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Magic Harvest

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This book is a unified collection of scholarly and thrilling essays on the history and development of the Italian diet, the geography of food and eating, the symbolism and changing historic meanings to Italy of agriculture, shopping, cooking, and eating, and thoughtful and thought-provoking discussions of ritual and the enormous changes that modernity has brought. In addition it includes serious and well-thought-out discussions on the meaning of food to humankind.

Camporesi, a Professor of Italian Literature at the University of Bologna, informs the reader in his first essay, "Bread and Death: Food and Peasant Rituals in Italy" of something that may come as a surprise: "the fearful threat of famine continued to hang over people's lives until the middle of the nineteenth century," and what is thought of today as the "Italian national diet" was in fact a late nineteenth- century invention. Before then, the peasants of Italy were frequently hungry, "thrift was the iron law of the table," people lived frugally on some bread, maybe a little wine, greens and root vegetables, maize and chestnuts, snails and frogs, fish occasionally, a little pasta, very little fruit, and very little meat. Dairy products and eggs were limited to what one's one animal (or much less frequently, animals) could produce.

Industrialization contributed greatly and decisively to the expansion of the Italian diet, and what we think of today as Italian food owes much to the ninteeeth century's embrace of railroad and steamship.

Camporesi has an unromantic and passionate interest in the social history of the Italian peasantry. In "The Two Faces of Time: The City Calendar and the Country Calendar" he explores the myths and ritual of the clock and the calendar, and his focus on the diet and practices of the peasantry threads through each essay.

An essay of particular interest to students of food history, food geography, meaning and ritual is "Dietary Geography and Social History," a remarkable study which includes a discussion of the geography of fats and oils (no small thing in a country that is the world's largest exporter of olive oil). There are essays on the contrasts between city and country cooking, and bourgeois cooking in the nineteenth century. One of Camporesi's pet topics, "Shopping for Food" includes a plea to "touch, sniff, handle, and swallow." He rejects grocery-store modernization and standardization (and food as status symbols), and wants food to be sustenance and sensual essential, "the umbilical cord that must never be cut." Food is too important, he asserts, to ever be "still life."

There is much to this careful and scholarly book that will thrill and educate, as well as surprise. There's a glossary of Italian food names, a bibliography (most of the books are in Italian only, though), many pages of endnotes, and a good index. Great stuff.