the restaurant first as a married couple and then, after they divorced, as amicable business partners. Ferraris was the fresh food purchaser and main chef, assisted by one other full-­time female chef. Serra was the front-­ofhouse manager in the self-­serve buffet-­style restaurant where he seated people, gave them plates, got them drinks, and made sure the buffet table was full. He also handled orders of supplies, dry goods, wine, and beer. Terra di Mezzo had thirty seats, just the right size, Serra said, to make a modest living for him, Ferraris, and their other chef. On the several occasions I ate at Terra di Mezzo, it was usually quite busy, and there was always a pleasant buzz of conversation softened by gentle background music. Their main aim was to spread the philosophy and practice of vegetarianism, but they also had to make a living. To reduce the expense of paying waiters and the risk of waste from the à la carte menu, in 2006 they made “a leap into the void” and transformed Terra di Mezzo into a buffet-­style, mainly lunch restaurant. For 15 euros, customers could serve themselves as much as they wanted from a diverse array of vegetarian dishes, for example, pasta with vegetables, sautéed potatoes and squash, lentil soup, hummus, salad with borage flowers, and seitan (wheat gluten) in white wine. This was the same price Dal Corsaro charged for a prix fixe lunch—a two-­course tasty but small meal. For co-­proprietors Ferraris and Serra, ethical vegetarianism, spiritual environmentalism, and networks with territorio producers were at the heart of their mission. Serra said: “Let’s say it was not then and still is not now a business decision . . . In reality, it is a decision for nature. Once we decided to open a restaurant, I could only do a vegetarian restaurant, and I did it hoping to be able to draw other people into an ethical choice.” Serra explained his ultimate philosophical goal: Our project begins from an animal rights perspective but also a spiritual one . . . Above and beyond the animal rights, ethical, ecological discourse, we have tried to convey a more profound discourse tied to the soul, tied to the evolving journey

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Italian Food Activism in Urban Sardinia of the human spirit that maybe today is no longer what it once was, and so our needs are not the same as they once were. For example the need to eat meat is no longer what it was a long time ago . . . Our goal is not simply a vegetarian diet, that is just part of the evolving journey towards doing ever less harm.

At Terra di Mezzo, this idealistic spiritual goal was tied to local food. Chef Ferraris said, “All our vegetables are absolutely local. The producers are from nearby and we always try for zero kilometers.” She cooked seasonal food from local ingredients supplied mainly by two purveyors. One was the Terranuova farming cooperative in Siliqua, a Seventh Day Adventist community committed to vegetarianism as part of their religion (see Chapter 8); Ferraris admired them for farming “with the spirit of their convictions.” The other produce supplier was Matteo Floris, an organic farmer and distributor (see Chapter 8). Ferraris said, “he is a person who really believes in what he does. So for me these two suppliers are fundamental stable touchstones in our business.” That stability, however, was undermined by the constant difficulties faced by small farmers (discussed in Chapters 4 and 8). Ferraris emphasized her philosophical network-­building reasons for buying local: The producers from whom we buy are people that we hold dear because they are people who do things with our same spirit. Thus even if another producer arrives and tells me, “I will supply you these things at a lower price,” I don’t do it, because I believe in our producers’ work and I prefer to continue to help them. Moreover, I know that farming is a really hard job, and thus I know the spirit with which they do things, and so for me this is an important network. I believe in them a lot, and so I prefer to buy from them.

Lara Ferraris practiced a “solidarity economy” (Miller 2010) where the goal was not simply profit but rather fostering the wellbeing of a network of producers, an idea addressed further in Chapter  8. Maurizio Serra shared his ex-­wife’s philosophical commitment to like-­minded local producers and also emphasized the quality of Sardinian products and the economic and social benefits of building networks. They sourced locally most of the time but, for various reasons, like the Irish restaurateurs studied by Duram and Cawley (2012) and Broadway (2015), they sometimes had to compromise that ideal. Serra disclosed: To the extent possible we seek our raw materials from zero kilometers. Sometimes we succeed in cooking the whole meal from zero kilometers, letting people know, publicizing it. Other times, whether to vary the products and the menu, or due to the availability of products (because we like to follow the seasons and cycles of nature), and because this is a commercial activity, we have to compromise and say,“OK, we’ll get this product from mainland Italy (la penisola) rather than from Sardinia (l’isola).” But all the greens, fruit, olive oil, drinks, and so on, they are all ours.

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Like Ferraris, Serra valued the social relationships with local producers as well as the quality of their products and sought those who were organic in practice if not through the certification process, which some renounced because it was long and costly. He bought the restaurant’s liqueurs from a local cooperative of “great people” who eschewed chemical agriculture, and he procured wines from a few different organic producers whose efforts he explicitly wanted to support: It’s right to give more space to these [organic] producers who aim for non-­ contamination. A wine can be excellent, in Sardinia we have some highly prized wines . . . but it can’t be denied that these wines are produced by an agriculture that is still too full of poisons. So I think it’s right to support the others . . . who are really paying attention to not contaminating.

Serra used the mantle of local food to offer an alternative to the omnipresent meat-­based diet in Cagliari. He spoke of a tourist he met who had searched all over the city for meatless dishes and concluded that “Sardinians put pork everywhere, even in ice cream!” But Serra argued: It is not true that typical Sardinian cuisine has to be centered on pork and that kind of cooking. We have so many exceptionally good products of the earth, and I think we have the best organic artichokes in the world—they are our typical products. We have exceptional grain products made here, like fregola, which we use. We are able to create a typical Sardinian cuisine without using animals, this is guaranteed. I am also certain that many dishes gain rather than lose [without meat]—they gain in taste, flavor, everything.

In the vision of Maurizio Serra and Lara Ferraris, “typical Sardinian cuisine” and local food went hand-­in-glove with vegetarianism, and they reinforced each other, but at the same time vegetarianism necessitated innovation to restructure some classic recipes into a meatless form while achieving high standards of sensory appeal essential to any restaurant’s success, especially one aiming to introduce an entirely new cuisine. Chef Ferraris said, we make maloreddus, . . . the typical pasta, there is no problem, you can prepare them many ways, for example, the classic maloreddus alla campidanese, the ones eaten in Cagliari with sausage. Obviously here we do not make them with sausage, however, we can make them with a seitan sauce, so we can always adapt the recipe to our cuisine.

The senses played a key role in hooking clients and attracting them to the food and the philosophy behind it. Serra said: So, the senses . . . for the clientele that we have, and for restaurant clients in general, I think they are a predominant aspect. That’s why it is important to educate . . . precisely through people’s senses, hence to draw them in with a

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Serra and Ferraris were “taste-­makers” just as Chef Stefano Deidda was, although their premises were different. Serra verbalized his efforts to use the restaurant to effect change: We created this place, simply proposing what we know, what we are, what we were even then, that is lovers of this [vegetarian] cooking, supporters of non-­ violent food. We had the idea of involving other people in an indirect manner, not by making propaganda in the plaza, but by proposing food in a restaurant. So people come, taste, and maybe even reflect and realize that in their week they can eat [vegetarian] even just once if they want to and reduce the damage, even on a global level. If everyone made a choice like this, little by little meat consumption would decline with repercussions on the economic system, and on so many things . . ., on health obviously, but on agriculture itself, and on everything. So this all came to life from the desire to be able to share with others, but since we are very shy people, this solution of the restaurant was the easiest for us. We have not ever in all these years had to turn to many words . . . to do all this, to carry it forward.

Educating clients was an essential aspect of Terra di Mezzo’s purpose, just as it was for Dal Corsaro. Serra explained: We are really trying to educate, as if it were a small mission. Forgive my presumption, but I say it in the most neutral and humble manner possible, and I realize that as much as this mission is in my heart, it is important that someone is doing it, and when we began, no one was doing it, and no one has since done it, and so we believe that we cannot abandon it, even if more than once we have been on the verge of quitting because of the difficulties. However, from my point of view it is not just any old activity, but it is an activity that has an aim that goes above and beyond money.

Serra articulated a perspective that reflected the concepts of economies of sentiment and solidarity to be discussed further in Chapter 8—valuing vegetarian ideals, sustainability, and relationships with like-­minded folks over profit. Terra di Mezzo restaurant propagated an alternative menu. In a peaceful and pleasant environment, clients saw, smelled, chose, and consumed tasty vegetarian food and with it a new way of eating and thinking. Chef Ferraris put it thus: “Our goal is to have people know another kind of food, to make them understand that you can be vegetarian and healthy . . . We hope that this serves to educate people, that it tempts people to inform themselves and yes, to educate themselves in some way.” Terra di Mezzo provided a congenial site for food activism and education. It supported a

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few small local organic producers and served fresh and healthy vegetables in old and new ways to expand clients’ sense of the possible. Although not exclusively vegetarian, Il Rifugio dei Sapori shared many of Terra di Mezzo’s goals and ideals.

Paola Sanna and Il Rifugio dei Sapori In 2015, sociologist Domenica Farinella introduced me to the recently opened Rifugio dei Sapori (Refuge of Flavors), a small delicatessen (gastronomia) with about a dozen seats, which sold cooked food for eat-­in or take-­out. Proprietor-­ chef-founder Paola Sanna used local ingredients to prepare tasty traditional and innovative dishes—like lasagna, meatballs, sautéed cabbage, couscous, and Thai rice with vegetables—while striving to attain where possible zero-­kilometer

Figure 6.4  Paola Sanna at Il Rifugio dei Sapori delicatessen

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sourcing, traceability, support for the local agricultural economy, and a welcoming community space. Thirty-­nine-year-­old Sanna opened Il Rifugio dei Sapori in June 2013 after two years of preparation. She had written a business plan, acquired two small business loans, found the locale, completely restructured it to get it up to code, bought second-­hand kitchen equipment and furnishings, and defined the cuisine. Born in Nuraminis, fifteen miles north of Cagliari, she left Sardinia in 1993 at age nineteen to work in mainland Italy, where she learned how to cook in restaurant kitchens in Emilia-Romagna. After several years of experience on the mainland, she returned to Cagliari to cook in a couple of restaurants while she developed her dream of opening a gastronomia based on home-­style cuisine, transparency of ingredients, and trust. Sanna’s goals for the gastronomia were to realize her culinary creativity and philosophy, to earn enough to survive while having a sane life, to create reliable networks with clients and suppliers, and to support local production. She said, “I wanted to realize this project to give voice to southern Sardinia, to what is for me a resource, agriculture. We have so much land that could be allocated to people to carry out a more intelligent agriculture compared to what was born in the 1970s”— the larger-­scale chemical and machine-­based industrial agriculture that swept away smallholders. Running a gastronomia was critical to her mission and business plan. Having worked in many restaurants, Sanna knew that cooks had a hard and hectic life, working evenings and nights with little vacation and out of rhythm with friends’ patterns of socializing. She said, “My dream is to work humanely and have time to enjoy other things.” Running a gastronomia enabled her to work daytimes, be her own boss, and express herself freely in the kitchen. In spite of the fact that gastronomie had once flourished, they were in decline in 2013, but Sanna believed they were a viable alternative to fast-­food and sandwich shops (paninoteche). “I knew that lots of people wanted this—to feel comfortable in an informal setting and to eat a good meal without a lot of frills.” She aimed to bring back the typical gastronomia dishes like lasagna and eggplant parmesan, but in a new form, with creative cooking and traceability. She put it thus, “If you want potato croquettes, I’ll make them with fresh potatoes and I’ll tell you which variety of potato I’m using and I’ll also tell you where it was grown [and who grew it].” Reintroducing foods of the territorio to Cagliari consumers was a key goal for chef Sanna, as was forging communities of trust between consumers, producers, and herself. Part of her business plan was to develop ties with local farmers to supply her with produce. At first, it was hard to find the right producers because “trust is no small thing.” She had to be sure of her suppliers so she could stand behind their foods. “I am the one who is exposing myself . . . I am the one who gives you security about what you are eating, and I absolutely must surround myself with people who give me the certainty that I am expressing the truth.” After two years, Sanna was happy to have established an excellent relationship with a young farmer, Stefano Galletta, introduced to her by a mutual friend. He was another example of the return to farming (ricontadinazione) discussed earlier.

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According to Sanna, Galletta gave up trying for a teaching career after repeated dead ends, and so he bought land and began farming. He sought help from aging farmers who remembered how to compost, fallow the land, build soil, and grow heirloom varieties in danger of extinction. Chef Sanna said that as soon as she met Galletta they hit it off and organized a planting calendar to produce the quantity and quality of seasonal products she needed in her restaurant: “from June to November there are all the vegetables—eggplant, zucchini, tomatoes, and so on, in such abundance that sometimes I cry, ‘help!’ Then beginning in January, there is the whole world of cabbage which is quite vast, and then wild chard, borage, everything from the fields.” Sanna said that Galletta shared her commitment to “total transparency for good and ill, in the emotions, in everything to do with running this business.” Sanna’s philosophy and mission was to “give voice to the territorio,” and to maintain traceability so that clients knew that the food they were eating came from Ussana, seventeen miles from Cagliari: There Stefano Galletta grows the chard, zucchini, eggplant, and so on that Rifugio dei Sapori uses in its dishes. The same [transparency] for beef. It comes from Villaputzu, 100 kilometers [60 miles] away . . . I really like to give voice to the territorio. I want all producers with a certain sensibility to have voice, space, expression—it is so important. There are a lot of farmers undertaking interesting activities but they face terrible difficulties competing in the agro-­industrial food system. I want to use my work to give them a space, absolutely.

Paola Sanna did not want to support just any local producers, however, but those who shared her “same ethics.” She gave the example of the only wine she served, a certified organic red wine from nearby Nurallao called Santu Teru, which she chose because, I understood immediately that its producer was a marvelous person . . . The wine is delicious and he and his family are delicious . . . I am very demanding about human relations, this is true. I need to surround myself with people I can trust blindly. Little by little I am doing this.

Paola Sanna wanted her foods to be not only local, tasty, and from trusted producers, but also to be priced within reach of the widest possible clientele and thus to project a welcoming egalitarian space: “I want everyone to feel comfortable, everyone to be able to eat a meal here, to be able to eat with what they can spend. So I have tried to invent dishes that work for everyone.” Customers could examine the cooked dishes arrayed in the display case—for example, lasagna, sliced roast beef, couscous, sautéed zucchini, or roast potatoes—and select just how much they wanted of each, paying by weight, and filling a plate with delicious food for 7–10 euro (approximately US $8–11 in 2015). Sanna’s goal of creating community in the space of her restaurant was reflected in its very name “rifugio” or “refuge” (also “haven” or “sanctuary”), which

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conveyed her desire to have a warm, hospitable, restorative space. “For me,” she said, “ ‘rifugio’ is a magic word. I love the mountain rifugio, a place where you rest after hiking or herding animals. It is a warm place, small and essential, with a special energy.” Sanna explicitly wanted her restaurant to be a refuge for everyone, including socially marginalized people: All kinds of people come here and I love that. There are old people whom I love and who are important figures . . . They can come here and share a table with others and have the chance to live well and serenely, to laugh and joke and be themselves . . . There is always an exchange. It’s really important to me that old people come here, especially women, because women of that generation have a hard time finding a place to have a glass of wine, especially in a provincial city like Cagliari.

Sanna’s goal was to use her restaurant to establish community through commensality: Sharing food is a moment of conviviality, of union . . . it’s a very important moment of love, and I like the idea that people feel this through my food, I want to express a lot of love . . . I like exchange in all its forms, I really like it . . . Sharing feelings, maybe through a story, an anecdote, a smile, yes, human relationships are based on exchange, and this is an important touchstone in my life, I live it intensely, it is also like this with my clients. I feel a reciprocal esteem, and I’m surrounded by it. People a lot like me have found their way here.

As mentioned above, Paola Sanna chose to open a gastronomia, even against difficult financial odds, because it allowed her free creative expression as a cook, something very important to her. “You cannot work for others in this job— you have to be free to express yourself. If you make things because someone tells you to, in my opinion you are not a cook. You have to be free to express yourself . . . you will die if you work for others.” She echoed chef Deidda when she said, “It is a very creative job.” Her shop was small and thus financially nimble. Sanna did all the administrative work herself and all the cooking, with the help of an assistant chef who worked thirty hours a week and whom Sanna hoped to make full-­time as soon as finances permitted. The shop was small so overhead expenses were relatively modest, and she had purchased much of her equipment second-­hand to minimize her costs. Because she was totally in charge of the day’s menu, Sanna could work with the seasonal local ingredients she purchased at good prices from her regular producers and on occasion from the San Benedetto market, a large two-­storey covered daily retail market in Cagliari with nearly three hundred vendors selling meat, fish, vegetables, cured meats, and cheeses from near and far.9 Each day, she constructed the menu depending on what was locally available and what she felt like cooking and posted it on Rifugio’s Facebook page.10 Her culinary philosophy, she said, was based on “home-­style cooking techniques” as well as “techniques tied to my

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profession . . . I love home cooking, I love those tastes, I love that the client can recognize the ingredients, and I really love the lightness of the dishes.” In 2015, Rifugio was open five full days a week, a half day on Sunday, and was closed Monday. By summer 2016, Sanna was able to reduce her hours to Tuesday to Friday, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., and Saturday and Sunday, 10 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. Each day, Sanna cooked enough for one hundred people using the same methods her “mother used in cooking for eight,” informed by the professional chef ’s skills and training. In addition to preparing any special orders, she made two trays each of three different kinds of lasagna. She made many rice dishes because “I love rice”— 3 to 4 kilos of brown rice, 3 to 4 kilos of Thai white rice, the same of couscous, and “an infinity of vegetables”—all told, an average of 25 to 30 different dishes, which expressed her “love of variety.” She even got recipes from clients and cooked their dishes, “like a marvelous recipe for potato fritters” that a young woman from Hungary gave her. “There’s a constant exchange with the clients,” she said, which energized her cooking. Chef Sanna not only loved trying new recipes from all over the world, but she also wanted to feature some of the wonderful Sardinian recipes of her childhood that were disappearing. She mentioned burrida made from dogfish boiled until smooth and buttery and dressed with a sauce of chicken livers, vinegar, and walnuts; coniglio su chiccu—rabbit cooked with a sauce of vinegar, olives, and sundried tomatoes; and scabeccio, an ancient Persian recipe the Arabs brought to Spain, where it was called escabeche, and the Spanish brought to Sardinia, where in sardo it was called scabecciu (Fancello 2016). Sanna said that in Cagliari, fisherfolk made scabeccio by frying all the little fish they caught but could not eat fresh. “Then they soaked them in a sauce of onion, vinegar, and often raisins . . . and it came out great. But no one makes it anymore.” Rifugio dei Sapori and the other two restaurants discussed in this chapter aimed not only to be successful businesses but also, with varying emphasis, to promote forgotten or innovative dishes made with local ingredients, to support small farmers, create communities of trust, and promote sustainability.11 These efforts contributed to food democracy. However, the restaurateurs faced many challenges in balancing their ideals with economic and political constraints.

