Theorizing Authenticity

Introduction to the Special Section''theorizing authenticity'' contributes to understanding the proliferation of authenticity in popular cultural and market arenas, a phenomenon reflected in the quantity and value of craft and heritage foods globally.The special section provides a place to explore how producers fashion authenticity through creative labor.The four articles in this section focus on the figure of the Italian artisanal producer 1 and as such explore how individuals create value in global capitalist markets through the practices they perform to produce food as well as the stories they tell about their skill, creativity, and geography.The figure also allows the authors to remain cognizant that wielding authenticity is not an equally distributed possibility in today's societies.Such privilege is rarely afforded to the innovators or to immigrant communities-the kabob maker in Perugia, Italy, can never be ''authentic'' (Nowak 2012).Those of us studying, writing, and thinking about food find authenticity suspect at best, but it persists-even through a pandemicand food seems to be its most noble vehicle.In this special section, we confront authenticity head on while remaining skeptical of the impulse to attach simple good versus bad moral values to authenticity narratives.This special section comes out of a panel we originally organized for the 2020 American Anthropological Association (AAA) meetings, scheduled in St. Louis, where the first author was resident and the co-author was born, but the meetings were canceled due to COVID-19.The panel finally came to fruition in November 2021 in Baltimore.Like everyone else, we had been changed over a year and a half of isolation and separation.Separation not just from our panel, but from our research sites, from our in-person classes, from our rituals of commensality.While this separation was difficult and painful, it also expanded our interest in, and exploration of, authenticity in life in general and food in particular.During the lockdown, debates about the authenticity of foods amplified, especially for those of us who maintained our livelihoods during the economic instability of COVID-19.And it was in the context of instability that nostalgia and authenticity came together in tense ways through food.As food writer Tanushree Bhowmik explained, ''What came along with the deluge of traditional food was the debate on authenticity'' (Bhowmik 2020).This debate coincided with the pandemic affecting Italians especially hard early on, transforming spaces of authenticity into geographies of crisis.Even before the pandemic, Italians were engaging in discourse about foods, marketing local foodways as authentic.Given the market share of Italian craft food, Italian politicians were also adamant that a simple definition of authenticity exists and can be attached to foods; take, for example, the mayor of the city of Bologna, which is located in central Italy.In 2019, he went to Twitter to ask Italian citizens living abroad a favor.''Dear citizens, I'm collecting photos of spaghetti alla bolognese in circulation across the globe as a type of fake news . . .Send me yours'' (Castrodale and Pollack 2019).According to the mayor, spaghetti bolognese did not exist in Italy.He made this claim even though writers such as Bologna native Piero Valdiserra have explained that the people of Bologna have consumed dried pasta for hundreds of years and probably even put ragu `on it (Kirchgaessner 2016).The authors in this special section, who all research foodways in Italy, would probably scream: ''But spaghetti bolognese does exist!''-atleast in places like the United States, Canada, Argentina, and the United Kingdom.At the same time, most of us who work in Italy on food often talk about authenticity with our families and friends (Parasecoli 2017: 8).We are bombarded with questions about the authentic dishes we consumed while living in Italy.As scholars of culture first, we learned quickly what people didn't want to hear: what we actually ate in Italy.We rarely brought up the Chinese hot pot, the Japanese sushi, or the halal hamburgers.It's a curious thing: they wanted authenticity.

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