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

Reviewed by: Feeding Fascism: The Politics of Women’s Food Work by Diana Garvin Karima Moyer-Nocchi Feeding Fascism: The Politics of Women’s Food Work. By Diana Garvin. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. 2022. xv+276 pp. $36.95. ISBN 978–1–4875–2818–8. The cover of a home economics treatise for young brides to be called Regalo di nozze is punctuated by a quotation from Mussolini: ‘I firmly believe that our way of eating, dressing, working and sleeping, the entirety of our daily habits has to be reformed.’ Such a declaration might seem antithetical to the felicitous occasion, but [End Page 396] bringing about radical social change on a national scale would require the consent or at least compliance of women, whose energies were monopolized by what Diana Garvin refers to broadly as ‘women’s food work’. In Feeding Fascism Garvin sets out to establish that despite Mussolini’s categorical imperative of unquestioned obedience (credere, obbedire, combattere), consensus among women over the twenty-year period of Italian Fascism could not simply be dictated as a top-down directive. It was a negotiation of tensions and intentions: of women’s willingness to proceed in lockstep with the regime, of their power to protest under a dictatorship, and of their ability to acquiesce in the absence of choice. They were, as Garvin says, ‘actors, interpreters and critics: they accept, modify and reject’ (p. 5). Feeding Fascism is a welcome contribution to currents in Italian Studies scholarship applying post-qualitative analysis to social contexts that veer away from the elite and grandiose. It posits a valuable perspective alongside such works as Carol Helstosky’s Garlic and Oil: Politics and Food in Italy (Oxford: Berg, 2004), Victoria de Grazia’s How Fascism Ruled Women: Italy, 1922–1945 (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1993), Christopher Duggan’s Fascist Voices: An Intimate History of Mussolini’s Italy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), and Perry Wilson’s Peasant Women and Politics in Fascist Italy: The Massaie Rurali (London and New York: Routledge, 2002). Garvin’s research involves an impressive variety of cultural ephemera, artefacts, and textual resources which not only support, but vividly illustrate her arguments. Her analysis of the resulting narratives that would shape Italy’s culinary trajectory is perceptive and illuminating, although some issues remain debatable. This is not a who-ate-what culinary history, but a critical examination of women and tabletop politics in both the public and private spheres—that is, the legacy of Fascism as it played out in Italian kitchens. With respect to the intimate nature of the topic and its myriad manifestations, primacy is given to women’s subjectivity. ‘Whenever possible, I use women’s own conceptions of gender, class, and region to describe social categories. In terms of style, these historical subjects express complex thoughts and emotions in clear speech. Their words remind me that educated sources will sometimes use convoluted phrasing as a power play, framing opacity as expertise’ (p. 4). The task of delineating a state narrative regarding female citizenry and the ways in which women navigated the regime’s often ambivalent expectations of their role may involve the risk of applying blanket assertions to a country as culturally disparate as Italy. Garvin reins in the potentially unwieldy project by selecting specific events or contexts as springboards from which to elaborate broader concepts of women as bodies who produce, consume, and feed. She begins with Filippo Tommaso Marinetti and the so-called Futurist Cuisine. As an artiste-provocateur, his interests lay more in self-aggrandizement than gastronomy or the regime. His infamous call for the end of pasta, that doughy culinary relic that softened Italian bellies, reducing them to a nation of sloths, made for titillating newspaper hype, but did not set off a scourge of panic in households. It did, however, impose on the [End Page 397] sphere of women, perhaps as a calculated stab at the gatekeepers of Italian cuisine. In his defence, the plea concurred with the regime’s 1925 Battle for Wheat, part of which consisted, ironically, in compelling the nation to eat more rice. The push for rice production under the auspices of autarky led...

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