chapotraphouse

The rice that can grow in Italy is not the kind you can use to make rice noodles though. And there's much more to the story of why rice was the preferred fascist crop.

While the agricultural autarchy angle is a big part of it, there's a healthy dose of Italian regionalism and chauvinism. Ever since the "unification" of Italy (which was more a violent conquest by the northern kingdom of Sardinia and Piedmont of the rest of the peninsula, especially of the south), there has always been a negative perception of the more ethnically and culturally diverse southern Italians, who were often said to be lazy, backward, duplicitous, uncivilized, and overall 'not white enough' for the standards of the northern Italians; y'all let me know where you've heard similar before.

The north has since then used the south as its own local periphery, extracting labor for the Northern-owned factories and resources -mostly agricultural- while constantly deriding them as 'not truly Italian'. This unequal relationship was the reason so many southern Italians migrated away at the end of the 19th century.

When fascism was building its ideological foundations, Fascists, starting with the Italian futurists, and going all the way to Mussolini and Co. positioned themselves in opposition to anything southern, which they viewed as backward, unindustrious, poor, and in need of civilization. Dry pasta is very much a southern thing, a food that was born out of the plentiful harvests and relatively mild weather of the area, and very tied to local southern identity and culture. For the futurists eating pasta dulled the senses, sapped you of energy, and killed creativity, so there was a number of articles and books denouncing pasta and its consumption, and even a cookbook with futurist substitutions for pasta and other southern dishes or ingredients, like tomatoes and chilies.

Meanwhile, rice is very closely associated with the northern, richer, and more industrialized parts of Italy, specially the Po Valley; this area is where rice-based dishes like risotto or timballo come from. The North was where most of the Fascists' power base was: industrialists, petite bourgeois, large landowners and urban cultural and political elites, the ones who stood the most to gain from fascist rule. So, to Marinetti, leader of the futurists and enthusiastic fascist, and most people like him, the only way to pull the South out of the misery in which it was, which was actually being inflicted by the North, was to make it be like the North. This meant erasing and suppressing local dialects and culture, forcefully industrializing it, and, most relevant to this post, changing the crops people grew, and what they ate.

In response, pasta became a symbol of antifascist resistance, with partisans embracing it, and when Mussolini was arrested and deposed, partisans briefly came back home and entire towns got together to cook big batches of dry pasta with butter and cheese to celebrate. The tradition is still a thing among Italian leftists and antifascists: every year local leftists will get together and cook/eat a pastasciutta antifascista, in celebration of the removal of fascism from power. Here's a good writeup on it.

Sorry for the super long post, but this post just happens to fall right under my special interests/scholarship, so there.