Challenges faced by alternative restaurants According to the interviewees, one big challenge faced by alternative and, for that matter, all Italian restaurants was the lack of governmental support. Stefano Deidda lamented: “Unfortunately, the category pertaining to chefs and restaurateurs is left to itself, in the sense that in Italy it is not valued as it should be. In addition to being a fundamental link in the country’s economy, I think the restaurant sector is also a fundamental part of the identity and culture of the country.” But, he said, not only were there no government provisions favoring restaurants, there seemed to be many that harmed them. The Conferescenti trade organization confirmed this perspective on the restaurant sector when it said, “There are many difficulties as

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shown by the high percentage of businesses that fail in the first few years. The heaviest burden are the taxes, which . . . are particularly exorbitant for restaurants and bars.”12 Maurizio Serra of Terra di Mezzo agreed: The difficulties we face are principally due to a system that does not help, for the entire Italian system does not help us . . . Dealing on a daily basis for twelve years with a system that tries to weaken you until you reach a point where you say, so much effort for so little? That’s the problem. That’s why so many give up—here restaurants open and close one after the other, one after the other. It’s hard. It’s a very complicated sector with many branches that have lots of consequences. Giving food to people is not a simple thing, you have to pay attention to a thousand things, you are hyper-­regulated, and the clients control you too. It’s not like selling souvenirs—this activity touches people a lot more closely and thus is more complicated . . . In addition, restaurants, as an activity, as a category, are not sustained from above, on the contrary, we are constantly weakened as if their objective was to close us down, to make us die.

Paola Sanna described her own travails in opening her delicatessen: there was the whole bureaucratic process which was hugely long . . . At city hall there are fine people . . . but nothing works . . . There is disorganization . . . There are all the health regulations, . . . and I had to redo the electrical system because since 2009 it has been obligatory to conform to the new standards . . . The costs were sky-­high and it took forever.

She found diverse ways to reduce costs: Buying used equipment, getting volunteer help from friends and family to paint and prepare the space, postponing payments when possible, and even recycling her grandparents’ old wine barrels, which a young man with a business called “The Impossible” converted into tables for her and deferred payment until she got on her feet. She said, “I had so many people who helped me with gestures like that.” But establishing trust with consumers, suppliers, and other food advocates was a constant concern. Paola Sanna described the difficulties starting her restaurant because people did not believe in her, especially banks, but even friends. Maurizio Serra articulated the challenges of building broader networks: We have real collaborations with some groups . . ., however it could be much more . . . Maybe this is just something Sardinian, something typical of Sardinia— we tend to act on our own. We create few synergies. Maybe it’s because we are an island, a physical island and an island in mentality. There exist so many alternative realities, some with an important ethical stamp, whether in terms of animal rights, or ecology, and we could create a real network of strength around all these realities, but it barely exists . . . So we just act directly with individuals rather than in a network.

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Terra di Mezzo chef Lara Ferraris lamented rising costs and small profit margins. Because we are a very small operation, there are many difficulties in paying the bills and the taxes and squaring the accounts. Yes, we have clients, but in this period of economic crisis [in 2011] we are experiencing a decline in numbers but prices are going up, so we have to stay attentive and pay what we have to. These are the main difficulties—material obstacles, in short.

In her study of Slow Food-­affiliated restaurants called osterie, Valeria Siniscalchi (2014a: 78) posed the question of whether restaurateurs were “businesspeople or militants” (commerçants ou militants). The ones in my study were both. Whereas Deidda had a modest commitment to local food and a muted sense of food activist politics, Sanna was outspoken about forging a more democratic food system grounded in the territorio, and Ferraris and Serra were militant about vegetarianism. They all had to be businesspeople to make sure their restaurants survived to carry on their mission. Like all restaurateurs, they faced the challenges of long hours, high personnel expenses, fluctuations in clientele, irregular cash flow, low profit margins, onerous taxes, and waste. Ferraris and Serra took the leap of making Terra di Mezzo buffet-­style and succeeded with this more nimble and cost-­effective strategy. Sanna combated the same challenges by choosing the gastronomia format, and Stefano Deidda by opening next door to the elegant and pricey Dal Corsaro a more casual restaurant called Fork, which had a fixed-­price 15 euro lunch and relatively modest dinner prices to attract a broader swath of diners. All tried to keep costs down by buying locally and selectively, and all faced challenges of maintaining dependable and reliable sourcing. In their study of local food restaurants in Ireland, geographers Leslie Duram and Mary Cawley (2012: 23) recommended other measures to help alternative restaurants: Certification and labeling of local foods, government assistance to link small farmers to restaurants, building a formal local food network, certification of restaurants that sourced locally, and education about fair trade to help chefs source products unavailable locally (like coffee) from quality artisan producers. Such initiatives were not happening in Cagliari where restaurateurs were on their own, but one arena where government was taking an active food advocacy role was in the farm-­to-school program, which is the topic of the next chapter.

Chapter 7 C ritical food education : place , T aste , and communit y

Introduction Education was fundamental to food activism in disseminating new information, approaches, and behaviors. Informal education was ongoing—for example, restaurateurs teaching about traceability, GAS members learning about olive oil, urban gardeners showing each other permaculture techniques, and vintners offering wines to taste. This chapter will focus on a formal educational initiative in the Medio Campidano province, thirty miles from Cagliari, called “In the Country to Learn” (Satu Po Imparai)—involving schools, teaching farms, and LAORE, the Sardinian Regional Agency for Agricultural Development. I interviewed two LAORE employees involved with the project, the principal of a participating school, and two owners/managers of participating farms. The chapter explores how these food educators described their goals, actions, and challenges, and it reflects upon the role of education in advancing food democracy. Food education was multifaceted. It was never just about food, but was always connected to other issues including the environment, nutrition, economics, and agriculture. Pedagogies and learning pathways were multiple and diverse, both intellectual and corporeal, just as Jubas (2016) found in her study of critical food shopping.1 Education took place not only through debates, workshops, and lectures, but also through laboratories, tastings, and site visits. This chapter pulls together themes introduced earlier in the book by showing how education focused on foods of the territorio, on teaching through taste, and on renewing community and culture. It shows how these themes were powerful rallying cries but also potentially exclusionary and limiting.

Critical food education Education in food activism shares much with a tradition of critical pedagogy inspired by Karl Marx, Antonio Gramsci, and Paulo Freire. I define critical food education as a process of raising consciousness about the world of food, what Freire (2007) called concientización. It takes place through what Marx (1997: 212)

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called “relentless criticism of all existing conditions.” In the Third Thesis on Feuerbach, Marx wrote, “circumstances are changed by men and . . . it is essential to educate the educator himself.” This, he said, constituted “revolutionary practice” (Marx and Engels 1970: 121).2 This dialectical process of learning and teaching for change is at the heart of critical food education, which aims for “social justice, equality and solidarity” (Lanas and Zembylas 2015: 34). Critical food education ran all through the Cagliari alternative food sector. As Slow Food member Carla Marcis put it, “Education is fundamental to changing people’s habits and purchases.” But did education work? Many scholars have questioned the efficacy of what Julie Guthman (2008b) called the “if they only knew” premise—the belief that new knowledge would automatically lead to new behaviors. Scholars have noted the grounding of such beliefs in neoliberal ideology placing responsibility for change in individuals and ignoring the structural forces and institutionalized race, class, and gender hierarchies that constrained choice and limited action.3 This chapter hopes to cast light on the potential and limitations of education in Cagliari food activism. Critical food education aimed to foster knowledge and reflection about the global food system; about taste, local food, and quality products; about shopping as economic power; about the ills of factory farming and plight of small farmers; and about the multiple connections between food and the environment, history, and culture. One issue, however, that was largely missing from Sardinian critical food education, and in much of the alternative food movement discourse, was labor. Deborah Barndt (2013) underscored that education about the conditions of farm laborers and food-­processing workers rarely occurred in food justice movements,4 and in Cagliari education about farm workers, and particularly the increasing numbers of migrant farm workers, was largely absent. Even Slow Food, which highlights indigenous and family farmers and the important role of producers in the food system, says little about migrant farm laborers. Three themes characterized to a greater or lesser degree the informal and formal educational efforts I witnessed in Sardinia: They were holistic; they promoted economic and cultural survival; and they could raise consciousness and create alliances for change. Here, I will focus on three branches of a farm-­ to-school education program in the Medio Campidano province not far from Cagliari. Jim and I heard LAORE employee Francesco Sanna speak about the “In the Country to Learn” program at a workshop in April 2011, just a week after arriving in Sardinia to begin research on food activism. Impressed with his project, we set up an interview at the Cagliari LAORE office with him and his colleague Andrea Cerimele, where they discussed their linked aims of improving children’s diets and revitalizing local agriculture and rural culture. They gave us names of several teaching farms, and Jim and I were able to visit and interview two farmers, Marco Pau of Su Staì farm in Sanluri Stato (discussed in Chapter 4) and Annalisa Lecca of Alba farm near Guspini. To gather a school perspective, we interviewed Giuliana Orru, principal of Giuseppe Dessì elementary school in Villacidro, thirty miles northwest of Cagliari.

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Francesco Sanna and Andrea Cerimele on “In the Country to Learn” (Satu Po Imparai) The “In the Country to Learn” farm-­to-school education project was a collaboration between LAORE of the Sardinian regional government, the Medio Campidano province, and several farms and schools. LAORE agronomist Francesco Sanna described Satu Po Imparai as “a project of education on food, the environment, and rural culture.” It evolved from an earlier initiative called “Knowledge in the Countryside” (Saperi in Campagna) funded by the national ministry of education that LAORE piloted in the Medio Campidano province in 2007/8, the same year it launched the teaching farms (fattorie didattiche). The first year, they involved six farms, three schools, and 632 children. The next year, they took the project to the education commissioner of the Medio Campidano province who was enthusiastic and provided funding. They were able to expand to thirteen schools and 1,200 children with twenty distinct lesson plans (percorsi didattici), each involving one or two visits between the farmers and parents, two visits by the farmers to the classrooms, and two visits by the students to the farms. The LAORE project summary defined the pedagogical philosophy: “Each course is shaped according to the motto: ‘if I hear I forget, if I see I remember, if I do I learn’ ” (LAORE n.d.: 13, my translation). As agronomists, Francesco Sanna and Andrea Cerimele aimed to sustain family farms through multifunctionality (discussed in Chapter 4)—of which the education project was a key part. Sanna said, “Our goal was to give value to the multifunctional role of the farms in our territorio, the Medio Campidano, the poorest province in Sardinia, which has a strong rural culture and suffers from big problems of abandonment. A goal was to use these integrated activities to keep our farms alive

Figure 7.1  Andrea Cerimele and Francesco Sanna

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now and for future generations.” Sanna hoped that teaching would add a source of revenue for the ailing farm sector and generate a market for, as he said, “the typical products of the rural territorio.” Andrea Cerimele claimed that farms had gone from being multifunctional in the past to specializing over time, and “the farmer went from being a producer of food to a worker (operaio),” with the consequent results of extreme specialization and social alienation. So the goal of LAORE, Cerimele said, was to ensure the survival of farms through diversifying from food production into activities like agro-­tourism, teaching, excursions, and food processing to increase their income, employ diverse family members in a range of activities, and improve their satisfaction. Farm multifunctionality and educational programs were also tied into the goal of increasing the farmers’ social relationships. Andrea Cerimele put it thus: There’s a need for sociability in farming, which for various reasons was destroyed. Hence food for us is a means to reconstruct these social ties, and not just through Satu Po Imparai but through everything we do to favor short food chains . . . The fact of having an exchange, shaking the client’s hand, bringing children to the farm is also this: to give a social feeling to the farmer . . . So food becomes the thread uniting all the different components, and we are trying to sew them all together . . . to sew a social fabric . . . which includes different perspectives.

Solidarity developed when thirteen participating teaching farms joined into an association named Satu Po Imparai (like the project). The association enabled the farmers to work together and resolve some conflicts. For example, they reached consensus on charging a standard price for the meals during the students’ farm visits: 20 euros for a full meal and 13 for a snack. They agreed to ask teachers to pay for their meals, whereas in the past some farmers had felt pressured to let teachers eat for free. They concurred that all foods served to students would come only from their own or the other farms in the Satu Po Imparai network. These agreements reduced tensions, fostered amicable relations, and contributed to economic wellbeing. This spirit of working together extended from the farms to the schools as well. Francesco Sanna said that it was very important “to share everything with all the subjects, the farms and the schools, and work together to share all the decisions.” Andrea Cerimele underscored the grassroots formation of the Satu Po Imparai project: “coming from the ground up it has started small and grown little by little.” Perhaps because of this organic growth and shared planning, Sanna said that, “the schools participate with great enthusiasm. Almost all of the teachers join willingly. The children come to the farm prepared.” Sanna described one school visit to an organic farm where the lesson plan focused on saffron, which is composed of the dried threads (stigmas and styles) of the saffron crocus flower. The farm divided the children into two groups. One went into the fields to learn about growing crocuses and harvesting saffron. The other went into the workshop to learn how saffron was dried and used in cooking, and

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then they mixed the crimson threads with water and painted with it. Then the two groups united to have a snack of farm-­made Sardinian bread and jam, which the children ate voraciously. Afterwards, they switched activities; the workshop group went into the fields, and the fields group went into the workshop. They reunited for lunch—lentil and wheatberry soup. The farmer was a major producer of lentils but feared, as did the teachers, that the children might not like the soup, but they loved it. Sanna was gratified: “They all ate the same thing: local products, zero kilometer products, we succeeded in that goal. The other positive thing was it showed that our typical dishes are feasible for the school cafeterias.” In fact, reforming school cafeteria food emerged as a necessary goal for the Satu Po Imparai program—both because the teachers complained that processed “global” school food contradicted the lessons they were teaching, and because the school cafeterias could provide an important economic market for local farmers. In the Medio Campidano province, 22 schools provided 550,000 meals a year at an average cost of 4.66 euros each—over two and a half million euros to inject into the local economy. But not a single school cafeteria contract had demanded the use of local products before Satu Po Imparai. The project’s goal was not just to insert local raw materials into the school diet, but also to foster knowledge about how to cook local dishes by seeking recipes from the families suitable to the school menu—like the lentil and wheatberry soup, which Sanna called, “an inheritance from the past and from the territorio.” It was a palatable, nutritious, and economical cafeteria meal. LAORE wanted to avoid waste, so testing the recipes with small groups of children at the farm visits was useful, as the success of the lentil soup demonstrated. It enabled them to have more leverage with the managers of the school cafeterias to transform menus and food sourcing. This they soon tackled, as we shall see at the end of this chapter. There were many challenges in realizing the goals of Satu Po Imparai, Sanna and Cerimele admitted. The first was navigating the burdensome bureaucracies to bring together diverse constituencies. Another challenge was the financial bottom line. In 2011, they hoped that the project would produce significant economic benefits for the participants as well as benefits of sociability, cultural exchange, and more sustainable food. Cerimele said they hoped to assess “how much the wheel would turn after the initial push,” and by 2015 they had some positive data, as we shall see below. A final challenge the agronomists mentioned was enlisting the support of the farmers, families, and schools, and maintaining a high level of quality, which was essential to satisfaction and continuation. So far, they were happy with how things were going. Satu Po Imparai was based on the belief that, as Francesco Sanna said: Food is extremely important . . . With food, there are a whole series of cultural and social elements that recount our history, our traditions, what we are. Food is fundamental . . . But we work to go beyond food . . . because we are convinced that the teaching farms, the farmlands, and rural life are ideal for producing culture, for producing sociability, for producing environment, and for producing sustainability. On this base our farmers must grow.

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Andrea Cerimele concluded that Satu Po Imparai “was born as a project on food culture and then it developed richly into a project of individual growth, both for the teachers who saw that agriculture was a means to realize their pedagogical goals, and for the farms who saw that multifunctionality was a means of development.” As the creators and administrators of Satu Po Imparai, Sanna and Cerimele were, not surprisingly, strong supporters. Let us now add to the picture by considering a school principal’s perspective.

Giuliana Orru, elementary school principal Giuliana Orru was a passionate and energetic director of four elementary schools with 300 students in Villacidro, population 15,000, capital of the Medio Campidano province. She was an enthusiastic supporter of Satu Po Imparai, which fit well with her own curricular focus on the environment. Her philosophy of education was succinct: “It’s a political choice, the choice to educate.” She elaborated: “You cannot just educate to read and write, you have to educate people to use their heads and work for the common good, not for individual gain to the detriment of others.” Principal Orru’s grandfather had been a farmer, but her father left the land to work for a bus company. He did teach her about the land, however, by growing parsley in their urban backyard, an experience that made a deep impression and animated her commitment to critical food education. She lamented her pupils’ poor eating habits, growing obesity, and low levels of physical exercise. Although Sardinian child and adult obesity rates were among the lowest in Italy, they were increasing, and a recent study of Cagliari elementary school children concluded, “overweight and obesity are becoming serious social and health problems in Sardinia” (Sanna, Soro, and Canò 2006: 333).5 Eating habits were changing, and for

Figure 7.2  Principal Giuliana Orru in her office

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Principal Orru food education was part of the school’s initiative of “all-­around health—body and mind.” The curricular focus on the environment linked human health with many issues: land and water conservation, biodiversity, sustainability, and food. Principal Orru supported the revitalization of small-­scale Sardinian agriculture, which she felt would lead to wellbeing and better food. “Our battle is for zero kilometers,” she said, and she implemented a “fruit in the schools” initiative with Sardinian fruit. The school provided Villacidro oranges for snacks, taught about orchards, made orange juice, and gave extras to the parents to use in producing traditional recipes. Thoughtful consumption meant little waste, and spending on local food stimulated the economy: Education can help move political choices towards the territorio, coming together to change things. If I have the situation of economic crisis in the countryside but I go to the supermarket and buy foods that come from Milan, or from other places, or worse, packaged foods, or if I go to McDonald’s, our local economy will die . . . We have to keep alive our origins, our roots, because that is where we come from and it is our salvation, not to lose sight of where we come from so we can go forward.

Like many proponents and scholars of critical food education (e.g., Juba 2016), Principal Giuliana Orru believed that education had to be holistic and had to involve body and mind. She said, “you cannot just study one thing, only food . . . It is all connected . . . If I do an oral lesson on Sardinian food, it goes right out of their heads. We have to create a network of information and then have them experiment with it . . . The goal is always to reinsert the children in the context so they have the tools to understand the context.” That context involved the ensemble of place, family, and culture: “The local economy is represented in the families. If the families are poor and without money, we have depressed families, in a cultural sense as well. If I involve the territorio, I sustain the families through the territorio . . . families, local producers, bakeries, olive mills.” She explained that “typical products,” that is, products of the territorio, were the “essence” of the school curriculum because they represented: “a way of being, the place where one lives, the tastes, the flavors, the clean environment . . . They have a strong cultural connotation.” She gave an example: “If I make bread that is not those industrial rubbery rolls but a slice of cifraxu bread, substantial bread, Sardinian bread, the pupils eat it willingly . . . They know it. It could be with white flour, it could be with bran flour, or dark bread, it could be in various shapes . . . but it is our bread (è il nostro pane).” Typical products and the territorio they came from were “a way of being,” which bread represented because it was such an essential, creative, local, and diverse product across Sardinia, with sculptural complexity and hundreds of varieties for festive and quotidian occasions (Cirese et al. 1977, Counihan 1984, Pani 2005, Pilia 2006). It varied from village to village, but was always made of Sardinian wheat and imbued with meanings. Bread not only represented identity and culture, but also

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housed deep emotions about land, life, and family. That affective charge, explained Principal Orru, was why studying, making, and tasting food enhanced learning and was a powerful curricular focus. In their study of school garden and cooking programs, Hayes-Conroy and Hayes-Conroy (2013: 81) found that “motivation to eat ‘healthy’ and ‘alternative’ food is a matter of affective relation.” But they pointed out that “emotional/affective responses to food undoubtedly arise out of the power-­laden social networks” (2013: 82–3). In Satu Po Imparai, adults from LAORE, the health agency ASL, and the school administration held the power to define “good” food. The children’s affective responses to it might be more varied than the power-­holders assumed, especially if the student body were to become more diverse. Principal Orru linked emotions to the “food of their ancestors” in the following description of a taste laboratory for the children: They cut the slices of bread, toasted them on the coals, and rubbed them with olive oil and tomato. This ancient food had to be with Sardinian bread, the big loaves, sliced, preferably a day old, toasted, and rubbed with tomato and our local Villacidro olive oil. The children ate it, and for them there was a collective affective dimension in eating the food of their ancestors . . . Taste, tasting, is important to teach children the flavors and hence the affective relationship with food because it occurs in an educational environment with their companions. So there is affection for that food.

