A few days ago, Italian cuisine was officially recognized by UNESCO (the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization) as an Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. This is a significant recognition, hailed by many. It celebrates not only national recipes, but the entire universe that revolves around Italian food: the preparation and sharing of food, including the transmission of knowledge, seasonality, biodiversity, and social rituals, such as family meals.
But beyond the patriotic celebrations, does Italian cuisine really exist? Or does the myth far outweigh the reality?
These are the themes addressed in the latest essay by food historian Alberto Grandi, entitled The Invention of the Cook (Mondadori, 2025, pp. 192, also e-book).
Grandi, professor of food history at the University of Parma, begins with a simple observation: for many centuries, Italian diets were marked by scarcity and severe territorial fragmentation . The very concept of "Italian cuisine" is, upon closer inspection, a product of the twentieth century. And this is not only for economic and social reasons, but also—and above all—media-related. Alberto Grandi, in fact, argues two powerful theses in his book. The first is that Italian cuisine made Italians (and not vice versa); the second is that television invented and narrated it, accompanying it with its archetypes: recipes, live forkfuls, nutritionists, chefs with celebrity poses. In short, an early idea of Italian cuisine emerged between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and was then "nationalized" by TV, with the self-interested support of the agri-food industry and tourism.
Is the tradition of our national cuisine an invented one? To a large extent, yes. But it is precisely this invention that shaped the gastronomic imagery we now call "Italian." How did this happen? In 1960s Italy, as the economic boom was winding down, food began to be narrated, represented, and spectacularized by the media, acquiring a symbolic dimension and gradually a role in defining identity: in short, Italians also became what they cooked . In this narrative, television played a decisive role, breeding legions of consumers who believed that succulent regional dishes had always been the daily fare in the poverty-stricken canteens of peasants until the post-war period, even perfected and passed down from mother to daughter. Starting from the legendary “Carosello”, and then through programmes and characters of varied expertise, from Ave Ninchi to Luigi Veronelli up to Antonella Clerici or Benedetta Parodi, television contributes to creating a shared and identifying gastronomic imagery, with the popular codification of recipes, rites, rules and archetypal figures that today we rightly consider a national heritage.
What we proudly call "Italian cuisine," Grandi explains, is nothing other than the shared narrative of an entire country that, towards the end of the 1960s, found itself faced with a remarkable availability and variety of food products and that, thanks to an innate talent for cooking and for satisfying taste, created it first for domestic consumption, using television, and then narrated it throughout the world with extraordinary effectiveness and a hint of gastronomic arrogance.