Cooks, Italianicity and the Culinary Field in Italy

The triangulation of food culture, food quality and national identity is often taken for granted in the Italian case. However, an increasing number of people and institutions affect what we eat, governing how food is produced, consumed and distributed day-to-day. Accordingly, food is a dynamic and transitional field where the process of its valorisation is constantly in transformation especially through the negotiation of production and consumption as specific and meaningful sets of activities. This chapter presents a two year ethnography of commercial cooking in a Northern Italian city, considering commercial cooks as particular “cultural intermediaries” within the process of institutionalization of a ‘territorial’ version of food quality in Italy. As Bourdieu suggested, cultural intermediaries are not a group of empirical subjects, in fact they exist only when social agents have the structural chance to position themselves within the field in such a particular place when intermediation practices become possible. Observing and listening to the cooks, from the point of view of their restaurants, emphasizing the importance of recalibrating the whole production chain on the culinary moment, as well as the relevance of a thorough knowledge of how to handle or smell certain foods, clearly show that there is at the stake the possibility of building a space for new consumers geometrically calibrated on their capabilities and skills. In this line, the chapter addresses the issue of how commercial cooks take part to the social construction of food quality on a territorial basis, and to what extent they participate to redefine the nexus between national identity and food culture.