Orru believed that the emotional connection to the food would enhance holistic learning about it. The school’s curriculum around the important local product of olive oil focused on its production, history, and uses in cooking—which necessitated collaboration between the school, the children, and their families. Principal Orru said: The families have to cook together with their children—the mothers, fathers, and grandparents. They have to cook with the children, and we are going to have a contest where they present their old and new recipes. This all involves a study of the foods of the past through the families: the children are the protagonists.

Giuliana Orru decried the loss of cooking knowledge among “the young mothers, the mothers who grew up with the boom of industrial products, used to having a quick meal . . . with ready-­made foods.” She wanted to educate not only the pupils but the whole community: “When I reach the children, I reach the families. And so I can also move the family’s behavior towards better eating.” For her, improving the diet meant eating traditional local food. She said, “we have to return to the past (dobbiamo tornare indietro), we’re getting started, and the school has taken charge of this, we feel it is our responsibility.” An issue raised by Principal Orru’s interview was the implicit assumption that all of the pupils had the same culinary culture, that it was identifiable and known, and that it was the “food of the past.” This contrasted with the habits of the young

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Sardinian mothers using processed foods. It was likely to be a delicate challenge to involve them in the school’s promotion of old-­time food without alienating them, just as it was to enlist children with diverse food preferences into one-­size-fits-­all California school garden and cooking programs (Hayes-Conroy 2014, HayesConroy and Hayes-Conroy 2013). And what about immigrants whose ancestral foods were not Sardinian and were likely to signify not only identity and comfort but perhaps also religious conviction—what would the Villacidro curriculum cause them to feel about their food? This question was looming on the horizon. While statistics reported that in 2011 there were only 73 foreigners in Villacidro, 0.5 percent of its population, their numbers had grown by 50 percent to 105 (0.7 percent of the population) by 2014 and were likely to continue to grow given Italy’s increasingly multi-­ethnic population, the growth in asylum-­seekers from Africa and the Middle East, the Villacidro area’s agricultural potential, and immigrants’ increasing labor in the Sardinian agro-­pastoral sector.6 In the northern Italian Lombardy region, tensions around immigrant foods had already surfaced in elementary schools where Muslim Maghrebi children made up nearly 14 percent of the school population (Giovine 2012, 2014). Prohibited by religion from eating all pork and non-halal meat, Muslim children were given unpalatable vegetarian foods which reinforced their difference and marginality (Giovine 2012, 2014). But in the Medio Campidano province, immigrant children were few and not yet a direct concern of Satu Po Imparai. On the contrary, Principal Orru emphasized “the real and important problem that the school and the family must address is the territorio.”

Annalisa Lecca and Alba teaching farm Sustaining smallholder agriculture of the territorio was a clear target of Satu Po Imparai whose third leg consisted of the teaching farms. As we saw in Chapters 3 and 4, the Sardinian farming sector was struggling and needed support. A hopeful strategy was multifunctionality, along with the production of quality products unique to the territorio and hence potentially remunerative. Both farms I visited followed this strategy, though they were very different. Su Staì (discussed in Chapter 4) was a large cooperative founded in 1978 with over a dozen member-­ farmers and a complete agro-­pastoral operation with diverse animals, vegetables, fruit and olive trees, vineyards, agro-­tourism, teaching programs, bread oven, mini-­slaughterhouse, and other activities. Alba was a small hobby farm started in 2003 by a couple in their fifties, Annalisa Lecca, who had always been a housewife, and her husband Peppuccio, who had a business making wooden door and window frames. They focused on raising heritage pigs, but they also produced other crops for the teaching program and for their own consumption. They had recently bought their seven hectares in a beautiful spot where Peppuccio’s father had herded sheep before moving to Cagliari in the 1950s to work as a watchman and provide opportunities for his children. As a young boy, Peppuccio had worked this land with his father and knew it well, so he had a deep

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Figure 7.3  Annalisa Lecca at Alba farm

connection to the place. “There was nothing here,” Annalisa Lecca said when we were walking around the property, “nothing.” They built the farmhouse, with a bedroom, bathroom, and kitchen where they stayed when they were working there, and an upstairs unfinished area which they hoped to make into an agro-­ tourism operation with some bedrooms and a big dining room. On the land, they raised about eighty heritage pigs of the autochthonous Sardinian breed (la razza suina sarda autoctona), for which they were in the process of getting a denomination of origin certification. They had planted fruit trees—lemon, orange, apricot, cherry, and quince—about 200 olive trees, and a small vineyard with table grapes. Annalisa Lecca also sewed—she bought Sardinian wool already spun into cloth, and then she embroidered it and sewed it into clothes. The farm work, she said, was “really tiring—a lot of work and little money,” but multifunctionality increased financial opportunities. Annalisa Lecca explained the Sardinian region’s accreditation process for teaching farms. The farmer had to take a ninety-­hour course conducted by LAORE once or twice a week over several months. Upon completion, the farmer had to pass an exam and then apply for membership in the regional registry of teaching farms. Then LAORE visited the farm to make sure it had “a human approach,” a well-­tended landscape with no dangerous areas, a bathroom, and a building to host the students. Once the farmer had passed the exams and the inspection, he or she had to launch the pedagogical activity by connecting with schools. “Right now, it is difficult,” Annalisa Lecca said. “The schools have no money; the families have no money.” Once she had established contact with a school, then Lecca said she worked with the teachers to establish a curriculum for the farm visit. She wanted to present a holistic picture, starting with the earth and moving to plants, animals, and people. Lecca said, “emotion is in the middle of it all” and thus supported

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Principal Orru’s belief in the affective power of food, as well as the findings of Lanas and Zembylas (2015) on the important role of love in critical education. Annalisa Lecca revealed the role of the emotions in her pedagogy and the challenges of the teaching farm program when she described a lesson plan she developed for middle school students, who were hard to teach, she said, because they pretended not to care about anything. The first step in the Satu Po Imparai curriculum was a visit from the farmer to the school to prepare the students for the farm visit. Lecca planned a curriculum around “his majesty, the Sardinian pig” in which she linked territorio, culture, and agricultural practices. In her first class with the middle school students, the regular teacher was absent and there were two apprentice teachers and a LAORE agronomist with her. The experience, she said, was a “disaster,” because classroom management fell apart and pandemonium ensued. But Lecca reflected on the problems and modified her pedagogy before the students’ farm visit. She learned that “you have to build trust with the children.” She understood that “the students needed to be heard,” and that “they wanted to see and touch, they did not want to listen.” So when they came to the farm, she broke them up into three groups: One group went to the piggery to see the sow and hold the newborn piglets; one group went outside to feed the pigs; and the third group went outside to touch, sit on, and learn about the tractor. Then they experienced the pigs in another way by having a snack composed of bread with a cured meat similar to prosciutto called mustela made from the farm’s pigs. “You learn by tasting” (gustando si impara), she said, “and using all the senses.”7 The farm visit was a success. The kids were touched by the direct experience with the pigs. Afterwards, they sent her comments on the visit, and one wrote “Thank you, you taught us about life.” Another whose parents were farmers wrote, “I did not know that there were so many beautiful things in agriculture.” Lecca

Figure 7.4  Sardinian heritage pigs at Alba farm

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said, “They too became impassioned,” and from ignoring the farmland all around them, they woke up to understanding it. After the farm visit, Lecca went back to the school, where she did a taste laboratory and then an exploration of trust. Trust was, of course, not only at play in all human relationships, but more specifically in the alternative food movement in ensuring quality and traceability (see Chapter 6). Trust, as Lecca learned in her first disastrous classroom visit, was also a key condition, as well as a goal, of critical education. On her second school visit, she had students play a game where they paired off and one fell backwards towards the other, having to trust that the other would catch them. Some of the students would not let themselves fall because they did not trust their classmates. But others afterwards wrote things like: “I am happy because my friend trusted me.” Lecca wanted the farm to convey “a life lesson” about trust, the senses, and education because, “the farm touches what cannot be seen.” Emotions were at the center of Lecca’s relationship to the farm. She told me that she named it Alba (Dawn) for two reasons, first because from the house there was a beautiful view of the sunrise as it broke out over the eastern horizon, and second, because like every dawn, the farm represented a new beginning. She had a huge rock inscribed with a passage from the Bible: “come to me all you who are tired and oppressed and I will restore you” (venite a me voi tutti che siete affaticati ed opressi, ed io vi ristorerò).8 These words encapsulated Lecca’s mission, and she said they were for all people, not just Christians, but for people of every religion and atheists too. Lecca and her husband bought the farm to have a place of peace and renewal for themselves, but once they got settled there, they wanted to share it with others. They hoped to extend the farm’s multifunctionality by developing it not only as a teaching farm, but also as a “social farm” (fattoria sociale), open to small groups of people in need of work and socialization, like those with mental illness, ex-­convicts, troubled juveniles, or refugees. They could come to the farm, help out, develop self-­ worth from working, and enjoy being in a beautiful and peaceful spot in the open air. Lecca was seeking support from the health agency ASL (Azienda Sanitaria Locale) and the town government to certify Alba as a social farm, which would expand its educational and community functions. In December 2016, on the Scirarindi social networking website mentioned earlier, Lecca encapsulated her intentions, “the social farm is really and truly an open air laboratory of teaching.”9

Satu Po Imparai in 2015 Earlier in this chapter, LAORE agronomists Sanna and Cerimele spoke about their realization that they had to change the school food contracts to be in line with their pedagogical mission. LAORE’s (n.d.) summary of activities for 2014/15 reported that they held meetings about school food with diverse constituencies: Town governments, the local health agency (ASL), and the schools. These meetings resulted in new contract terms for food in the 22 schools in the Medio Campidano.

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From no requirements for local food, the new contract stipulated that at least 70 percent of cafeteria food had to be traditional, local, short-­chain, and/or certified quality products (DOP, IGP), with at least 30 percent organic. Whereas previous contracts lasted only one or two years, the new ones had to be for at least three years with a possibility of renewal for two more years. This was to give meal providers some time to develop new menus and suppliers, and to work out the kinks. The contracts also demanded “a plan of food education,” the use of filtered municipal water (rather than bottled water), and biodegradable or washable dishes. Nineteen of twenty-­two municipalities participated in the first year and made a serious effort to fulfill the contracts. LAORE (n.d.) reported that Sardinian foodstuffs varied from 65 to 71 percent of all foods: “100 percent of meat, vegetables, bread, olive oil, pasta, rice, saffron, and honey were from the Region. 73 percent of cheese and milk products were from the Region. 35 percent of fruit was from the Region.” Costs per meal went up from 4.66 to 4.88 euros, but much more of the money went into the local economy. By 2015, LAORE estimated that expenditures for local and regional products in the school cafeterias amounted to approximately 750,000 to 800,000 euros in a year, about half of which went directly to farmers. Expenditures on the fattoria didattica programs were 273,620 euros, of which 78 percent, or 214,475 euros, went directly to the farms—an average of 16,498 euros for each of the 13 participating farms. This program clearly appeared to be having a significant impact in generating income for small farmers and revitalizing rural culture. Many things contributed to its success—not least the relatively small size of the province, its agricultural history, and its depressed rural economy. The cooperation between diverse political entities—the Sardinian regional government through LAORE, the Medio Campidano provincial government, ASL health agency, and the schools—was crucial. That political support meant that critical food education could lead to more prosperous farms, changed cafeteria menus, and changed consumption, which redirected resources into the local economy.

Conclusions This chapter has explored critical food education, which moved from the classroom, to the farm, to the school cafeteria; engaged mind, emotions, body, and all of the senses; and linked history, environmental science, nutrition, and farming. It touched an array of interconnected topics that provided context for remembering. LAORE’s leadership role showed that focusing on territorio foods in the school curriculum and cafeteria could increase consumption of nutritious local food and produce real economic benefits to smallholder multifunctional farmers. These positive results parallel those of farm-­to-school programs in the USA (Allen and Guthman 2006, Bagdonis, Hinrichs, and Schafft 2009, Izumi, Wright, and Hamm 2010). Placing territorio food and culture at the heart of the school curriculum resonated with many families and teachers, but overemphasizing the local could

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result in unplanned marginalization of people preferring products of the agro-­ industrial food system or of foreign lands. Assumptions about who “we” are and whose foods are “good” begged for self-­conscious reflection and expansion beyond either/or thinking to both/and conceptions of foodways which could make room for diverse cultures, religions, and cuisines. Situating local food in broader global context could increase students’ understanding of the holistic web of people, food, and culture. As many food advocates emphasized, education had to be based on interaction and “a dialectical relationship” between the food advocates and those they sought to educate (Mayo 2015: 52). Constant interchange was essential to avoid missing the mark and trying to impose a worldview that was alien and possibly oppressive. This was the danger that geographer Julie Guthman (2008a, 2008b) uncovered in California’s alternative food institutions (AFIs) where a mentality prevailed that if people “only knew” that local, organic produce was better for them, they would flock to AFIs like farmers’ markets, CSAs, organic shops, and the like. But in fact, many economically marginal and ethnically diverse people did not frequent AFIs because they did not relate to them and found them culturally coded as “white.”10 Moreover, the messianistic message of salvation through changed food consumption alienated consumers who were attached to their own foodways—which could happen, for example, with the young Sardinian mothers whose affinity for industrial foods Principal Orru hoped to change. Hayes-Conroy and Hayes-Conroy found this conundrum in school garden and cooking programs. These, they said, sought “to counter an imagined ignorance and apathy in the broader population by encouraging an intellectual awakening in regard to the origins of our food” (2013: 82). This awakening involved acceptance of the superiority of fresh vegetarian food associated with white, middle-­class culture and consequent denigration of their own cuisine. Similarly, Satu Po Imparai assumed the superiority of traditional, typical, rural foodways and implicitly marginalized other foodways possibly dear to students. Food democracy demands that all the voices of the food system be represented and that sustainable, culturally acceptable, justly remunerated food be available for all. Satu Po Imparai made important steps towards that end, but recognition of Italy’s class and ethnic diversity will be increasingly crucial. In her farm called “Dawn,” Annalisa Lecca created an inspiring vision of inclusion in her message of welcome, her practices of educational and social farming, and her focus on trust, emphasizing its necessity in human relations and cultivating it through critical food education. An important concern for food advocates was not only to teach people to think critically about tasty, just, and sustainable food, but also to make it widely and easily available. In the Cagliari area, access paths were expanding and included farmers’ markets, the urban garden, and the GAS. In addition, a few alternative food shops were convenient places to buy local and/or organic food. The next chapter examines how they navigated the tricky path between commerce and its demands for profit, and activism and its demands for food democracy.

Chapter 8 C ommerce and activism :

C ompromises and challenges

Introduction This chapter focuses on three organic food businesses to explore the challenges of surviving financially within a competitive capitalist economy while trying to favor sustainable and fair local food. The first is S’Atra Sardigna, an organic food production, processing, and distribution cooperative founded in Cagliari in 1982 and described by co-­founder and produce development director Ignazio Cirronis. The second is Emporio Bio, an organic food store founded by Francesca Spiga and her then-­husband in 2003, and in 2013 involving Spiga, one part-­time employee, and a small family farm Coooperativa Terranuova. The third is Bioagrumi di Monteporceddus, a small organic home-­delivery business started by young farmer Matteo Floris and his then partner Paola Francione in 2006, which lasted until 2014. All three businesses advocated in some ways for more democratic and sustainable foodways and struggled to strengthen local food and farmers within a capitalist economic system favoring big businesses, far-­flung distribution, standardization, worker exploitation, and horizontal and vertical integration. They faced several challenges: Reaching and keeping sufficient consumers, establishing reliable organic producers/suppliers, and maintaining short distribution chains. The chapter uses the concepts of solidarity economies and economies of sentiment to explore how the three organic businesses tried to survive within the greater capitalist system while advancing more local and democratic food. “Economies of sentiment,” applied by anthropologist Heather Paxson (2013) to North American artisan cheese-­makers, refer to economic activities that aim for more than making a profit to include living “a good life”—by realizing ideals, producing a quality product, doing rewarding labor, and forging meaningful social relationships. Economies of sentiment explain how multi-­layered feelings, ideals, and goals inspired people—like Cirronis, Spiga, and Floris—to try new ethical and sustainable ways of making a living, to take financial risks, and to work long hours. They led some to participate in “solidarity economies” (Miller 2010) based on cooperative networks, profit-­sharing, and sustainability. The chapter examines to what extent the three businesses fit the solidarity economy model and its overriding

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goal: “To further integrate economic alternatives into social movements and social movements into economic alternatives” (Miller 2010, italics in original). One of the ways S’Atra Sardigna, Emporio Bio, and Bioagrumi di Monteporceddus aimed for sustainability and solidarity was through a commitment to organic food production—raising crops and animals with limited use of only a few allowed chemical products. In the mid–1990s, the European Union started offering subsidies for organic production, which stimulated expansion. Italy has become second in Europe for land devoted to organic agriculture, and Sardinia is the third region in Italy (De Matthaeis et al. 2014).1 According to Audrey Vankeerberghen’s (2012: 104) research in Belgium, farmers over time have become less motivated to go organic by counter-­cultural philosophy and more attracted by its niche market, subsidies, and higher prices. Several scholars have proposed the “conventionalization thesis” to explain this trend—stating that organic started out as oppositional but has become more and more like what it opposed.2 Organic businesses like S’Atra Sardigna, Emporio Bio, and Bioagrumi di Monteporceddus had to walk a tightrope between being unconventional and being successful; fair-­trade businesses have faced similar challenges (Dolan 2010, Moberg and Lyon 2010, Shreck 2008). The conflicting pulls of oppositional ideals and conformist practices emerged in the narratives of Cirronis and Spiga about their organic businesses, but less so in that of Floris who remained more resolutely counter-­cultural. All three faced the pinch of price— finding a balance between what customers were willing to pay for organic and the added costs of producing and distributing it.

