Table of Contents

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments

Introduction: Tabletop Politics

1. Towards an Autarkic Italy

2. Agricultural Labour and the Fight for Taste

3. Raising Children on the Factory Line

4. Recipes for Exceptional Times

5. Model Fascist Kitchens

Conclusion: From Feeding Fascism to Eating Mussolini

A Note to Future Researchers
Notes
Bibliography
Index

About the Author

Diana Garvin is an assistant professor of Italian at the University of Oregon.

Reviews

Garvin’s book is a fascinating look at how dinner tables, café menus, cookbooks, and kitchen utensils can help us understand the intersection of politics and daily life. In this case, Garvin takes readers on a journey through women’s experiences of Fascism under Benito Mussolini’s regime by exploring their cooking, agricultural labor, and industrial food production in Italy from 1922 through 1945."
*Civil Eats*

"Feeding Fascism is a fascinating journey through the food, kitchens, and work of women in an era of intense political ideology and citizen stewardship, where nutrition and food science, design and modernity were all used to facilitate that stewardship."
*Nature Food *

"Feeding Fascism contributes much to our understanding of women’s lives under Mussolini’s dictatorship and is a welcome addition to a growing body of scholarship that challenges the consent-resistance dichotomy that long dominated studies of interwar Italy. Fascists rarely missed an opportunity to celebrate what they were doing or to explain to people how they wanted them to act and feel. By subjecting the kitchen cabinets, factory cafeterias, ration cards, and recipe collections of the period to scrutiny, Garvin has brought the experiences of at least some Italian women into the frame."
*LARB*

"Feeding Fascism looks past the gilded hearths of Fascist leaders, and transports us instead to rice paddies, factories and working-class kitchens. This important intervention in Fascism scholarship examines cooking, foraging, and labour in fields and factories to understand ‘what happened between rebellion and consent’ throughout the ventennio."
*Modern Italy*

"Feeding Fascism is for a general audience, and Garvin succeeds in making the material accessible – no dry prose or unfamiliar academic jargon here. By using the less-explored lens of women’s food work, she sheds light on a moment in history that threated to profoundly changed Italian culinary traditions."
*The Parliament*

"Feeding Fascism is an excellent contribution to the scholarship on Italian women, labour, food production and policy, industrialization, and architecture."
*Histoire sociale / Social History*

“Garvin deftly strikes a balance between explaining the process of food distribution and describing the subjective experiences of women within the macroeconomic transformations that concerned food production at the time.”
*EuropeNow Journal*

“Garvin’s work announces that the comprehensibility of the feelings, stories and struggles from those kitchens can only be partial without understanding their physical, tangible, tactile features … her constant emphasis on biopolitics and banal nationalism in everyday life underlines the extent to which food is always inherently political, whether or not it is recognized as such.”
*MLN*