Amidst the meat, cheese and butter-heavy cuisine of northern Italy, a vegan restaurant in Turin is teeming with diners. Daniela Zaccuri, owner and head chef of Mezzaluna, draws on food cultures from across Italy and the world to create veganized traditional Italian cuisine. Here you’ll find a fusion of foods ranging from curried broccoli to Italian apple pie. But over the past few decades, the Italian far-right has sought to criminalize vegan cuisine through policy and propaganda. In Italy, a nation still tainted by the politics of fascism, a culture war is being waged over food.

Since coming to power in 2022, a coalition of far-right parties led by Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni and Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini have used food as a political prop. Salvini, who leads the right-wing Lega, Party, publishes pictures and video content defending his favorite Italian dishes. Recently explained the politician that “eating Italian is now more than ever a political act.” As nationalism grows in Europe and in Italy – a nation where food is second to none – the far right is solidifying what is considered Italian..

Anti-vegan sentiment in Italy

Last year, Italy banned the production and sale of cell-cultured meat – a move likely to run afoul of the European Union’s free trade rules. In defense of the ban, Salvini linked cell-cultured meat to a shrinking labor market, growing bureaucracy and uncontrolled immigration. He sums up these problems and claims that the European Union’s influence and regulation are to blame for Italy’s problems. Food is merely a proxy to prove his political point. The minister even described cell-cultured meat as one of the “concrete problems” that his conservative coalition is against.

In addition to banning what many consider a sustainable alternative to meat, fines of thousands of dollars have been introduced for plant-based foods with names like “cauliflower steak” and “vegetarian ham.” Although Italy is vulnerable to climate change, including rising sea levels threatening Venice, conservative politicians see veganism as a threat to their culture rather than a climate solution. These restrictions, along with others in France, Florida, Alabama and Texas, successfully criminalize consumer choice.

Zaccuri was baffled by the law. “I think this is a joke,” she scoffs. The vegan chef claims that plant-based eating can actually be Italian, and offers her own take on the traditional cuisine she loves. In the kitchen, she marinates seaweed to mimic the anchovies in “Bagna Càuda” (a spicy Piedmontese dipping sauce) and makes a mayonnaise from soy milk for her “Insalata Russa” (a cold vegetable salad similar to American potato salad).

While both veganism and immigration to Italy are on the rise, the far right seems content to maintain its cultural position. In 2016, just as the mayor of Turin was unveiling a citywide plan to promote plant-based diets, a conservative politician drafted a bill that would impose prison sentences for parents who raised their children vegan. The bill—which never became law—was proposed after an Italian court ordered a vegan mother to feed her children meat as part of a divorce settlement. In the midst of the debate, then-opposition leader Giorgia Meloni snapped a photo with a butcher, reiterating her solidarity with both ranchers and her neo-fascist political party, the Brothers of Italy.

“She throws a lot of red meat at her followers,” jokes Dr. Diana Garvin. Garvin, a professor of food and politics at the University of Oregon, says the Italian prime minister, who opposes abortion, homosexuality and immigration, is using meat to represent larger cultural issues and win the votes of the country’s ranchers. (In America, the same culture war over meat rages on, played out on the battlefields of masculinity, money and political influence.) Salvini contrasts homegrown Italian meat with what he calls the bureaucracy of the European Union. He frequently associates insect meal and lab-grown meat with the EU, and his recent campaign slogan was “More Italy, less Europe!”

Culinary racism in Italy

When the Archbishop of Bologna hosted a festival for the city in 2019 and served chicken tortellini – instead of pork – for the Muslim residents to eat, the Italian right reacted with outrage.

In the right’s ideal of Italian food, tortellini are filled with pork, and recent immigration has not changed the country’s national dishes. Regarding immigration, Prime Minister Meloni stated that “there is a problem of compatibility between Islamic culture and the values ​​and rights of our civilization.” This “us versus them” rhetoric dictates how food can be consumed and how the consumption of some foods can even be prohibited.