S’Atra Sardigna and Ignazio Cirronis S’Atra Sardigna was an organic food cooperative founded in 1982 by a group of thirteen idealistic young people in their twenties. Starting as a small organic vermaculture business, by 2016 it employed approximately 250 families in agro-­ pastoral production and processing, in running five retail stores, and in administering the business. More than one hundred farms with more than 2,000 hectares belonged to the cooperative. I interviewed co-­founder Ignazio Cirronis in 2011, when he was fifty-­seven, and he described himself as “an agricultural entrepreneur, an organic farmer.” Here, I will present S’Atra Sardigna through his words and address whether and how it practiced solidarity economics, was constrained by the market, and deployed territorio and taste in its food advocacy efforts. “We have been exclusively organic as long as we’ve existed,” said Cirronis. It was not a conversion “like St. Paul on the road to Damascus,” but a conscious choice from the beginning—“we are without doubt a so-­called historic company in the organic field.” They chose to found an organic cooperative for several reasons: “Surely the desire to do enjoyable work, where you could make your own choices, and be simultaneously . . . worker and entrepreneur, in a collective, discussing things with others, not making decisions alone.” Cirronis found the job stimulating because it involved the self-­education characteristic of food advocacy: “It is not a

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boring job, there are always new things. You travel the world, you meet people who operate with a different mentality and you accept it, you learn, you compare.” In addition to being personally fulfilling, the organic co-­op also fitted with the founders’ broader ideals: It is something that kept us at peace with the environment, it is something that does not ruin the environment. Look, we thought about this from the beginning . . . Yes, to work on the land, in the open air, in contact with nature, and not to destroy it. To maintain intact as much as possible nature and its properties, values, and characteristics . . . And we wanted to do something that would last and so we thought that producing what people eat would have a future.

S’Atra Sardigna’s founders held an idealistic vision of organic agriculture characteristic of its early practitioners (Vankeerberghen 2012), and Cirronis was still optimistic about its future after almost thirty years: Organic agriculture is going to fare ever better because it responds to the demands of everyone including the consumer and the economic planner. It is a production system that permits development and does not damage natural resources . . . Furthermore, in my view, it is a sector that reconciles city and country. Culture and agriculture are reconciled after having been separated almost as if farms were factories. Now they are returning to being places where people are at the center—the farmer is at the center of the farm and the consumer is at the center of the undertaking. I am not producing for a generic market but rather for a consumer who is attentive and knowledgeable. So from this point of view, organic has a future, it has to. It has to mend the break between production and consumption, between the city and the country.

Cirronis went on to admit that there was increasing competition for the organic market from supermarkets but that the small stores were nonetheless important because of their influence on “changing lifestyles, changing food habits . . . If organic has a future, it is a future of people who are thirsty and longing for values and knowledge,” which they could get from the proprietors of the small shops. He said, “We have to reach the consumers as directly as possible so we can inform them about the product and organic farming.” But, Cirronis affirmed, to succeed it was not enough just to be organic; a firm had to be well organized, familiar with the market, and always shortening the distribution chain. A firm also benefited from controlling the market. Five interviewees mentioned S’Atra Sardigna’s aggressive efforts to swallow up other organic farmers and distributors. Cirronis’s description of S’Atra Sardigna’s products revealed the cooperative’s emphasis on Sardinian specialties and its role in processing as well as producing. It also revealed a cardinal principle, what he called “the diversification rule—not just diversified production but also diversified markets.” His product list included, first of all, locally grown fruits and vegetables, followed by sheep and goat cheese, but mostly sheep “because that’s what we make in Sardinia.” Next came wine, olive oil,

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dried pasta, and the special thin cracker-­like Sardinian bread called pane carasau. They also produced honey, nougat, jam, liqueurs made of myrtle and the medicinal plant helichrysum, vegetables like peppers and eggplant preserved in olive oil, and some products of the sea like the renowned Sardinian dried salted gray mullet roe (bottarga di muggine). Cirronis said, “Among our members, we not only have farms producing the raw materials but also businesses that transform it, so we have a cheese factory (caseificio), olive oil bottling plant (l’oleificio), winery (la cantina), nougat plant (il torronificio), and all the workshops that produce final products.” When I asked Cirronis about the role territorio played in S’Atra Sardigna, he made clear its multifaceted centrality: Territorio has dictated what we produce . . . So we have not tried to compete in products that others can make. We have focused on the products most typical of our area, that are hard to find outside of Sardinia or at least to find this good, this characteristic. Of course there are many kinds of bread but pane carasau is found only in Sardinia. Of course there is good nougat in other regions, but ours is special . . . This is what territorio means.

Good flavor was evidence of and testimony to the value of the territorio and of organic production. Cirronis said that “an organic product cannot have a neutral taste, it has to have a true taste . . . In the Cooperative when the producers consign their products, we give them a quality classification, that is, a tomato has to taste like a tomato just as pasta has to convey the taste of grains.” Cirronis said that production methods also had to contribute to good flavor, for example using the bronze mold method to make high-­quality pasta. One aim of S’Atra Sardigna’s unfortunately short-­lived restaurant was “to exalt rural cooking . . . to show how with grains, legumes, and vegetables you can make splendid, tasty, and nutritious dishes.” Cirronis concluded, “taste is extremely important.” Concentrating on tasty foods of the territorio was not only a clear production strategy, but was also central to S’Atra Sardigna’s identity, branding, and marketing: “Territorio has clearly given an imprinting to the business. We carry the image of Sardinia everywhere, not only because of our name—S’Atra Sardigna means ‘the Other Sardinia’—but also because we have chosen a production method tied to the idea of nature. The image of Sardinia . . . is an uncontaminated, wild territorio where nature is still evident.” Here, Cirronis tapped into what has indeed been a longstanding image of “wild Sardinia,” noted by anthropologist Gabriella Da Re (2015a) in her edited book on nature in Sardinia. Da Re (2015b: 31) wrote that outsiders have historically seen Sardinia as untamed and empty, but Sardinians have seen it as a familiar place full of human–nature interactions typified by the “loving relationship between wild and domestic” in the practice of grafting wild olive trees. Similarly, anthropologist Tracey Heatherington (2010) found that in debates over establishing the Gennargentu National Park in central Sardinia, outsiders used the image of “wild Sardinia” to justify expropriation of villagers’ land. In contrast, insider Cirronis deployed “wild (selvaggio)” to establish a positive culinary identity for local food.

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S’Atra Sardigna’s hundred farms joined the cooperative to increase their market access and economic stability. In addition to its farmers, S’Atra Sardigna had forty employees on the payroll working in several different offices: administrative, commercial, logistical, planning, and technical. Cirronis said: “we provide services to the farmers so they have guidance, advice, and help so they do not fail, because they must not fail—either in producing well or in producing organic—both things.” Another important sector of S’Atra Sardigna overseen by Ignazio Cirronis’s brother Mario consisted of their retail stores. In 1985, three years after its founding, S’Atra Sardigna opened the first organic store in Cagliari to benefit from the short supply chain (filiera corta). To keep benefiting, by 2011 they had opened five stores (three in Cagliari, one each in the neighboring municipalities of Quartu Sant’Elena and Sestu). Cirronis explained why the stores were important: First of all, they are a market we control. We have a direct relationship with the consumers and at the outset understand their choices and their expectations. It is a daily market survey that costs us nothing. Second, it is an economic benefit because we can sell our products at higher prices than if we sold them to a wholesaler . . . Third, it is a financial benefit because we sell and get paid, sell and get paid, which is not always the case today in Italy—it usually takes a long time to get paid, if you get paid at all. Sometimes out of all those who owe you, some leave you in the lurch—it happens.

Because of the problems of late payment, low prices, and competition from nonEU countries, Cirronis concluded, “having the market right here nearby gives us more serenity.” S’Atra Sardigna grossed five and a half million euros in 2010, Cirronis said, and its web page reported that in 2015 it grossed just over eight million euros—a 45 percent increase in five years.3 Cirronis said that in 2010, 70 percent of sales came from Sardinia, and they also sold to mainland Italy, Germany, Switzerland, the USA, and Japan, but the Sardinian market was the largest, most important, most under their control, and most insulated from global trade problems and competition. Because, “in Sardinia, the Sardinian product is worth twice that of a non-Sardinian product,” S’Atra Sardigna had every intention of expanding their producer-­ members, stores, and sales on the island. Balancing growth and monopoly with quality production and short distribution chains was a challenge that highlighted the fine line between food advocacy and commerce. I asked Cirronis if he felt S’Atra Sardigna was “a political undertaking as well as an economic one.” He replied that S’Atra Sardigna’s work had “cultural and political value because it called into question the passive role of the consumer and the farmer.” It asked consumers to think critically about the value of organic. It asked producers to break away from the heavy reliance on the agricultural chemicals of multinational corporations and to develop new methods. Cirronis added, “We have made an economic choice that also has had political consequences because it is what is now called solidarity economy.” His answer linked S’Atra Sardigna explicitly to the movement in Italy for a Solidarity Economy

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Network, or RES—Rete di Economia Solidale. According to Cristina Grasseni (2013: 54–8), RES evolved out of earlier solidarity economy efforts, and its main goal was to create DES—Districts of Solidarity Economy. Cirronis said that these brought together “businesses that work in the area of ecologically and ethically sustainable economies—that respect the environment, nature, working conditions, and disadvantaged people.” Solidarity Economy Networks (RES) included initiatives like fair trade, organic agriculture, organic building and architecture, natural foods, and everything involved in the “green economy” and the “social economy,” which all worked for sustainability, social integration, and equitable profit-­sharing, as S’Atra Sardigna to some extent did. But, Cirronis said, “There is a tension in using capital not for profit, as an end in itself to enrich the business and its owner, but for sharing as ethically as possible among those who participate in the productive activities.” To forge solidarity with consumers, S’Atra Sardigna launched an initiative to start a “shared garden (orto condiviso)” where “consumers become co-­producers,” much like Su Staì farm’s “your garden at a distance” (Chapter 4). As in community-­ supported agriculture or CSA (Lang 2010, Obach and Tobin 2014), consumers had a share in the garden which assured them a certain quota of produce. Moreover, they could participate in some phases of the work, learn about farming through experience, and become “co-­producers.” This project, in addition to promoting solidarity and long-­term sales between the cooperative and its consumers, also served to educate, which was key to building markets. S’Atra Sardigna undertook other initiatives to educate both consumers and member-­producers about organic. In their largest, newest store, they had installed a computer touch screen that shoppers could play with to learn more about “why to choose an organic product, and what an organic product is,” Cirronis said. S’Atra Sardigna also organized tastings and farm visits, and distributed informational brochures to explain the characteristics of organic. Before their restaurant closed,

Figure 8.1  Ignazio Cirronis and computer screen in S’Atra Sardigna store

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they had held educational dinners there to “suggest to the consumer to change not only the raw material, . . . but also the whole way of eating . . . We try to convey basic information that is not always common knowledge, for example, less meat, more vegetables, how to balance proteins without using meat, and also how to make the most of seasonal products.” Last but not least, S’Atra Sardigna educated farmers about organic agriculture: “The producers have to be taught about a series of regulations that benefit all, about production methods, about harvesting, and about packaging. So there is a process of formation and education for producers too.” S’Atra Sardigna faced several challenges. One was to expand their affiliated producers and market share, but this opened them to charges of cut-­throat competition and monopoly, which circulated in the alternative food sector. S’Atra Sardigna was always trying to increase shoppers in their stores, which was particularly difficult in 2011 when the economic crisis was severe and people were cutting expenses any way they could. Maintaining quality and organic standards was another challenge, and S’Atra Sardigna faced rumors of faking the organic label or selling stale produce. The cooperative struggled to find a good balance between selling locally and exporting Sardinian products to higher-­priced markets in northern Europe, the USA, or Japan. They also faced competition in Sardinian markets from lower-­priced fruits and vegetables imported from North Africa. Cirronis said that S’Atra Sardigna needed more capital to invest in growth. A last challenge was renewing the cooperative’s leadership and workforce because the original founders were nearing retirement. As a cooperative, S’Atra Sardigna was committed by definition to solidarity economies, which it practiced by including small producers in its networks and improving their market access. It contributed to environmental sustainability by using organic methods, and to social and economic sustainability by favoring typical products of the Sardinian territorio that were less vulnerable to competition. While Cirronis claimed it aimed for equity, further research would be necessary to assess how power and profits were shared within the cooperative, which, because of its size and longevity, wielded substantial influence over the organic sector on the island. Into that sector in 2003 entered Francesca Spiga and her organic food store.

Emporio Bio and Francesca Spiga Originally from the agricultural village of San Sperate, twenty kilometers from Cagliari, at age forty-­six Francesca Spiga left her job in northern Italy with a multinational pharmaceutical firm to seek a different life running an organic food store in Cagliari. Her overriding goals were to live in harmony with her ideals, to revitalize Sardinian traditional organic agriculture rooted in the territorio, and to renew community. But there had been many slips, both personal and financial, and her dream became a long, hard slog of eleven-­hour days trying to stay in business and dealing with competition, near bankruptcy, loss of supplier, and divorce. In describing Spiga’s journey, I will address whether and how Emporio Bio reflected the solidarity economy, promoted territorio and sustainability, and was buffeted by market forces.

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Figure 8.2  Francesca Spiga in Emporio Bio

With high hopes, Francesca Spiga and her then husband opened Emporio Bio in 2003, about a mile from the first S’Atra Sardigna store that had opened eighteen years earlier. In 2011, Spiga recounted: My store was born eight years ago with great anticipation and enthusiasm, to try to lead a different life, but naturally things were not that simple. It has become a little—I don’t want to say a trap, but almost . . . I wanted to change my life with this work. I was not here in Sardinia, I was in the Trentino [in northern Italy], I wanted to return to Sardinia, and change my work. I was doing pharmaceutical research for a huge multinational company, imagine. I was truly convinced that this was the right job to change completely.

She conceived of the store as an idealistic project to counter the agro-­industrial food system, and not only to transform her own life but also to enable other people to change theirs by acquiring healthy organic food. She said, “I have always believed that our food should be as simple as possible, as natural as possible.” Her store stocked organic goods of all kinds—produce, bread, wine, cookies, rice, pasta, legumes, make-­up, soaps, shampoos, cleaning products, herbal medicines, tea, coffee, chocolate, cereal, soy and hemp products, yogurt, milk, and many other items. She sold vegan, gluten-­free, and lactose-­free products. Her clients were mainly teachers, state workers, clerks, and counter-­culture youth seeking organic goods for various reasons—for example, for young children, for allergies, or for veganism. She estimated that 98 percent of her clients were female. Opening her store turned out to be a difficult process. At first, she was going to join the organic food franchise Emporio Alcatraz, but that turned into a “disaster” she did not want to discuss. The stresses of moving to Sardinia and opening the

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store were too much for Spiga and her husband, and their marriage broke up. This was a severe blow for Spiga personally and for the business. She lost not only her husband’s labor and support, but also her major supplier of “everything” organic, ECOR,4 which dropped Emporio Bio after her husband left. I asked her if this was because they did not want to work with a woman, and she said, no, it was because the store had accumulated many debts and was always behind with payments. Her husband had handled the accounts, placated ECOR by paying a little at a time, and never let her know the extent of their financial problems. She only found out how bad things were when he left. She said that ECOR did not understand the extent of her will and strength; they just looked at the balance sheet and her debts and gave up on her. Spiga felt totally defeated. She had to start over and build up the business from scratch. ECOR had provided everything—packaged goods like pasta and rice, milk products, fruits and vegetables, even mineral water. When they dropped her, the store was almost empty, and she had to find new suppliers for everything. “I built that store myself,” she said. She eventually started to work with Ki Group,5 which was small then, but has since grown to be the second biggest organic food supplier in Italy after ECOR. Being with Ki Group set her apart from the S’Atra Sardigna organic food stores, which stocked ECOR products.6 Breaking with ECOR “gave me the strength to become unique,” she said. Moreover, losing ECOR pushed Spiga to seek local suppliers for key Sardinian products—goat milk, cheese and yogurt; pecorino cheese; bread; and most importantly fruits and vegetables. Spiga rented space in her store, first one, then two, and finally three days a week, to Cecilia and Angelo Corona, farmers of the Terranuova cooperative from Siliqua, twenty miles northwest of Cagliari, who also supplied Terra di Mezzo restaurant (Chapter  6). They sold organic fruits and vegetables of their own and others’ production. They generated a loyal clientele and enabled Francesca Spiga to provide good produce without increasing her already very heavy workload. After her marriage broke up, Spiga had to run the store by herself with only one part-­time clerk because she could not afford a full-­time employee. She spent most days from 9 a.m. to 8 p.m. in the store and handled everything—ordering supplies, stocking shelves, running the cash register, and dealing with the Italian state bureaucracy and its regulations for small businesses. Spiga explained: This store was planned for at least three people—me, my husband, and another employee. Right away, we understood that the employee would not work, then slowly the disasters emerged, and then I was left alone and could not do everything, it was really burdensome. So that’s why I started this initiative with Cecilia and Angelo Corona of Cooperativa Terranuova who are farmers and I like having them. This is my idea—to get out from under the weight of everything—to gather as much as possible what we produce in Sardinia and sell it. It’s not easy, I’m always seeking difficult solutions . . . It is not easy because there are disastrous communication networks in Sardinia. I receive more quickly from the mainland than from Sardinia.

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But Spiga clung to the ideals of solidarity that had led her to open the store, “I have a dream. A small dream—to become self-­sufficient, and above all to learn again to live together, to be solidary among ourselves. It is hard for all of us . . . but we have to return to communicating, to being solidary, to exchanging things. It is the only way to save ourselves.” Interestingly, her dream focused on the revitalization of smallholder farming, the same dream whose effectiveness has been well argued by Van der Ploeg (2010). Spiga continued: Here we could do it. I always say if I win the lottery, and I don’t play, I would buy all the uncultivated lands and I would cultivate them all organically, naturally, the way they did in the old days. I would create farmers this way. But even here in San Sperate there is envy, it’s true. Everyone has a little piece of land, they all have a tractor for which they have to pay the bank for one hundred years. Look, buy one and divide it among ten farmers, no? . . . We have to return to community. Even in the villages this is lost.

Spiga held a goal of uniting and supporting the local organic farmers who were not part of S’Atra Sardigna’s cooperative: Maybe it’s a bit presumptuous but I’d like to form a network of small organic producers and try to unite them . . . Because there is a monopoly over small producers, those who are not with that group [S’Atra Sardigna] are alone and scattered . . . It would be important to try to unite them and organize them for sales in Italy and abroad, not just here. The products we make are good, take artichokes, people would buy them at prices for gold.

