What the fuck is a carbonara?

There are few things that define us as much as our culinary tradition—rich, ancient, beloved, and globally celebrated. Yet despite our pride, not only are we losing it, we are actively destroying it.

This brief speech will focus on the value of traditions and the dangers that come with them, on how our people are no longer up to the task of reconciling with the weight of history.

I’ll start with cooking because it’s a field I’ve resonated with since childhood. I've even managed to win a title in the prestigious and incomparable Italian Chefs Federation – Belgium delegation, a group of geniuses and avant-gardists who carry throughout Europe a copy of a copy of a copy of what true Italian talent should be.

I’d begin with a question: how much value do we really place on cooking?

I’m not talking about the importance we claim to give to this custom, nor the disdain we feel when we elevate ourselves to critics, nor even the pleasure of savoring a venison ragù. I’m asking: how much time do we actually dedicate today to cooking? How many of us cook for themselves, or have stood beside their grandmothers—pillars now crumbling—with eyes hungry for knowledge?

I’ve always joked that cooking is humanity’s everyday way of playing with fire and heat—becoming something halfway between poet and chemist. The remarkable thing about this act is that it literally cuts across our history, both synchronically and diachronically, of this strange ape we are.

Indeed, the ritual of eating represents in some way an anthropological universal. In the West, with industrialization, many countries have gradually lost that ritual—but certainly not Italy.

On the contrary, I would argue that the entire 19th century until fairly recently was the true birth of modern Italian cuisine: our backward land, from an industrial standpoint, still participated in technical improvements (tools, ingredients, farming techniques, pesticides…), without profoundly disrupting the slow-paced popular and peasant realities. It was an enhancement of resources and time to care for them.

Of course, I’m making a big chronological leap and so I’ll inevitably make some inaccuracies—but most of our current recipes originate in the immediate post-war era: again, very similar conditions—a boom in economic and technological resources (think of the refrigerator’s arrival) in a still rural country, deeply attached to its land and traditions.

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Suddenly we began to live in unprecedented abundance, and those countless tiny traditions that once had to struggle even for a handful of meat found themselves able to experiment, to reshape ingredients that until then had been too sacred to tamper with.

Let’s not forget that Italian cooking was born as a cuisine of scarcity—a cuisine blending top-quality raw materials and scraps. A cuisine that, in its simplicity and often speed, requires its own kind of time.

Indeed, I believe one of the major problems with the degradation of cooking today is—and here’s the key—time: the frenzy of schedules and the imposed abundance of ingredients, gradually pushed by our economic system.

The time for meals, for community and sharing—literally breaking bread together—has increasingly been seen as wasted, compared to productive processes. This has favored efficient, sterile industrial foods made up of unreadable combinations of letters and numbers: ready-made, prepackaged, standardized, engineered to provide just the precise caloric intake needed for a day’s work, designed for consistent flavor that creates dependence and imbalances only solvable through more industrial process. These problems affect all “developed” societies, yet Italy long managed to resist this banalization and dehumanization of food.

Moreover, another problematic element is that our “food culture” (if you’ll allow me the neologism) has traditionally been upheld by a segment of the population—and essentially it was women who held nearly exclusive responsibility for it.

And rightly so—times have changed, and women are finally free to pursue other things. But then let’s accept that our cuisine has changed and is changing too! And let’s drop this annoying myth of an unchanging “original” recipe that has remained eternally the same.

Here we finally see the real challenges posed by traditions: on one side, the superstition around identity, around the original recipe; on the other, the limitations that any tradition inevitably creates.

Let’s start with identity—understood in its two most common senses: identicalness, sameness; and identity, as something that identifies or particularizes. When these two senses fall out of balance, the corrosive effects of history's weight begin to surface: anything that doesn't change—or worse, fights change in order to refuse interaction with evolving reality—is something fundamentally dead, just as surely as something alive is compromised when it blindly defers—without personality, without questioning—to what came before it, something different from itself, different from its own contingencies, aspiring only to conformity.

Second, we face what I previously called the limitations of tradition: the fact that any tradition wasn't founded in a single ethereal moment, but always responded to a people's struggles, needs, contradictions, irrationalities, and to their unjust and antiquated principles. A tradition can therefore only be limited—and limiting—if viewed in its purity and static state.

Yet we overlook that through constant repetition the principium individuationis of originality is lost—but that doesn’t mean nothing genuine, nothing original, remains in each iteration.

Look at tomatoes or corn when they were first brought to Europe; they’re no longer the same plants, even though they are—and try making polenta or sauce with those original plants. Does it really make sense to get lost over the question of originality? How many iterations did it take to reach what we have today? How many recipes did women tweak over centuries without men knowing? Is it even necessary to know that to enjoy a good dish?

Here, just as Saussure taught us about language, we face truly an infinity of small, continuous changes—tiny variations over time, region, city, village, even from family to family. That, to me, is the greatness of Italian cuisine: it has never been the original recipe, but the richness of its countless variations. Italy ate well when it had a thousand different recipes for the same dish—each carrying its own history, countless lives, many trials and errors. Italian cooking was—and still is, though increasingly rare—more than merely a list of ingredients. It is a method, a way of honoring simplicity; it was always a "minus" that revealed itself to be a "plus."

But between social media and nationalism, we’ve started emasculating each other with slogans like, "This is the real Genovese," "Carbonara is only made like this," "Here’s the one true lasagna," etc. We haven’t just lost variety by flattening ourselves into bland averages, but we’ve lost contact with food itself, corroding the "mother" philosophy of our culture—variety—and of cooking in general, which is creativity.

We are no longer, as a people, capable of reconciling with history, because we desperately seek closure—to freeze the processes of contamination and evolution that have always propelled it.

So I’ll leave you with one question—and one certainty:

Who decides when a tradition becomes such? How and when is that determination made?

And here’s the certainty:

No one will ever make a better Neapolitan pastiera than my grandmother.

 *What the fuck is a carbonara?