As immigration has increased, a wave of bans on foreign food has swept Italy. Starting in 2009, the city of Lucca banned the opening of new so-called “ethnic” restaurants. Since then, cities such as Florence, Verona and Trieste have put an end to foreign cuisine in order to protect what they see as their own culinary traditions. When the city of Venice banned the sale of kebabs in the city, the mayor said the Middle Eastern delicacy was “incompatible with the preservation and development of Venice’s cultural heritage.”

Garvin imagines a sliding scale that goes from pride to xenophobia. According to the professor of nutrition and politics, the scale in Italy has tipped towards exclusion. There is a feeling – stoked by right-wing politicians – that something fundamental to Italian identity is being corrupted by outsiders. “Food is a substitute for people,” says Garvin. Preserving traditions can be a substitute for racism.

“What is tradition?” Zaccuri replies. To create her own interpretation of Italian cuisine, the chef draws on culinary traditions that predate Italian ones, such as Chinese tofu and Japanese seitan. She makes curries from India and sauces from Thailand. Her restaurant is a reflection of cultural fusion, a modern reality so easily overlooked by politicians and food purists who would like to turn back the clock.

In fact, Italian food has always been a fusion. Pasta was probably imported from Asia or the Middle East, and pizza was popularized by Americans. In their current form, these popular dishes have only been around since the mid-20th century, according to Garvin. Before that, the tomatoes for sauces, the corn for polenta, and the potatoes for gnocchi all came from the New World. Influenced by culinary traditions and ingredients from around the world, Italian food continues to evolve today. The grain for Nonna’s pasta comes from as far away as Canada, and Salvini is right to clarify that the hazelnuts in Italian Nutella come from Turkey; however, his dismissal of the chocolate hazelnut spread is likely due to prejudice.

Gastronationalism in Italy

Gianfranco Marrone, PhD, an Italian professor at the University of Palermo, studies the symbolism and discourse surrounding Italian food. Like chef Zacurri, he is skeptical of far-right food politics. In his view, gastronationalism – the use of food to preserve a country’s political identity – results in “something that doesn’t make sense.”

A sitting minister shouted at a crowd that he eats pork and vegans should “get over it,” and Italy’s largest agricultural lobby declared that “test-tube meat is erasing the national identity of an entire nation.” On the one hand, conservative politicians have worried about a minority of Italians who they believe are corrupting the country’s culture. On the other, it doesn’t take much to see through what Marrone calls their “totally false identity of Italian cuisine.”

When asked if meat is as important to Italian identity as some politicians claim, Zaccuri replies, “It depends on the region,” and Italy has many regions, each with its own cuisine. While northern Italian cuisine has historically been characterized by heavy, hearty meat dishes, the south follows the more vegetarian, Mediterranean diet – albeit with plenty of seafood. Overall, says Marrone, “meat has a strong gastronomic tradition in Italy, but not like in other European countries or America.”

The meat industry and meat consumption in Italy

Italians eat about a third of a pound less meat on an average day than Americans, who consume nearly a pound of meat a day. They also eat less meat than the French and Spanish. The Italian meat industry slaughters about 600 million animals and produces about 4 million tons of meat annually, but is dwarfed by American production. Italy’s meat industry has grown considerably since the 1980s, while the U.S. meat industry – which slaughters about 10 billion animals and produces 48 million tons of meat annually – has steadily increased its production.

One reason for Italy’s recent obsession with vegans and immigrants who don’t eat certain meats might be due to industry concerns, but the reality is that fascism — especially food fascism — doesn’t have to make sense. Gastronationalism is much more about nationalism than cuisine; the facts don’t count compared to what politicians say and what people feel. Food represents so much more than what’s on the plate, and our sense of taste is so subjective.

A country’s culture is shaped by its people, but it is shaped by its politics. And the far right in Italy, like a conceited restaurant critic, believes it has the authority to dictate its culture. The popularity of a vegan fusion restaurant in northern Italy may explain why the country’s far right is trying hard to put an end to this development.

GF Fuller’s reporting was made possible in part by the Institute for European Studies at Cornell University.