Spiga reflected the complex motivations and tensions of economies of sentiment. Her relationship with farmers Cecilia and Angelo Corona was not solely economic, that is, not solely based on making the most money possible from their labor, but rather was steeped in common values, struggles, and friendship. “The Coronas pay me for the space, rent for the days they come . . . When they aren’t here, they leave a few things and we sell them. They give me a small percentage but they have little money to spare—we’re all trying to help each other out.” Spiga recognized how hard the Coronas worked, how little money they made, and how great were the obstacles they faced—both those of the bureaucracy and those of making a living from the land. She was emotionally as well as financially involved with them. This was clear when Spiga, Jim, and I spent a Sunday at the Coronas’ farm, touring the fields, learning about their challenges, and having a meal with them. Spiga told us about an innovative example of solidarity economies that she participated in: Sardex, a closed-­circuit system of exchange between Sardinian businesses who were members of the network.7 It was founded by four young people in 2009 and launched in 2010 (Luna 2012). Each business that joined received a start-­up amount of interest-­free Sardex representing its investment in the network. Sardex were pegged to euros and used as a medium for the

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exchange of goods and services; its founders called Sardex “ethical finance” (Luna 2012). Spiga was skeptical at first, but eventually realized that Sardex expanded her networks and customer base—with an intake of what she estimated in 2013 to be 300 to 400 Sardex per week. One woman came in to Emporio Bio never having heard of organic food or knowing what it was, and she spent 250 Sardex. Spiga bought a new computer and a new refrigerator for the store with Sardex. She used them at a participating salon to pay for facials and massages. The Sardex network was continually expanding and included dentists, carpenters, mechanics, electricians, advertising firms, clothing stores, hotels, restaurants, the AngloAmerican school, a nursery school, and other services. One of the advantages of Sardex, according to its founders, was that “wealth stays in the region and local products are given value” (quoted in Luna 2012, my translation). Spiga in fact used Sardex to buy high-­quality Sardinian goods from a distributor who went around the island and bought them from producers. He brought her goat milk and yogurt, typical products made with myrtle, and Sardinian pasta. She liked working with him and said, “I am interested in stocking more Sardinian products.” It was convenient to pay him with Sardex, but this was a very tiny percentage of her stock, and she had to pay most of her bills in euros. Another manifestation of the solidarity economy was the network “Scirarindi,” Sardinian for “wake up,” a website featuring Sardinian initiatives in food, organic building, ecotourism, and health that aimed for “psychological, physical, and spiritual well-­being of the individual and the collectivity in harmony with the environment.”8 Both Emporio Bio and S’Atra Sardigna figured on the Scirarindi website, along with many other businesses and groups, including some discussed earlier in the book: the GAS, the vegetarian restaurant, Annalisa Lecca’s farm Alba, and Marco Maxia’s caper operation. In spite of these networks of support, Francesca Spiga faced many challenges in running her store. One was competition with supermarkets: “In Sardinia there is a huge concentration of shopping centers, more than in all of Italy relative to the population we have. Imagine the difficulty of working in an environment like this where people are considered sheep to bring to pasture in those places. It is not easy.” Another was competition from the organic food cooperative S’Atra Sardigna, whose five organic food stores in Cagliari and vicinity left only a “little slice” of the market for her. Another difficulty was finding reliable organic suppliers from Sardinia. In 2011, she had tried to purchase eggs locally, but gave up and imported organic eggs from the mainland; in 2013, she was cautiously optimistic that she had found a reliable local supplier. A farmer had come to her store and offered her Sardinian chickpeas to sell; she enthusiastically told him to bring her all he had, but she never saw him again. Ensuring a regular, dependable supply was a big problem for small purveyors like her who wanted to find a local source. Like everyone I talked to in the food sector, Francesca Spiga expressed frustration with the bureaucracy: “From a fiscal point of view, the State kills us. I can’t live. It is impossible. The taxation is impossible.” Tight finances and long hours had

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discouraged Spiga, and she was considering selling her business or taking on a partner. But finding someone with the dedication to undertake the heavy workload and challenges of running a small business had so far not panned out. Another challenge was consumer interest and acceptance: “In our Sardinian environment, it is not so easy to propose new things, alternatives—people are still very set in their ways . . . Because you know how we Sardinians are—‘no, no, my oranges are the best,’ ‘no, no, mine are a whole different quality.’ We have to overcome this.” There was a small part of the population who embraced her efforts to supply healthy organic food, but there was also resistance on three fronts. The first was the fact that many in Cagliari did not need her store because they had their own sources of local products: “Living on an island, we don’t feel strongly the demands for the natural because everyone has a garden back in their village.” The second form of customer resistance was to paying the sometimes higher prices charged for organic and/or local foods. Spiga described the challenge: Until people change their mentality, I see things as always difficult. Because people buying organic produce have the same attitude as normal people—they want everything free, everything at a low cost . . . They want to exploit the labor of others and that’s it. They make a lot of talk about fair trade, and then do not help their neighbor who is farming and even say their produce is expensive. They have a whole bunch of issues, they complain about everything . . . I recently heard customers saying to the Coronas, “Oh, but you’re expensive!” I know what work they do, and I would like to see the customers pick string beans, and see what it takes, or strawberries, to work all day picking strawberries, and how much should they cost? It bothers me. I would resolve these problems by making everyone work a week in the countryside to make them shut up. There is no other way. We have gotten away from reality.

A third reason for customer resistance to buying organic was distrust. I heard many people in the community express skepticism about whether products were really local, fresh, or organic. Ferretti and Magaudda (2006) noted very high levels of distrust in food among Italians in general. This pervasive fear of being deceived made Spiga’s work even more difficult. She said: People are full of resentment and anger because in my opinion we have a state that is oppressing us, and so everyone is trying to trick you . . . You don’t see reality how it truly is, but you see everything the same. So if all are cheaters (imbroglioni), then those who are growing organic foods are too. You hear, “Eh, they are clever (furbi), they are making a lot of money. The strawberries are expensive,” and so on. Egotism and fear, we are paralyzed by fear.

Spiga highlighted the same issue that Annalisa Lecca and Paola Sanna raised— without trust, the social compact broke down and profit-­making ruled. Economies of sentiment aimed to foster trust through personal relationships and to promote collective wellbeing.

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Bioagrumi di Monteporceddus and Matteo Floris Economies of sentiment motivated small organic farmer/distributor Matteo Floris. When I met him in April 2011, he was still filled with passion for the path he was forging into the alternative food sector, though he ruefully acknowledged many struggles. He and his then partner, Paola Francione, had a small organic email-­ordering home-­delivery business, which they operated from their residence in Monteporceddus in the Sarrabus region, thirty miles east of Cagliari. They cultivated organically a rented orchard of 300 orange and lemon trees and a small garden. They sold not only their own fruits and vegetables but also Sardinian foods grown by other small organic producers (e.g., olive oil, wine, artichokes, legumes) and fair-­trade imported products (e.g., bananas). Each week, they emailed about 400 clients a list of their offerings, received 20 to 50 orders, spent a day traveling to producers all around the Cagliari agricultural hinterland to pick up goods, spent a day boxing the orders, and spent a day driving them around to that week’s clients. They valued the work and the relationships they forged, but regretted making only a meager living. What motivated Matteo Floris into the alternative food sector, he said, was taste—the disappointing taste of the supermarket food that invaded Sardinia at the turn of the millennium—and all it represented: I decided to get into agriculture when at 18, 20 years old I began to do my own food shopping. Often it happened that I bought fruit with a beautiful form, a beautiful appearance, beautiful colors, and brought it home and tried it, and it didn’t have any flavor, it had no taste. And so from the beginning [my decision to get into organic farming] grew from the taste of food.

Figure 8.3  Matteo Floris

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For Matteo Floris, the recognition of supermarket food’s inferior quality led to self-­education: And then you go and inform yourself . . . and you discover precisely that it is not necessary to eat strawberries all year long, because strawberries have their season, and so also zucchini, eggplant, peppers, tomatoes. We are used to seeing them twelve months a year on our shelves, and instead discover that tomatoes are a summer crop, and discover that the product you bought at the supermarket, beautiful to look at, was nothing like the fruit that you harvested or acquired from someone who had a small garden. And then you begin to ask yourself questions, and give yourself answers.

Those questions and answers drove Floris into his work of producing and distributing local and organic food. He was an example of young people’s return to farming (ricontadinazione) discussed in Chapter  4. Although he had attained a secondary school degree in computer technology, he disliked that field and started growing vegetables in 1998. In 2011, he defined himself as a contadino—a farmer or peasant. Historian Massimo Montanari (2017) pointed out that the contadino was a long-­disparaged figure in Italian popular culture and history, and was deemed ignorant, uncivilized, and ill-­mannered. But Montanari argued that the farmer has recently experienced an upswing in prestige and respect in Italy due in part to the local food movement, which may explain why Matteo Floris proudly claimed the label contadino. Floris and Francione started the organic food home-­delivery business in 2006 and supplied Cagliari consumers, restaurants, and two nursery schools. Floris recognized that the desire for good tastes that motivated him could also motivate his customers and was continually proselytizing. He encouraged the nursery schools he supplied to use colors and tastes to attract the youngsters to eat vegetables, for example by puréeing spinach into mashed potatoes to make a lovely green dish, or adding squash to get vibrant orange potatoes. He encouraged the nursery school administrators to buy local and seasonal as well as organic. They originally ordered 2,200 pounds of bananas and 110 pounds of oranges, and he said, “Look, I don’t produce bananas, I produce oranges, you need to buy more oranges and fewer bananas.” They wanted apples all year round, and he said, “Look, apples are not grown in Sardinia, we can get them from the Trentino region [in northern Italy], but not all year round, and at other times of the year they have to come from Chile. Is that what you want?” He tried to work with them to transform their standardized menu into one that followed the seasons and increased consumption of tasty, locally available foods. He believed that Sardinian farmers could only survive by producing and selling fresh organic products to local consumers, and his home-­delivery business aimed to generate those consumers. Commitment to organic, local, seasonal, flavorful food led Floris to look deeply into the food system: There is a whole political discourse . . . about whether industrial agriculture is sustainable for our planet and hence if organic agriculture is an obligatory future

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. . . With our consumption there is waste while in the global south there are those who are dying of hunger . . . I don’t like humans exploiting other humans, and I don’t like exploiting the planet. So it is a critique of the logic of the profit motive.

But Floris struggled to make a living as a small alternative food producer and distributor. It was difficult to develop a steady, predictable, committed clientele and supply chain. He had to charge high enough prices to make it worth his while to do all the driving, packing, and delivering, but clients complained about the cost. However, Matteo Floris believed in challenging the tasteless global food system by supporting local farming and organic food networks, and he gave it his all. Nonetheless, Floris’s organic email home-­delivery business was always precarious, with uncertain income and small profit margins. The global economic crisis that began in 2008 had reached full sway in Italy in 2011 when I began this research. It made things harder for organic and specialty product vendors, Floris and others told me, as consumers cut back on more expensive purchases. “I live below the poverty line,” he said in 2011. Floris tried in 2013 to expand his reach and cut his travel and delivery costs by opening a stand at the municipal Santa Chiara market in central Cagliari to sell his oranges and vegetables directly and have a place where customers could pick up their orders. But the Santa Chiara market had been languishing for several years and had few customers, so his sales there were minimal and insufficient to keep him afloat. Moreover, he and his former life and business partner, Paola Francione, broke up, and thus he lost her support and labor, as well as access to her land where they had lived and grown vegetables. Causes of the break-­up, Floris said, were the stress of both living and working together and their chronic economic instability. They were not alone. Among my study participants, two other marriages failed. Vegetarian restaurant owners Serra and Ferraris divorced but remained business partners; Emporio Bio owner Francesca Spiga forged on alone after splitting with her husband. Scholars have shown that trying to build new economies and politics in the alternative food movement could be stressful, and that the failure of marriages could lead to the failure of alternative food enterprises (Paxson 2013: 81). On May 6, 2014, Matteo Floris sent out an email to his client group with the subject: “no organic shopping: I quit! I give up! I’m throwing it in.” Sadly, Floris announced that in spite of his best efforts, “trying to hurl my heart over the obstacles . . . against all adversity,” his debts had accumulated, and he could no longer stay in business. He hoped to find another path to continue organic farming, but for the time being had to close. His experience uncovered some of the challenges of succeeding in the alternative food sector. His business was too small to benefit from economies of scale and to ensure constant and reliable sourcing. His costs rose when he lost the “free” labor of his companion and had to hire a helper. Purchases fell with the economic recession that began in 2008. He faced competition for the organic market from the bigger and more powerful S’Atra Sardigna, whose five stores, along with Emporio Bio, provided more dependable and convenient access for consumers than his once-­a-week email-­ordering system.

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Conclusion All three firms revealed the difficulties of running an organic food business while trying to create solidarity, sustainability, and personal wellbeing. On the business side, competition was rough—not only with supermarkets and ordinary food shops but with each other. Establishing trustworthy suppliers and regular customers took time. Clients were diffident and picky, and they complained about prices. Starting their businesses demanded a huge labor input which generated low profits, at least for Floris and Spiga. Both suffered the break-­up of important relationships—Spiga with her husband, some clients, and the supplier ECOR. But she also built rich reciprocal relationships with other clients, suppliers, Sardex, and producers—especially with the farmers of Cooperativa Terranuova. These networks demonstrated the power of solidarity economies to support alternative businesses. S’Atra Sardigna cooperative was a much bigger operation than Emporio Bio and Bioagrumi di Monteporceddus. It collected more activities under one expansive roof—food production, processing, and sales. In addition to selling the cooperative’s products locally, S’Atra Sardigna also participated in the global economy by selling some of its “typical” Sardinian products abroad. It thus joined other small and medium enterprises (SMEs) exporting food products and improving Italy’s trade balance: “SMEs are responsible for 65% of total Italian food exports . . .” (Brasili and Fanfani 2010: 18). Locally identified food products were unique, and hence less vulnerable to global competition—providing a potentially lucrative niche abroad as well as at home. All three businesses faced challenges reconciling success and solidarity— ensuring quality, finding markets, allocating profits, and competing with other conventional and organic farmers and food shops. They were animated by economies of sentiment—desiring to make the world a better place as well as to make a living, but they faced a tough struggle because profit margins were low and hours were long. They had to play by the rules of the market—seeking to sell products that people were willing to pay for, but at the same time promoting ethical and sustainable production. They constantly balanced commerce and ideals as they practiced a politics of the possible (Gibson-Graham 2006). Commerce is a significant dimension of the food system, and there is a small but suggestive literature that explores how food stores interweave economic and social functions in several different contexts (Anguelovski 2015, Everts 2010, Jochnowitz 2001, Mankekar 2002, Sen 2016).9 Alternative food businesses could have a real impact on community formation, and culinary and cultural diversity; Francesca Spiga said that she had established a solid network of clients who believed in her effort to supply organic and local food. But small businesses faced vigorous competition from supermarkets. In Italy, the agro-­industrial food system marked by the expansion and concentration of the food economy and the growth of supermarkets exploded at the end of the twentieth century. Italy was one of the last countries in Western Europe to embrace supermarkets; the first opened in Milan in 1957 (Scarpellini 2004),10 and only in the late 1980s did they burgeon, more than tripling from 2,858

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in 1988 to 9,059 in 2006. In the south and islands (including Sardinia), the growth was even more striking—an almost ten-­fold increase in just thirty years—from 289 supermarkets in 1981 to 2,839 in 2010 (Rapporto 2010: 251). Moreover, Sardinia had more square meters of supermarkets than any other Italian region.11 According to Golisano and Liberati (2010: 270, my translation), “In the [Italian] food sector in twelve years (1996–2007), the traditional stores and ambulatory venders lost 31 percent of their sales outlets while the big chain stores grew by 41.3 percent.” Yet there have been hints of a counter-­trend towards short distribution channels. In 2015, supermarkets in Italy suffered a contraction. An article in the important Italian daily newspaper La Repubblica titled “the sunset of supermarkets” (Tonacci 2015, my translation) noted their decline from a high of 29,366 in 2011 to 27,668 in 2015—a 6 percent drop. Ferretti and Magaudda (2006: 161) found that Italians valued local food and “personal relationships with the staff of the shop where they purchase food”—preferences that kept small shops and farmers’ markets afloat in spite of the tidal-­wave of chain supermarkets. Golisano and Liberati (2010) cited a study by the European Economic and Social Commission (CESE 2008) which decried the concentration of the Western European food distribution sector and encouraged farmers’ markets and direct sales to promote local food and keep prices down. Meloni et al. (2009: 8) noted that, although in 2008 only 5 percent of Sardinian agro-­pastoral enterprises practiced short-­chain direct food sales, this sector promised expansion because of the population’s favorable attitude toward local food—as was evidenced by the success of Cooperativa Terranuova’s produce sales at Emporio Bio and the growth of S’Atra Sardigna’s revenue. The failure of Bioagrumi di Monteporceddus, however, showed that short-­chain distribution alone was not sufficient to sustain a business, and that price and convenience mattered even in economies of sentiment. Although Bioagrumi di Monteporceddus had closed, Emporio Bio had stayed afloat for thirteen years, and S’Atra Sardigna’s five small and medium-­sized stores were going strong. Alternative shops like the organically focused S’Atra Sardigna and Emporio Bio could offer spaces for economies of sentiment with glimmers of solidarity. But they faced many challenges as they tried to advance food community, equity, and sustainability while securing sufficient customers in a small and competitive market.

Chapter 9 C onclusion : I talian food activism and global democrac y

Introduction This chapter evaluates the relevance of food activism in Cagliari to similar efforts around the globe. Food historian Massimo Montanari (2013: 71) claimed that Italy did have broad relevance because of “its alimentary and gastronomic model” rooted in local culture and territorio, which offered a fruitful alternative to the global agro-­food industry. In contrast to many other countries, Italy is culinarily diverse because of its broad range of climate zones in a relatively small area, and Sardinians have access to fresh local produce all year round—something that people in less favorable agricultural zones do not have. This book has explored how in Cagliari, as all over Italy, the emotional, cultural, and economic importance of food has persuaded some to activism. They included consumers, businessmen, government employees, teachers, farmers, restaurateurs, young people, and retirees. Three themes emerged in their efforts: place, taste, and community. This conclusion evaluates these foci for the overriding goal of food democracy.

Place In Sardinia, the local food movement, encapsulated in the concept of territorio, was a pillar of food activism and had both strengths and drawbacks. Many shared Matteo Floris’s belief that high-­quality organic production was key to economic and cultural survival in Sardinia because the island’s small-­scale agriculture could not compete with global factory farming; he said, “The challenge is precisely this. We either distinguish ourselves because we succeed in making high quality food, and we put Sardinia in the taste of the food we eat, or we lose the challenge . . . We do not have the quantity to compete on the market with low prices; we have to stand out for quality and only thus will we save ourselves.” But, as Floris’s own struggles revealed, it was very difficult to sustain a market for high-­quality items that would provide a living wage for producers and be affordable for consumers, many of whom were struggling to eat, not to mention eat well.

