Il crudo, il cotto e l’autentico: il cibo tra natura e naturalizzazione

Authenticity has become an essential ingredient of several dishes, discourses and practices related to food. Geographical indications such as PDOs and PGIs are used to certify the authenticity of “local” and “typical” products, emphasising their link with the so-called terroir. After the advent of molecular and fusion cuisine, cookbooks and TV programmes have drawn their attention to “traditional” cuisines, that is, the evocation of an authentic past making the present feel a deep and irreconcilable nostalgia. Following the decline of fast food, increasing notoriety has been conferred on the promoters of food experience as a “sensual pleasure to be practiced in slow and prolonged enjoyment” (Slow Food 1989), who proclaimed themselves guarantors of the parameters of quality and authenticity underlying such a pleasure. By contrast, the boundaries and the characteristics of such a highly praised principle of authenticity are not very clear. On the one hand, it is often associated with concepts such as tradition, nature and identity, and – exactly like them – it tends to be mistakenly fixed into static descriptions. On the other hand, it recalls, in fact, complex processes of construction and transformation of values, revealing the active and transformative character of “naturalness”, which seems to be closer to a process of “naturalisation” than to a “nature” understood in Lévi-Straussian terms. Specific case studies will allow us to reflect on these issues, investigating the communication and narrative strategies underlying them.