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Sardinian producers turned to resistance farming to maximize their economic wellbeing and reach. They aimed for high-­quality production of typical products like Floris’s organic oranges, Carignano wine, Villacidro olive oil, Selargius capers, or heritage breed cattle and pigs. They practiced multifunctionality—working on and off the farm, and broadening their activities to include teaching, agro-­tourism, and farm visits. Some added value to foods by artisanal processing or organic production. Although organic farming could be industrial, large scale, and based on monocropping, as Guthman (2003) pointed out for the USA, many of its proponents linked organic to local food, small farmers, short-­chain distribution, and sustainability. Commitment to organic and local food could lead to a politicized conception of food sovereignty (Wald 2015), which emphasized democratic community control over food systems and was meaningful to Sardinians who were loyal to territorio foods. These provided economic strength, a marketing strategy, and a political rallying cry for farms, the GAS, the urban garden, school cafeterias, and the food businesses S’Atra Sardigna, Emporio Bio, and Bioagrumi di Monteporceddus. But scholars have noted the potential nativistic and exclusionary dimensions of an uncritical focus on local food (DuPuis and Goodman 2005, Hinrichs 2003, Pratt 2007). Allen et al. (2003: 74) emphasized that, “Directly oppositional stances cannot be successful when they are only local; they require the power of a broader social movement to prevail.” In other words, activism had to go beyond what David Harvey (1996) called “militant particularism,” which referred to people acting out resistance in their daily lives from their specific local social positions, to “global ambition,” which involved seeing their own struggles as part of the worldwide political economy. Moreover, DuPuis and Goodman (2005: 364) urged pushing localism beyond a “commodification of territoriality” to a critical examination of “how to make localism into an effective social movement of resistance to globalism.” This is what the producer movement called La Via Campesina sought to do through alliances with peasants all over the world to advance food sovereignty (Desmarais 2007, Martínez-Torres and Rosset 2014, Thivet 2014, Wald 2015). As discussed in Chapter  7, the local food movement could exclude foreign cuisines and people. “Ethnic food bans,” such as that passed for the historic center of the quaint Tuscan town of Lucca, codified the exclusion of outsiders from the cultural center (Donadio 2009). In Italy, this was a dangerous trend because it could offer support for anti-­immigrant fervor at a time when immigrants were rapidly increasing in number. In the USA, as Julie Guthman (2008a) has shown, the local food movement has unwittingly propagated prevailing white middle-­ class mores that sometimes have made local food unpalatable to low-­income people, non-­citizens, and people of color. Moreover, local food might be a problematic mobilizing strategy for food justice in situations where people have been thrown off their land, are refugees or immigrants, or are always on the move like migrant farm workers. Food activism grounded in locality has had difficulty forging ties with people across differences of class and national origin to make good food accessible to all. Clare Hinrichs (2003: 36) offered a hopeful vision in conceptualizing “diversity-­receptive localization” as a counterpoint to the “defensive localization” that has so often

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prevailed. “Diversity-­receptive localization” in Cagliari could involve studying and eating global cuisines alongside local ones, recognizing the contributions of diverse ethnic groups to producing local food, and including locally grown foreign spices or vegetables in the taste experiences so essential to Italian food activism.

Taste As seen throughout this book, taste has been a key hook and strategy for those in Cagliari seeking to change the food system. They highlighted the good tastes of local foods and contrasted them with the bland, stale flavors of industrial foods traveling long distances to reach consumers. Taste was a key engine of the commensality that served to forge alliances. It was a central focus for producers seeking to increase the value of their wines, capers, strawberries, and olive oils. It played a key part in farm-­to-school programs in educating pupils about Sardinian culture. The search for good taste motivated restaurateurs to purchase local foods, to reclaim old recipes, and to innovate by using typical products in new ways. For many Italians, taste was a key factor influencing their food choices, and for some it became a powerful motivator to activism. Exploration of the meanings of taste for Cagliari food advocates supports anthropologists’ claims that taste is socially constructed through interpersonal acts of sharing and talking about food (Counihan and Højlund 2018, Howes and Classen 2013, Pedersen 2015, Sutton 2010). Preferred tastes and their meanings vary across cultures, and Chapter  5 discussed the fact that middle-­class Italian families give much more attention to taste in their mealtime conversations than Americans. This helps explain Italians’ lifelong attention to taste and its power in inspiring food activism and may mean that taste is a less important focus in the USA and elsewhere. Further research is needed to uncover the potential of taste to generate oppositional food practices in diverse cultures across the globe. But an important question is whether concern with taste is a luxury only open to those with money and power, and whether they impose anti-­democratic taste distinctions that serve to separate rather than unite food activists. Pierre Bourdieu (1984) famously explored how taste served to buttress class differences. Some scholars have found elitist notions of taste in Slow Food events, which alienate some members (Chrzan 2004, Hayes-Conroy and Hayes-Conroy 2010). Moreover, people simply do not agree about what constitutes “good” taste. Food advocates may be much more successful in opening up discussions of taste and how it is linked to production methods, freshness, and processing, as the Slow Food caper tasting in Chapter 5 did, rather than trying to establish absolutist taste hierarchies.

Forging community A central goal of many food advocacy efforts is to build communities of resistance capable of multiplying the efforts of individuals. Commensality is an important

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route to community, but so is working together in the urban garden, joining a solidarity purchase group, participating in a farm-­to-school network, shopping regularly at organic food stores, or dining at alternative restaurants. As people join with others, they educate themselves, argue about different strategies, refine their political understandings, and make friends. They counter the alienation and loss of community typical of modern urban life through a focus on making food better and more just, but the path to collective democratic activism can be rocky.

Challenges One important challenge is recruiting people and sustaining their participation in activities that can be time-­consuming, inconvenient, unorganized, and unfamiliar. According to Navé Wald (2015: 113), some challenges are: “the time required for decentralised and consensual decision-­making, the difficulty of ‘emotional intensity’ and personal conflict, and . . . non-­participatory democratic habits and values of members.” These emerged in the Cagliari GAS, as they have in other alternative food initiatives. To stay alive, the GAS had to get enough participation and purchases from members to be economically and socially sustainable. An email went out to GAS members on June 7, 2011, entitled “Little enthusiasm?” (my translation). It lamented the low volume of orders and expressed fear that people’s commitment to the GAS was faltering. This may have in part been due to the economic crisis which was then in full swing; at the time of the writing of this book, the GAS endures. Another challenge faced by the GAS, and by many alternative food initiatives, was in leadership and participation. Only a small number of people attended meetings; the most successful events were the producer visits, but these were one-­ shot events and sustaining member involvement was difficult. President Lucio Brughitta was recognized by all as the driving force behind the GAS. Some said, “He does a lot which is great because few others step up,” and others said, “Lucio does too much and we need more participation from others.” The GAS suffered from a problem common to many alternative food initiatives like Slow Food discussed in Chapter 2: They were run by volunteers, who came and went according to other responsibilities, interests, and burnout. Moreover, simply participating in GAS purchases demanded ordering ahead and picking up the items in a two-­hour evening window of time, or attending one of the GAS farmers’ markets—not as convenient as popping into a store or supermarket and a deterrent to those who were not fully committed. Similarly, growing food at the urban garden, transitioning to organic farming, shopping at farmers’ markets, or joining Slow Food all demanded extra time and effort that people did not always have. I chatted about this at the GAS herb-­gathering expedition discussed in Chapter  5 with a young couple, Paola and Fabrizio, aged twenty-­seven. He was from Naples and she was from Cagliari, where they were living together and where he had found a good job. Her field was information and communication, but at the time of the GAS event she was unemployed. They joined the GAS because of the

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excellent local products and good prices. Paola said that although it was not very practical to go at specified times to pick up the order, it worked because she was unemployed and had the time, but if she were working, she would probably just go to the supermarket even though she likes the GAS products better. I asked if joining had a “political goal,” and she said no, for her it was an “individual goal”— to have better food through a short supply chain. She revealed the challenges to the GAS and other alternative food institutions of retaining members who had a culinary but not political commitment to the project. When I asked GAS president Lucio Brughitta about the challenges the GAS faced, he replied “many.” In addition to keeping members active, there was the problem of what Brughitta called “mentality.” They had to push against the fact that, “in Sardinia associationism does not come easily,” a comment about Sardinians’ resistance to working cooperatively echoed by many—and challenged by others. He quoted a famous saying of the Spanish colonizers that Sardinians were “pocos, locos, malunidos”—“few, crazy, disunited.” Brughitta decried this disunity and declared that the challenge was to decide “whether to hoe that small garden alone or hoe it together with others and share it with others.” Former GAS member and sociologist Carla Locci identified another big challenge—how to grow the GAS movement and pass from solidarity food purchasing to broader political empowerment. Alliances with producers as well as with other food advocacy groups were essential but elusive. The struggles of the GAS raised the question of how much people can change the world by changing their consumption habits and educating themselves and others about the food system. Brughitta knew the GAS made only a small difference, but he dreamed of expansion: The problem is that still today we are few solidarity purchase groups. It is a kind of economy that is starting to go forward but is limping. We would like to order much more and consume much more than we do now to give further incentive to our producers, but it’s a beginning. I think that this way of defining the market, this relationship between the city and the country, can be the relationship of the future, the relationship of tomorrow. Let’s hope we’ll get there.

Getting there, however, demanded more than just the actions of a small group of consumers. The research of Giovanni Orlando (2011) on efforts of “citizen consumers” to establish a farmers’ market in Palermo, Sicily, showed the necessity of having institutionalized political support to make significant progress in the alternative food movement. Although consumers and farmers were able to establish a farmers’ market in Palermo, without the city government’s support they lost access to the town square where they wanted to hold it. Similarly, the Cagliari urban garden association was hampered by lack of public political support for their project and had to make do with a small private garden plot lacking water while acres of public decommissioned military lands were unused. The success of the Medio Campidano farm-­to-school program (discussed in Chapter 7) backed by the Sardinian agricultural agency LAORE, the health agency ASL, the school district, and several farmers showed how effective institutional collaborations

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could be. Yet some groups, like the GAS, chose purposely to stay outside formal institutions to remain flexible and unfettered. Scholars have also questioned whether a few small efforts to redirect production, distribution, and consumption like those underway in Cagliari could effectively change the global food system. GAS president Lucio Brughitta had an optimistic vision: I hope for a galaxy of GAS, as numerous as the soap bubbles of a child who plays with soapy water. I dream of a galaxy of GAS, I dream of a network of producers of the new millennium with a hoe in one hand and the internet in the other. This is my dream.

Notes Chapter 1 1 Sardinia became part of Italy with unification in 1860. “The top-­down approach” has defined Sardinia’s political and economic relations with the Italian state and reflected “the desire to ‘normalize’ a region that was deemed as being too different and distinct by the political ruling classes” (Onnis et al. 2009: 1324). The “Plan of Rebirth” (Piano di Rinascita) launched by the Italian state in the 1960s aimed to eradicate peasant agriculture and small-­scale pastoralism and develop a petrol-­chemical industry, but ultimately failed (Onnis et al. 2009: 1326). 2 For European Commission (2016) data on Sardinia, see https://ec.europa.eu/growth/ tools-­databases/regional-­innovation-monitor/base-­profile/sardinia, accessed June 6, 2016. 3 Shepherds have responded to their declining economic wellbeing by organizing politically into the Sardinian Shepherds’ Movement—Movimento Pastori Sardi (Pitzalis and Zerilli 2013). 4 It is difficult to find reliable statistics on food imports to Sardinia, but interviewees and the media regularly claimed that 80–85 percent of the island’s food was imported. For example, the newspaper L’Unione Sarda wrote on April 25, 2016: “a region like ours that imports eighty per cent of what is brought to the table each day” (http://www. unionesarda.it/articolo/cronaca/2016/04/25/frutta_e_verdura_importati_da_spagna_ cina_stati_uniti_nord_africa-68-491063.html, accessed March 2, 2018, my translation). 5 DOP refers to Denominazione di Origine Protetta—Protected Denomination of Origin, or PDO; and IGP refers to Indicazione Geografica Protetta—Protected Geographic Indication, or PGI. 6 Sardinia was a part of Italy yet different and distinct. For example, although almost everyone spoke Italian, and this was the language of law, business, politics, and schools, Sardo—a catchall term for three main language groups (Pittau 1970, Wagner 1928, 1951)—persisted in the villages and in some urban neighborhoods. It was “one of the fifteen European minority languages with more than one million speakers,” but it was “considered an endangered language by UNESCO” (Capra et al. 2015: 2). 7 In the scholarly study of food activism, some key works are: On solidarity purchase groups (Fonte 2013, Grasseni 2013), ethical consumption (Carrier and Luetchford 2012), farmers’ markets (Alkon 2012, Counihan 2015, Markowitz 2010, Orlando 2011), community-­ supported agriculture (Lang 2010, Obach and Tobin 2014), organic and biodynamic farming (Garcia-Parpet 2014, Guthman 2003), the anti-GMO movement (Fitting 2014, Heller 2012, Schurman and Munro 2010), Slow Food (Leitch 2000, 2003, Sassatelli and Davolio 2010, Siniscalchi 2010a, 2010b, 2012, 2013a, 2013b, 2014a, 2014b, 2015), Via Campesina (Desmarais 2007, Holt-Giménez 2009, Thivet 2014, Wald 2014), Fair Trade (Moberg and Lyon 2010, Reichman 2014, Shreck 2008), and many other initiatives. 8 The term “food activist” was explicitly addressed and broadly defined in Counihan and Siniscalchi (2014) and has come to have wide use; “food advocate” comes from Kimura (2011) and “food rebel” from Winne (2011).

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9 Their emotion-­filled interviews fit Laura DeLind’s (2006: 126) call “for re-­situating the campaign for local food within the realm of meaning and memory.” 10 Meredith Abarca (2006: 9–10) develops a similar concept of “theory from the ground up” and highlights the ways ordinary Mexican and Mexican American working-­class women make sense of their lives through cooking and speaking about it. 11 Geographer Julie Guthman (2008a: 443) writes, “More attention needs to be given to the cultural practices of food activism including more reflection and care given to the idioms we use and the historical constructions on which they lie.” Geographer Patricia Allen and colleagues affirm that, “Discovering how people working in these [alternative agrifood] organizations view the world and how they see their place in challenging and reshaping the agrifood system is an essential step for better understanding the role of these organizations in social change” (Allen et al. 2003: 68). 12 Apart from Deborah Barndt’s (1999) edited volume containing several articles which take a feminist approach to food activism and focus on women (Field 1999, Moffett and Morgan 1999, Villagomez 1999), there is little work on gender and food activism, and most of what there is focuses on women. See Allen and Sachs (2007), Counihan (2012, 2014), Hayes-Conroy and Hayes-Conroy (2008), Schroeder (2006). 13 Some studies that focus explicitly on food and gender in Italian history and culture are: Assmuth (1997), Counihan (1988, 1998, 1999, 2004), Romano, Mencarini, and Tanturri (2012), Saraceno (2011), Saraceno and Keck (2011), Segalla (2016).

Chapter 2 1 Many historical and ethnographic studies of Sardinia have shown the economic, social, and cultural centrality of food all across the island—in the pastoral villages of the interior, the agricultural towns of the plains, and the fishing villages of the coast. Studies of Sardinian history and culture with information about foodways include Angioni (1974, 1976, 1989), Assmuth (1997), Barbiellini-Amidei and Bandinu (1976), Ben Amara and Guigoni (2006), Bodio (1879), Cannas (1978), Chessa (1906), Cirese et al. (1977), Cois (2015), Da Re (1990, 2015a, 2015b), Delitala (1978), Lai (2000, 2012), Ferrero Della Marmora (1839), Magliocco (1993), Mathias (1983), Maxia (2006), Meloni (1984), Mondardini Morelli (2006), Murru Corriga (2015), Somogyi (1973). French geographer Maurice Le Lannou’s (1941) Pâtres e Paysans de la Sardaigne based on extensive fieldwork in the 1930s is an essential source on the production, distribution, and consumption of food as well as the island’s geology, soils, climate, rivers, and landforms. Food anthropologist Alessandra Guigoni has done definitive original work on many aspects of the food system, especially the arrival, adoption, and indigenization in Sardinia of American plants like tomatoes, potatoes, beans, and prickly pear cactus (Guigoni 2009, 2011, 2015), as well as on contemporary efforts to revitalize small farming (Guigoni 2014). My doctoral dissertation (Counihan 1981) described agriculture, pastoralism, diet, meals, food exchanges, and rituals surrounding food in Bosa (Sassari) in 1978/9. Tracey Heatherington (2001, 2014) has written about the role of “authentic” food in Orgosolo in projecting a positive identity and about the complex interweavings of ethical consumption, sustainability, traditional honey production, and environmentalism in highland central Sardinia. 2 Some key studies of Italian food history and culture are Black (2012a), Camporesi (1980, 1996, 1998a, 1998b, 2000), Capatti et al. (1998), Capatti and Montanari (1999), Conti (2008), Counihan (1999, 2004), Helstosky (2004), Montanari (2006, 2013),

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Parasecoli (2004, 2014), Serventi and Sabban (2000), Somogyi (1973), Sorcinelli (1998), Teti (1976), Vercelloni (1998, 2001). 3 The explorer Alberto La Marmora (1839: 245) traveled to Sardinia in the early 1800s and found that the poor ate wild greens and prickly pear cactus fruit in season to supplement their legume soups and bread. Somogyi (1973) looked at government and scholarly sources to conclude that since the unification of Italy in 1860 through the 1960s and even into the 1970s, rural peasants all over Italy including Sardinia endured chronic dietary scarcity. Chessa (1906: 279–80) studied peasants around Sassari in 1906 and found, “Rarely do they eat meat or broth . . . In the summer they eat fruit and legumes. In the winter cereals and dried fruit. The quantity of food is scarce.” In the 1930s, geographer Le Lannou (1941: 288) found people subsisting on meager and monotonous diets consisting of almost 80 percent bread, with the rest mainly legumes and vegetables. Ethnographer Enrica Delitala (1978: 101, my translation) wrote, “Entire generations of shepherds, peasants, fishermen, small artisans, miners, etc. grew up on bread and olives, bread and tomatoes, bread and cheese, minestrone of vegetables and legumes, snails, and cheap fish; only in exceptional cases did they know meat or more elaborate dishes.” Key foods were bread, pasta, beans, chickpeas, favas, wild and cultivated greens, tomatoes, potatoes, fruit, nuts, olives, honey, and prickly pear, supplemented by small amounts of meat (beef, mutton, lamb, goat, chicken, game), fish and shellfish near the coast, cheese, and red wine. The overriding commonality was a preference for a local, seasonal diet relatively high in grains, legumes, and vegetables, and relatively low in meat and fats (Tessier and Gerber 2005). 4 Slow Food defines ecogastronomy at https://www.slowfood.com/about-­us/slow-­foodterminology/ accessed January 25, 2018. 5 Scholars, journalists, and Slow Food adherents have written about Slow Food. Scholarship includes Valeria Siniscalchi’s many articles: Siniscalchi (2010a, 2010b, 2012, 2013a, 2013b, 2014a, 2014b, 2015); as well as Chrzan (2004), Donati (2005), Gaytán (2004), Brackett (2011), Jones et al. (2003), Labelle (2004), Leitch (2000, 2003), Lotti (2010), Miele and Murdoch (2002, 2003), Parasecoli (2003), Paxson (2005), Peace (2006, 2008), Peano, Migliorini, and Sottile (2014), Pietrykowski (2004), Sassatelli and Davolio (2010), Schneider (2008), Simonetti (2012), West and Domingos (2012). Journalistic and insider accounts include Andrews (2008), Bukowski (2016), Petrini (2007), Petrini and Padovani (2006). 6 From Slow Food’s website https://www.slowfood.com/about-­us/slow-­foodterminology/ accessed February 20, 2018. 7 http://slowfood.com/international/8/slow-­food-terminology, accessed October 14, 2015. 8 In 2011, there were seven Slow Food chapters in Sardinia, but those with fewer than fifty members were closed and their members absorbed into the remaining chapters, of which there were five in 2018: Cagliari, Gallura, Nuoro, Sassari-Alghero, and Terre Oristanesi (www.slowfood.it accessed February 3, 2018). 9 Criticisms of Slow Food’s elitist elements include Chrzan (2004), Donati (2005), Gaytán (2004), Jones et al. (2003), Paxson (2005). 10 The six Slow Food presidia products in Sardinia are: Casizolu (stretched curd cow’s milk cheese), Osilo pecorino (sheep’s milk cheese), pompia (citrus fruit candied or used in sweets), San Gavino Monreale saffron, Sardinian Modican red steer, and shepherd’s pecorino sardo (sheep’s milk cheese). See http://www.fondazioneslowfood.com/en/ nazioni-­presidi/italy/?fwp_regioni_italiane_presidi=sardinia accessed Janaury 31, 2016. On Slow Food presidia, see Lotti (2010) on Basque Euskal Txerria pig, Siniscalchi (2013b) on pecorino sardo, West and Domingos (2012) on Serpa cheese in Portugal.

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11 On Slow Food farmers’ markets, literally “earth markets,” or mercati della terra, see http://www.mercatidellaterra.com consulted November 12, 2016. 12 In my 2009 study of thirty-­eight leaders or members of diverse Slow Food chapters, they were unanimous that one of the biggest challenges faced by Slow Food was the burnout of members. 13 The population of Cagliari grew from 92,689 in 1931 to 130,511 in 1951 (41 percent increase) to 173,540 in 1961 (33 percent over 1951, 87 percent over 1931), in part due to in-­migration (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_Cagliari accessed January 23, 2018). 14 While child and adult obesity rates have been increasing in Sardinia, as all over the globe, nonetheless, Sardinia has among the lowest rates in Italy (Sanna, Soro, and Canò 2006, Velluzzi et al. 2007). Central Sardinia is known for having exceptionally high numbers of very old people, whom studies have shown to be on average very well nourished (Buffa et al. 2010, Pes et al. 2013). 15 Sardinia’s 24,000 square kilometers contain 35,000 hectares of Italian, NATO, and USA military installations (about 1.5 percent of the island’s surface). These military installations, along with mines and oil refineries, have produced significant pollution in 18.5 percent of the island’s surface (L’Unione Sarda, April 16, 2015, p. 2). The official website of the Sardinian regional government describes “the military presence on the island” in detail. See http://www.regione.sardegna.it/argomenti/ambiente_territorio/ servitumilitari/cosasono.html, accessed December 4, 2015. 16 One friend of mine said she would never shop at Vivarelli’s store again after he refused to sell her a filet mignon unless she bought some lesser cuts as well.

Chapter 3 1 On the work of sociologist Benedetto Meloni’s research group on “food and place (cibo e territorio),” see Farinella and Meloni (2013), Locci (2013), Meloni and Farinella (2013), Meloni and Farinella (2015a, 2015b). 2 Traditionally, people referred to localities with specific and culturally important place names (Capra et al. 2015, Counihan 1981, Lai 2000, 2012, LeLannou 1941, Wagner 1928, 1951). 3 Slow Food says, “The preservation of territorio is also the preservation of taste” “la → salvaguardia del territorio è anche la salvaguardia del → gusto” (Ruffa and Monchiero 2002: 159). 4 http://www.dizionario-­italiano.org/Territorio consulted January 15, 2015. 5 In her book Wild Sardinia about disputes surrounding the creation of a national Gennargentu Park in central Sardinia, Tracey Heatherington did not use the word territorio, but discussed the significance of the “communal territory” or Commons to the people of Orgosolo, for whom the landscape was a constant recalling of their pastoral traditions, history, foods, and cultural practices (Heatherington 2010: 72–3). 6 See Di Giovine (2014) for a case study of the “heritigization” of local food in southern Italy. 7 Anthropologist Jeffrey Pratt (2007: 293) finds that “authenticity” is a useful tool for food rebels because it evokes “original, genuine, real, true, true to itself . . . defined against modern, ‘mass’ culture.” 8 See Counihan (2014b) and www.domusamigas.it.

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9 For more on the project, see the Domusamigas website http://domusamigas.it/I-SEMIDEL-FUTURO-Dal–20-al–23-Maggio–2015.html accessed December 8, 2015. See also Ceccarelli (2012) at http://www.scienceanddemocracy.it/interventi/intervento-­ ceccarelli.pdf accessed December 8, 2015. 10 The AGRIS website says “It is the agency of the Sardinian Region for scientific research, for technological experimentation and innovation in the agricultural, agro-­industrial and forestry sectors. The agency’s mission is to promote sustainable rural development, to safeguard and promote biodiversity, and to increase the competitiveness of the agency’s structure in the field of research” (http://www. sardegnaagricoltura.it/innovazionericerca/agris/ accessed February 20, 2018, my translation). 11 The LAORE website says “It is the agency for carrying out regional programs in agriculture and rural development. It promotes holistic development of rural territories and the environmental compatibility of agricultural activities, favoring multifunctionality, territorial specificity, quality production, and market competitiveness” (http://www.sardegnaagricoltura.it/assistenzatecnica/laore/ accessed February 20, 2018, my translation). 12 The list of traditional agricultural food products (elenco dei prodotti agroalimentari tradizionali) of the Ministry of Agricultural, Alimentary and Forest Politics (Ministero delle Politiche agricole, alimentari e forestali) is regularly updated, and the fourteenth update was published in 2014. See https://www.politicheagricole.it/flex/cm/pages/ ServeBLOB.php/L/IT/IDPagina/3276 accessed March 3, 2016. 13 Thanks to Alessandra Guigoni for indicating this website on the Biodiversity Law proposal: http://consiglio.regione.sardegna.it/XIVLegislatura/Disegni%20e%20 proposte%20di%20legge/propleg174.asp accessed February 14, 2018. 14 See http://www.indena.com/. 15 On Guigoni’s work as an applied public anthropologist, see Counihan (2014b). 16 Among others, the following have made important contributions to the study of urban gardens: Bellows (2004), Bendt, Barthel, and Colding (2012), Hale et al. (2011), Harper and Alonso (2016), Mares (2014), Martinez (2010), Krasny and Tidball (2012), Okvat and Zautra (2011), Pink (2008), Pudup (2008), Walter (2012, 2013), Weissman (2015). 17 See the following article for further information about the urban garden: http://www. castedduonline.it/cagliari/zona-­monteurpinu/13957/medici-­ingegneri-negozianti-­acagliari-­dilaga-la-­mania-orti-­urbani.html consulted March 19, 2014. 18 At the Terra e la Piazza farmers’ market, Luisa Massacci told me about the social agriculture based on garden therapy (ortoterapia) she and her husband ran for people on the autism spectrum. See http://www.pocopocosardegna.it accessed November 13, 2016. 19 Erasmo’s words reminded me of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels’s (1970: 53) famous vision of communist society where people could “hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner.” 20 On the sardo languages, see Ingrassia and Ferrer (2009), Pittau (1970), Wagner (1928, 1951). 21 After an extensive review of the literature on urban gardens, Pierre Walter (2013: 527) concluded, “present-­day community gardens can be vibrant sites of ‘counter-­ hegemonic’ public pedagogy and social movement learning.” 22 On terroir, see Bowen (2010), Demossier (2011), Paxson (2010a, 2010b), Teil (2012), Trubek (2008), Trubek, Guy, and Bowen (2010). On the local food movement, see DeLind (2006), DuPuis and Goodman (2005), Grasseni (2013), Hassanein (2003), Hinrichs (2003).

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23 On the LFM in the USA and world, see Allen et al. (2003), Counihan and Siniscalchi (2014), DuPuis and Goodman (2005), Hinrichs (2003). 24 On anti-­immigrant votes in Italy’s 2018 election, see Erlanger (2018). Some studies of immigration in Italy and Sardinia are: Ambrosini (2013a, 2013b), Bachis and Pusceddu (2013a, 2013b), Cinotto (2009), Cole (1998), Cole and Booth (2007), Contu (2013), Daly (1999), Gasparetti (2012), Meloni (2013), Perrotta (2014, 2015), Randall (2009), Riccio (1999), Sias (2013), Tayler (2014). In December 2011, an Italian with ties to the far right murdered two Senegalese immigrants and wounded several others at an open-­air market in Florence; the local imam was quoted in Italy’s national newspaper La Repubblica as calling this act “fruit of ten years of politics of hate against immigrants” (Montanari 2011). 25 http://www.ilpuntocoldiretti.it/attualita/Pagine/Immigrati,dallAssembleaColdirettiunp rogettocontroillavoronero.aspx accessed February 12, 2017. 26 According to Ambrosini (2013a, 2013b), access to Italian citizenship is difficult and prioritizes ancestry. While Italian law gives immediate citizenship to grandchildren of Italian emigrants, four years’ residency are required for EU citizens to apply for citizenship and ten years are required for non-EU immigrants, followed by a four-­year process after which the answer is usually negative. Children of immigrants can gain automatic citizenship only if they were born in Italy and lived there uninterruptedly to age eighteen. 27 http://www.regione.sardegna.it/argomenti/ambiente_territorio/servitumilitari/

Chapter 4 1 On the work of sociologist Benedetto Meloni’s research group on “food and place (cibo e territorio),” see Farinella and Meloni (2013), Locci (2013), Meloni and Farinella (2013), Meloni and Farinella (2015a), Meloni and Farinella (2015b), Meloni and Farinella (2015c). 2 Paxson (2010a: 46) talks about re-­territorialization as what Vermont cheese-­makers are doing to give economic and affective weight to their cheese. 3 Statistics are from Fabiani (1993: 550), ISTAT (2014: 13). 4 See http://www.ilpuntocoldiretti.it/attualita/Pagine/Cresconoigiovaniagrcioltori, 35nel2015.aspx accessed February 12, 2017. 5 Guigoni cited four examples of resistance to the agro-­industrial food system: the durum wheat/pasta cooperative Madonna d’Itria di Villamar; a green-­recycling business Casa verde CO2.0; Michele Cuscusa’s multifunctional sheep-­herding enterprise; and Scirarindi, a cultural association and website (www.scirarindi.org) that brings together a number of alternative food sector initiatives (Guigoni 2014a: 94–5). 6 Sardus Pater’s website is http://www.cantinesarduspater.it/index.php accessed February 21, 2017. 7 This article highlighted thirty-­three-year-­old farmer Lorenza Mercante from Siniscola, a town of 11,500 on the northeast coast of the island, who earned an anthropology degree at the University of Bologna, could not find work in her field, and returned to farm in her village in 2011. She took a course from LAORE (the Sardinian region agricultural development agency, see Chapter 7), learned from her father, used lands owned by her family, and farmed four hectares (ten acres), devoted to citrus and other fruit trees and vegetables. She was president of the association Terras Apertas composed of seven young farmers, including two other women, who sold at the

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Siniscola farmers’ market and to all the school cafeterias in Siniscola. She supported direct sales, interaction between producers and consumers, “knowledgeable consumption,” and better health. She loved working outside and being her own boss.   A similar but more nascent story was told to me by GAS solidarity purchase group member Giannella Todde in 2015. Her nephew Stefano, aged twenty-­five, had begun cultivating in Tonara, a town of 2,000 in the very center of Sardinia, the abandoned vegetable garden of his ninety-­two-year-old grandmother, which she had always maintained until she became too old to do it. But recently, Stefano had put the garden back into production, instructed by his grandmother. He and a friend were hoping to buy a small plot of land to cultivate on a larger scale and had bought a sow who had eleven piglets that they divided among four friends and planned to raise, slaughter, and preserve, again with the help and advice of the grandmother. Stefano also wanted to raise chickens and maybe other small animals. He was excited about growing “genuine things” and proud of his produce—he felt “satisfaction.” The economic crisis had nudged him—like many others—into farming. 8 Van der Ploeg (2014: 1004) gives an example of how larger size has reduced income in the European dairy agriculture: “in Europe over recent decades . . . the reallocation of milk quotas from small and low cost peasant units towards large, entrepreneurial farms led to the total income (realized with these quotas) declining by at least 21 percent.” 9 Theodorus Rakopoulos (2014a, 2014b, 2015) studied anti-­mafia cooperatives in Sicily as forces of food activism and found that they held principles of social solidarity, economic democracy, and a community orientation that encouraged local investment. 10 See Founding Father: Giacomo Tachis – Decanter http://www.decanter.com/features/ founding-­father-giacomo-­tachis-248258/#pr4iGhGZcUSw0Pgf.03 and Decanter Man of the Year 2011: Giacomo Tachis – Decanter http://www.decanter.com/features/ decanter-­man-of-­the-year-2011-giacomo-­tachis-246123/#CsH302TCS3sEefAY.03 accessed September 21, 2015. 11 The Oxford Companion to Wine’s entry on “Carignan” (Robinson 1994: 192–3) says the grape originated in Aragon, Spain, and has spread widely in France. In Italy, it is grown mainly in Latium and Sardinia. It is not highly esteemed in France and “only the most carefully farmed old vines on well-­placed low-­yielding sites . . . can produce Carignan with real character,” offering support for the viticulture described by Alessandro Pedini for the Carignano of Sant’Antioco. The entry makes no mention of the Carignano produced on the piede franco, or ungrafted vine. 12 See one blogger’s high opinion of piede franco wines and citations of others’ approval at https://vinieterroir.wordpress.com/2012/10/08/vigne-­a-piede-­franco/ accessed March 8, 2016. In the entry on “Rootstock,” The Oxford Companion to Wine avers, “Although at one time it was a common complaint that pre-­phylloxera wines are better than those since the invasion (perhaps because early rootstocks were not always ideally matched with soil types), more recent experiments have shown that little effect on wine quality which [sic] can be attributed directly to rootstock” (Robinson 2994: 822). 13 See Oppo (1990: 499), who says partible inheritance and joint husband–wife ownership of property enhanced the status of women in regions like the Campidano around Cagliari. Gabriella Da Re (1990) discusses partible inheritance at length and illustrates with kinship charts. In her discussion of olive cultivation, Da Re (2015: 40) writes about “a well-­known theme among scholars of rural Sardinian society: the extreme egalitarianism of inheritance that made divisible an object or a plant that elsewhere was

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thought indivisible.” In her discussion of the Sardinian agricultural landscape, Pungetti (1995: 53) writes, “The splitting of cultivated areas into smaller parcels, because of the subdivision of the land through inheritance, brought about many changes in landscape patterns.” Benedetto Meloni (1996: 98) says that for the central Sardinia town of Austis (Nuoro), there have traditionally been two inheritance patterns. The fenced agricultural lands are classified into vegetable gardens, vineyards, orchards, wheat fields, and so on, and upon the death of the owner each type is divided equally among all male and female heirs so that each gets a portion of the various types of land, leading quickly to fragmentation. In contrast, the open lands used for pasture are not divided. 14 See Grasseni (2017) on the processes and politics of attaining DOC status for cheese in the Lombardy region of Italy. 15 Nuraghi are the Bronze Age megalithic stone structures that dot the Sardinian landscape, with approximately 7,000 remaining today, remnants of a flourishing island culture long before the Romans arrived in 238 BC (Lilliu 1967). 16 I am grateful to anthropologist Alessandra Guigoni’s (2010) historical and ethnographic research for much of the information presented here about capers, and to farmer Marco Maxia for his description of his own caper production in Selargius. 17 Capers appear in the definitive mid-­nineteenth-century compendium of Sardinian geography by Angius/Casalis, Dizionario Geografico-Storico-Statistico-Commerciale degli Stati di S.M. il Re di Sardegna (Guigoni 2010). 18 In contrast, the Handbook of Herbs and Spices says they are hard to propagate from cuttings and describes planting from seeds (Sozzi et al. 2012). 19 David Lebovitz has nice photos and description of caper production on Pantelleria on his blog http://www.davidlebovitz.com/2014/06/capers-­in-pantelleria-­italy-sicily/ accessed October 27, 2014. 20 See http://coopterreumbre.altervista.org/la-­mosca-olearia-­come-combatterla-­senzachimica/?doing_wp_cron=1454632865.6663129329681396484375 for a description of how to make the “do it yourself trap” for the mosca olearia. 21 On Su Staì farm, see the website http://www.agriturvalbella.it/home.html accessed February 5, 2017. Many thanks to Sandrina Casula for organizing our visit to the farm and accompanying us there. 22 See http://ortoadistanza.com or http://www.leverduredelmioorto.it/ which shows how to sign up and design a garden. 23 Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) involves a partnership where consumers pay the farmer in advance and receive weekly throughout the growing season a share of the farm’s bounty (Obach and Tobin 2014). Inspired by the teikei movement in Japan where housewives got together to “put the farmer’s face on food,” the first CSA formed in the USA in 1985 (Norberg-Hodge et al. 2002), and by 2007 there were more than 12,000 CSAs in the United States (Lang 2010).

Chapter 5 1 See especially the essays in Counihan and Højlund (2018). David Sutton (2008: 161) put it, “taste itself, like the body that does the tasting, is both individuated and deeply socially shaped.” Anthropologists who have studied the senses include Ayora-Diaz (2012), Chau (2008), Højlund (2014), Pedersen (2015), Howes (2005), Howes and Classen (2013), Paxson (2010b), Pérez (2014), Rhys-Taylor (2016), Seremetakis (1993), Stoller (1989, 2010), Sutton (2008, 2010).

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2 Anthropologist Sidney Mintz (1985) traced how sugar at first was a mark of distinction for elites, but as it became mass produced gradually lost its elite status. 3 In her study of Mexican and Mexican American home cooks, Meredith Abarca (2006: 60) defined sazón as “corporeal, sensual knowledge” embedded in food, in the body, and in acts of cooking and eating where “the body becomes a source of knowledge.” 4 Here is the original Gramsci (1975: 451–2): “Passaggio dal sapere al comprendere al sentire e viceversa dal sentire al comprendere al sapere . . . non si fa storia-­politica senza passione . . .” I thank Gianni Pizza (2013: 89) for directing me to this citation and for his fine work on Gramsci’s relevance to anthropology in general and medical anthropology in particular (Pizza 2003, 2009, 2012, 2013). 5 ARCI has over 5,000 local clubs spread over Italy and one million members. ARCI stands for associazione ricreativa e culturale italiana (Italian recreational and cultural association) which has roots in the popular movement against fascism (Siniscalchi 2014a: 75). See the ARCI website http://www.arci.it accessed November 28, 2016. 6 Rachel Black (2012b) wrote about the role of “taste memory” in establishing a consistent taste in wine over time. It is developed by ongoing tasting, smelling, and discussing older vintages and comparing them to newer ones. 7 See http://www.retegas.org/, Grasseni (2013), Meloni et al. (2009). 8 Another example of cultural narrowing of taste comes from Joanna Davidson’s (2012) ethnographic research on the rice-­growing Diola of Guinea Bissau. They distinguished many different tastes of rice but found most other foods and tastes unsatisfactory; Davidson (2012) described one female villager who suffered great hunger in the midst of plenty during a visit to Portugal because she could not find palatable rice to eat. Also in Guinea Bissau, Marina Temudo (2011: 318) found that taste was implicated in food security and social harmony among both Balanta and nonBalanta rice farmers. They sometimes preferred bad-­tasting rice that lasted longer and eschewed good-­tasting rice varieties: “They destroy the household because people do not want to stop eating!” In this case, a moral vision centered on food security defined good taste as destructive and anti-­social, in sharp contrast to how it figured in Italian food activism.

Chapter 6 1 Some scholarly studies of restaurants are: Beriss and Sutton (2007a), Ceccarini (2013), Clark (2013), Fine (1996), Johnson (2016), Paules (1991), Reiter (1992), Sammells (2016), Segalla (2016), Watson (1996), Yan (2013). Running a restaurant can provide a path to entrepreneurship, agency, and survival, as several studies have shown. Immigrants often got a foothold in their new lands through working in restaurants (Lim 2007, Ray 2016, Yano 2007, Ferrero 2002, Knauer 2001). Some women have found restaurant work to be a positive path to employment and survival as they have taken into the public domain and capitalized on domestic skills learned in the home (Counihan 2012, Haber 2005, Williams-Forson 2006). Meredith Abarca (2007) examined Mexican women’s establishment in the US–Mexico borderlands of what she calls “public kitchens”—small food stands or restaurants where women used their own and family labor to generate income and community. Men in marginalized circumstances have also attained economic and cultural survival through restaurant work; for example, Liora Gvion (2011) found that for Palestinian men in Israel

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establishing restaurants was one of few channels to autonomous employment that enabled them to follow “the rules of the dominant system and simultaneously make up their own rules of action” (Gvion 2011: 5). 2 On the role of restaurants in food activism, see Broadway (2015), Clark (2013), Corvo (2014), Duram and Cawley (2012), Le Grand (2015), Siniscalchi (2014a), Starr et al. (2003). 3 The Jantar Popular (“People’s Dinner”) has some commonalities with the decentralized global activist anarchist group “Food Not Bombs,” which recuperates vegan food destined for the waste system and cooks it into soups distributed free in public spaces to the homeless, hungry, and whoever wants it. The goal is to challenge the charity system by emphasizing solidarity with the poor and the right to food. See Heynen (2010), Parson (2014). 4 On the definition of osteria, see Siniscalchi (2014a: 74) who discusses three Italian osterie with links to Slow Food. On women’s roles in osterie of the Veneto region, see Segalla (2016). 5 See the chef action network, http://www.chefactionnetwork.us for the food advocacy efforts of some American chefs. The home page states that “the chef action network provides chefs the opportunity to become effective leaders in the fight for food system changes” (accessed December 2, 2016). 6 The website for Alma cooking school is http://www.alma.scuolacucina.it/en/ accessed February 7, 2017. Chef Stefano Deidda told me he worked at Sadler in Milan, at the hotel Principessa in Milan, at Villa Crespi on Lake Orta, and Château Villa Fior di Lisa on Lake Garda. See his website for more information about Dal Corsaro and his trajectory: http://www.stefanodeidda.it/stefano-­deidda.html, accessed January 7, 2016. 7 See http://reportergourmet.com/schede/ristoranti-­e-pizzerie/1/sardegna/14-0/cagliari/ ristorante-­dal-corsaro-­chef-stefano-­deidda-19/28/ accessed January 7, 2016. 8 According to the Sardinia tourism website, “An ancient dish prepared in the Barbagia district (Nuoro), filindeus are a type of stretched pasta similar to noodles. The dough is made of durum wheat semolina and water, worked by hand until it achieves an elastic consistency. It is then rolled and elongated by hand until a series of strips are obtained, whose thickness depends on the degree of stretching of the dough during preparation. Once the pasta has been made, the strips are placed on a round dish and left to dry. The end result depends on the skill of the maker. This pasta is used in mutton broth soups, with fresh cheese.” http://www.sardegnaturismo.it/en/article/filindeus accessed October 8, 2016. 9 According to the Cagliari tourism website http://www.cagliariturismo.it/it/vivi-­ cagliari/commercio-304/mercati-50/mercato-­civico-di-­san-benedetto-164 accessed October 10, 2016, San Benedetto market is the largest covered market in Italy, with 8,000 square meters and almost 300 stands. See also the market’s website http://www.mercatosanbenedetto.it. 10 The Facebook page of Rifugio dei Sapori is https://www.facebook.com/Il-Rifugio-­deisapori-573970252624348/ accessed July 26, 2016. The menu for 26 July 2016 was (my translation): Sicilian caponata (eggplant salad) with roasted almonds Eggplant parmesan Sautéed zucchini Salad of green beans Potatoes in green sauce Chard in citronette sauce

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Carrots and zucchini pecan Garlic chicory Sweet and sour onions Salad of melon, rocket, and walnuts Organic aromatic Thai rice, zucchini flowers and hazelnuts Organic red Thai rice, chicory, ginger and onions Rice salad Lasagne with tomato and basil Eggplant lasagna Chicken salad Beef meatballs with tomato Cutlets Roast chicken thighs Jam tart of citrus fruit and dried fruit 11 The Cagliari restaurants had some things in common with the food trucks in Philadelphia discussed by Paolo Corvo (2014), which offered entrepreneurship opportunities, locally sourced foods, and modest prices. 12 This comes from the Conferescenti website: http://www.confesercenti.it/blog/pmi-­laripresa-­parte-dalla-­ristorazione-dal-2012-quasi-29mila-­bar-e-­ristoranti-in-­piu-boom-­ nel-mezzogiorno-­possibili-100mila-­posti-di-­lavoro-nei-­prossimi-due-­anni/ accessed February 17, 2018.

Chapter 7 1 Kaela Jubas (2016: 132) said in her study of critical food shopping, “learning [is] multidimensional or holistic, involving emotions, senses and spirituality along with intellect . . . In other words, learning and knowledge are based as much in what people feel, do, sense and experience spiritually as they are in what people think.” 2 This transformation of self and other through education was a part of human nature according to the Sardinian-­born Marxist activist Antonio Gramsci who wrote, “Transformation of the external world . . . signifies the development of one’s potential, development of oneself . . . We can say that humans are essentially political, because activity directed at consciously transforming and leading others realizes our ‘humanity,’ our ‘human nature’ ” (Gramsci 1955a: 35, my translation). On Gramsci, see Counihan (1986), Gramsci (1955b), Pizza (2003: 36). Food activism shares much with Theresa Catalano’s (2013: 277) definition of “global citizenship education” in her study of the USA’s 2011/12 “Occupy” movement. “Global citizenship education” aspired to disseminate knowledge about globalization, sustainability, and human and environmental diversity. It developed critical thinking about inequalities and promoted cooperation and respect for people and nature. It strove to generate empathy and the “belief that people can make a difference.” All of these themes in greater or lesser strengths ran through formal and informal education in food activism. 3 See Hayes-Conroy and Hayes Conroy (2013), Jubas (2016), Kimura (2011), Weissman (2015). 4 On food labor, see also Allen et al. (2003), Wald (2011), Widener and Karides (2014).

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5 Sardinia, after Finland, has the highest rate in the world of the autoimmune condition that causes type 1 diabetes (Muntoni et al. 2009, Murgia et al. 2008), which is not directly diet-­related, whereas the island’s prevalence of the diet-­related type 2 diabetes is not excessively high and “is similar to that of other non high risk populations” (Murgia et al. 2008). 6 On immigration to Italy and Sardinia, see Ambrosini (2013a, 2013b), Bachis and Pusceddu (2013a, 2013b), Contu (2013), Guigoni (2013), Mantovan (2013), Perrotta (2014, 2015), Pinelli (2015), Sias (2013). 7 Lecca pushed the students to use all their senses in her lesson on plants in which she taught about “the colors of nature, the colors of emotions, the dyes in the plants” and had the children collect plants and use them to color the white bricks she has on the place. As we walked around, she picked leaves and had us smell them—myrtle, from which they make the liqueur that we tasted, a kind of mint that they used to use to scare off fleas, and rosemary. 8 This is from Matthew 11:28, which the King James Bible renders as “Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.” 9 Annalisa Lecca’s farm Alba’s page on the Scirarindi website is http://www.scirarindi. org/scirarindi/?q=node/4744 accessed December 6, 2016. 10 For further analysis of this “white” coding of AFIs, see Alkon (2012), Guthman (2008a, 2008b), Mares (2014), Markowitz (2010), Slocum (2008).

Chapter 8 1 Sardinia is the seventh region in Italy in number of organic farm operators (2,228/52,383—4 percent), third in land cultivated (142,250/1,317,177 hectares— 10.8 percent), and third in numbers of animals raised organically (1,588/8,033— 19.8 percent) (De Matthaeis et al. 2014). For recent details on organic agriculture in Europe, see “Facts and Figures” 2013. 2 On the “conventionalization” thesis in regard to organic agriculture, see Hall and Mogyorody (2001) on Ontario, Canada; Best (2008) on West Germany; and Vankeerberghen (2012) on Belgium. Vankeerberghen (2012) found that early Belgian organic farmers turned to organic as an expression of values: Sustainability and condemnation of noxious chemicals; support for small, diverse family farms; alliance with other small farmers; and direct links to consumers. But organic changed in the EU due to regulations and market expansion, and “today one can farm organic without living organic,” as one farmer told Vankeerberghen (2012: 97). Guthman (2003) discusses this same process of mainstreaming of organic agriculture in the USA though does not use the term “conventionalization.” 3 http://www.satrasardigna.it/Bilancio_2015.html accessed September 6, 2016. 4 The ECOR company website is http://www.ecor.it/it. 5 See the website of the Ki group: https://www.kigroup.com. 6 ECOR’s website reports that its products are available in Cagliari only in the five S’Atra Sardigna stores: http://www.ecor.it/it/dove-­ci-trovi/ricerca?r=pv&k=cagliari. 7 On Sardex, see http://www.sardex.net accessed February 23, 2017. 8 The Scirarindi website is http://www.scirarindi.org/scirarindi/?q=node/44850 accessed September 17, 2016. See Guigoni (2014a), who cited Scirarindi as one of her examples of resistance to the agro-­industrial food system.

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9 Eve Jochnowitz (2001) studied the Park Slope Food Co-­op in Brooklyn, an intriguing example of the ideals and struggles involved in forging solidaritous food consumption. Isabelle Anguelovski (2015) did several years of rich ethnographic and media research in the Jamaica Plain neighborhood of Boston on the displacement of a longstanding Latino supermarket by a Whole Foods store, marked by increased gentrification and reduced access to inexpensive Latino foods. In contrast, Arijit Sen (2016) showed how Bangladeshi fish stores have thrived on Devon Avenue, Chicago, and contributed to the renewal of foodways, memories, and the Bangladeshi community itself. 10 Supermarkets spread slowly in Italy, mainly in the north, and by 1971 there were 607 supermarkets but only 65, just over a tenth, in the south (Scarpellini 2004: 660–1). See Deutsch (2001) on the rise of supermarkets in the USA. 11 On supermarkets in Italy, see Rapporto (2010), and Mileti, Preti, and Guido (2011). See also the supermarket industry website: http://www.infocommercio.it/pagine/ banche-­dati/index_supermercati.php. Comparing Sardinia to other regions (Rapporto 2010: 245), the actual number of supermarkets is not particularly high, but density is: Sardinia has 258.9 square meters of supermarkets per 1,000 inhabitants, over 100 square meters per inhabitant more than the average for the south and islands (158.5) and higher than the averages of the center (178.6), northeast (256.8), and northwest (228.8).

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Index Abarca, Meredith 140 n.10, 147 n.1, n.3 AGRIS bean research 32–5 mission 143 n.10 Allen, Patricia 140 n.11 Allison, Anne 82 Althusser, Louis 82 Anguelovski, Isabelle 151 n.9 ARCI see associazione ricreativa e culturale italiana associazione ricreativa e culturale italiana 147 n.5 Barndt, Deborah 102 beans 32–5 Beriss, David 81–2 Bioagrumi di Monteporceddus 127–9 Brackett, Rachel 11 bread 27, 61, 74, 107–8, 141 n.3 Broadway, Michael 83 Brughitta, Lucio 72–9, 136–8 Cagliari 1–2 population 142 n.13 capers 54–8 harvest 56 marketing 57 tasting 66–9 Carignano wine 50, 52–3, 69–72 in France 145 n.11 taste 69–72 ungrafted rootstock (piede franco) 52 Catalano, Theresa 149 n.2 Cawley, Mary 83, 84, 99 Cerimele, Andrea 103–6 Cirronis, Ignazio 116–21 Clark, Dylan 82 commensality 9, 11, 19, 65, 66, 78, 96, 135 Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) 146 n.23 consumption politics 10, 11

cooperatives 51 anti-­mafia 145 n.9 Cooperativa Terranuova 90, 123 Corona, Angelo and Cecilia 124, 126 Cossu, Anna 12–13, 19–22, 58, 69 critical food education 101–14 concientización 101 Dal Corsaro restaurant 84–8 Da Re, Gabriella 118, 145 n.13 Davidson, Joanna 147 n.8 Deidda, Gianfranco 58–60, 75–6 Deidda, Stefano 84–8 Deriu, Giuseppe 13–17 diabetes 150 n.5 Domingos, Nuno 11 Domusamigas 29–31 Duram, Leslie 83, 84, 99 ecogastronomy 10 economies of sentiment 92, 115, 127 embodiment 65 Emporio Bio 121–6, 130 challenges 122–3, 125–6 products 122 solidarity with farmers 124 Erasmo, Paolo 36–41 ethnography 1, 4 farming cooperation in 47 employment in 48 innovation 47 resistance 144 n.5 re-­territorialization 47 return to by young people 49–51, 56, 94, 144 n.7 Sardinian 48 small scale 28 farm-­to-school programs 61, 101–14 Ferraris, Lara 88–93

174

Index

filindeus 148 n.8 Floris, Matteo 90, 127–9, 133 food advocate 3 education 101–14 and gender 5–6, 140 n.13 imports to Sardinia 139 n.4 Italian 140 n.2 rebel 3 Sardinian 140 n.1, 141 n.3 food activism 3–4 challenges 136–7 and gender 5–6, 140 n.12 middle-­class 10 scholarship on 139 n.7 and traditional food 14–15, 19 food businesses 115–31 food community 11, 13, 58, 66 food democracy 3, 25, 30, 41, 43, 45, 47, 64, 79, 80, 82, 97, 101, 114 food sovereignty 7, 16, 17, 18, 31, 39, 40, 45, 134 Food Not Bombs 148 n.3 Freire, Paulo 101 Galassi, Luca 66–8, 83 GAS (see solidarity purchase group) gender and food activism 5–6, 140 n.12 in Italy 5–6, 140 n.13 Gramsci, Antonio 4, 5, 66, 73, 101, 147 n.4, 149 n.2 Grasseni, Cristina 72, 120 Guigoni, Alessandra 33, 34, 47, 54, 140 n.1 Guthman, Julie 102, 114, 134, 140 n.11 Gvion, Liora 147 n.1

opposition to 43, 44, 134, 144 n.24 Sardinian 43–4, 109 inheritance 52, 145 n.13 Jochnowitz, Eve 151 n.9 Jubas, Kaela 149 n.1 land fragmentation 52 LAORE and farm-­to-school program 101–14 mission 143 n.11 La Via Campesina 134 Lecca, Annalisa 109–12 Le Grand, Yvonne 83 Le Lannou, Maurice 140 n.1, 141 n.3 Levkoe, Charles 41 Leynse, Wendy 80 local food movement (LFM) 42–4, 134–5, 143 n.22, 144 n.23 Locci, Carla 6, 76–7, 137 Lotti, Ariane 11 maloreddus 18, 91 Marx, Karl 101–2 Maxia, Marco 33, 54–8, 68 Meloni, Benedetto 25, 47, 75, 142 n.1, 146 n.13 methodology 4–5 Mintz, Sidney 147 n.2 Montanari, Massimo 28, 133 multifunctionality 47, 60–4, 103–4 nuraghi 146 n.15

Heatherington, Tracey 118, 140 n.1, 142 n.5 Heller, Chaia 64 heritigization 142 n.6 Hinrichs, Clare 37, 43, 134 Holtzman, Jon 79–80 Hubbert, Jennifer 82

obesity in Sardinia 106, 142 n.14 olive oil 75–6 organic 59–60 organic food 58–60, 91, 115, 150 n.1, n.2 conventionalization 116 production 116, 117 and taste 118 orto sinergico (see permaculture) osteria 83, 148 n.4

Il Rifugio dei Sapori 93–7 immigration and citizenship 144 n.26 and food 109 Italian 144 n.24, 150 n.6

Pau, Marco 60–3 Paxson, Heather 42 Pedini, Alessandro 49–54, 69–72 permaculture 30, 36, 38, 41 phylloxera 52, 54, 145 n.12

Index Pink, Sarah 10, 35, 65 Piras, Teresa 25, 29–31 Pizza, Giovanni 147 n.4 pluriactivity 47, 56 Porta, Tore 36–41 Pratt, Jeffrey 28, 35, 43, 142 n.7 presidia 11, 141 n.10 Rakopoulos, Theodorus 145 n.9 re-­peasantization (ricontadinazione) 47 restaurants 81–99 building community 89, 90, 95–6, 98 challenges 97–9 and education 87, 92 and food activism 148 n.2 and identity 82 and ideology 82–3 and local food 83, 86–7, 90–2, 94–5 scholarship on 81–2, 147 n.1 as taste-­makers 84, 87, 91–2, 97 and trust 85–6, 94, 95 vegetarian 88–93 saffron 104–5 San Benedetto market 96, 148 n.9 Sanna, Francesco 103–6 Sanna, Paola 93–7 Sardex 124–5 Sardinia 1–3 military presence 142 n.15 pollution 53 wild 118 Sardinian Shepherds’ Movement (Movimento Pastori Sardi) 139 n.3 sardo 38, 139 n.6, 143 n.20 Sardo-Modican cattle 18–19 Sardus Pater wine cooperative 49–54, 69–72 Sassatelli, Roberta 10 S’Atra Sardigna 116–21, 130 challenges 121 markets 119 monopoly 117, 119, 121, 124 products 117–18 profits 119 retail stores 119 role of territorio 118 Satu Po Imparai 61, 101–14 school food 105, 109, 112–13

175

seeds 29–31, 39–40 Sen, Arijit 151 n.9 Serra, Maurizio 88–93 Sims, Rebecca 83 Siniscalchi, Valeria 11, 83–4, 99, 141 n.5, 141 n.10, 147 n.5, 148 n.4 Slow Food 9–23 burnout 13 Cagliari chapter 12–13 caper food community 57 caper tasting 66–9 chapters in Sardinia 141 n.8 conviviality 11, 21 elitism 80, 135, 141 n.9 farmers markets 142 n.11 and middle class activism 10 and restaurants 83–4 taste education 11–12, 16 social agriculture 37, 63, 143 n.18 solidarity economy 90, 92, 115–16, 119–20, 124–5 solidarity purchase group 72–9, 136–8 aims 73 challenges 136–7 in Italy 72 markets 76–7 politics 79 role of taste in 73–6 solidarity 77 wild-­herb gathering expedition 78–9 Spiga, Francesca 27, 121–6 supermarkets in Italy 28, 130–1, 151 n.10, n.11 Su Staì farm 60–3 Sutton, David 81–2, 146 n.1 taste 65–80 anthropological scholarship on 146 n.1 defined 65 education 76, 108 and food activism 20–1, 135 in France 80 in Guinea Bissau 147 n.8 hegemony 80, 135 in Italy 65, 79 in Kenya 79–80 memory 147 n.6 in USA 79

176

Index

taste activism 65–80 Terra di Mezzo restaurant 88–93 territorio 25–45 and beans 32–5 definition 25–6 and emotions 26–8, 108 and identity 26 and local food movement 41–2 and schools 107 and Slow Food 22 and taste 70 and urban garden 35–41 terroir 41–2, 143 n.22 typical products 2, 18, 26, 28, 53, 70, 73, 91, 104, 105, 107, 118, 130, 135

urban garden 35–41 benefits 35, 40 challenges 36 community 38 and immigrants 43 scholarship on 143 n.16 and senses 40–1 and territorio 38 van der Ploeg, Jan Douwe 47–8, 51, 64 Vankeerberghen, Audrey 116, 150 n.2 Vargas-Cetina, Gabriela 51 Vivarelli, Walter 17–19 West, Harry 11