The Italian Far Right’s Beef with Vegans and Immigrants

Amidst the meat, cheese and butter-heavy cuisine of Northern Italy, a vegan restaurant in Turin is bustling with patrons. Daniela Zaccuri, owner and head chef of Mezzaluna, draws upon food cultures from across Italy and around the world to create veganized traditional Italian cuisine. Here, you’ll find food fusion ranging from curried broccoli to Italian apple cake. But over the last few decades of policy and propaganda, the Italian far right has been attempting to criminalize vegan cuisine. In Italy, a nation still stained with the politics of fascism, a culture war is being fought over food.

Since its rise to power in 2022, a coalition of far right parties led by Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni and Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini has fashioned food as a political prop. Salvini, who leads the right-wing Lega party, posts pictures and video content defending his favorite Italian foods. Recently, the politician declared that, “now more than ever, to eat Italian is a political act.” As nationalism grows in Europe and in Italy — a nation in which the importance of food is second to none — the far right is consolidating what counts as Italian.

Anti-Vegan Sentiment in Italy

Last year, Italy banned the production and sale of cell-cultivated meat — a move which will likely clash with the European Union’s free trade regulations. In defense of the ban, Salvini linked cell-cultivated meat to a declining job market, growing bureaucracy and uncontrolled immigration. He lumps these issues together and claims the European Union’s influence and regulation is to blame for Italy’s problems. Food is simply the proxy to prove his political point.  The minister even called cell-cultivated meat one of the “concrete issues” that his conservative coalition stands against.

In addition to banning what many consider a sustainable alternative to meat, fines of thousands of dollars were instituted for plant-based food products with names like “cauliflower steak” and “veggie ham.” Despite Italy’s vulnerability to a changing climate, including rising sea levels which threaten Venice, conservative politicians see veganism as a threat to their culture rather than a solution for the climate. These restrictions, along with others in France, Florida, Alabama, and Texas, succeed in criminalizing consumer choice.

Zaccuri was baffled by the law. “I think it’s a joke,” she sneers. The vegan chef contends that plant-based eating can indeed be Italian, offering her own interpretation of the traditional cuisine she loves. In the kitchen, she marinates seaweed to mimic the anchovies present in “bagna càuda,” (a Piedmontese hot dipping sauce) and makes a mayonnaise out of soymilk for her “insalata russa” (a cold vegetable salad similar to American potato salad).

While both veganism  and immigration to Italy are growing, the far right seems content to hold its cultural ground. In 2016, just as the mayor of Turin issued a city-wide plan to promote plant-based eating, a conservative politician drafted a bill which would’ve levied jail time for parents who raised their children on a vegan diet. The bill — which did not become law — was proposed after an Italian court ordered a vegan mother to feed her children meat in a divorce settlement. Amidst the debate, then-opposition leader Giorgia Meloni snapped a picture with a butcher and affirmed her solidarity with both livestock breeders, and her neo-fascist political party, Brothers of Italy.

“She throws a lot of red meat to her supporters,” Diana Garvin, PhD, quips. Garvin is a professor of food and politics at the University of Oregon and says the anti-abortion, anti-gay and anti-immigration Italian Prime Minister uses meat to represent larger cultural issues, and gain the vote of the country’s livestock farmers. (In America, the same culture war over meat wages on, fought on the battlefields of masculinity, money and political influence.) Salvini contrasts home-grown Italian meat with what he paints as the bureaucracy of the European Union. He frequently associates insect flours and lab-grown meat with the EU, and his most recent campaign slogan was “More Italy, Less Europe!”

Culinary Racism in Italy

In 2019, when the Archbishop of Bologna threw a feast for the city and served tortellini made from chicken — instead of pork — so that Muslim residents could dine, the Italian right was outraged.

In the right’s ideal of Italian food, the tortellini is stuffed with pork, and recent immigration has not changed the country’s national dishes. Speaking about immigration, Prime Minister Meloni stated, “that there is a problem of compatibility between Islamic culture and the values and rights of our civilization.” This “us vs. them” rhetoric shapes how food is allowed to be eaten, and how some foods can even be made illegal to enjoy.

In the wake of increased immigration, a wave of bans on foreign foods have swept throughout Italy. Starting in 2009, the town of Lucca prohibited any new so-called “ethnic” restaurants from opening. Since then, cities like Florence, Verona and Trieste have all put an end to foreign cuisine in efforts to protect what they consider to be their own culinary traditions. When the city of Venice banned kebabs from being served in the city, its mayor said the Middle Eastern delicacy was “not compatible with the preservation and development of Venice’s cultural heritage.”

Garvin imagines a sliding scale that goes from pride to xenophobia. According to the professor of food and politics, the scale has tipped into exclusion in Italy. There is a feeling — inflamed by leaders on the right — that something fundamental to the Italian identity is being corrupted by outsiders. “Food provides a stand-in for people,” Garvin says. Preservation of tradition can provide a stand-in for racism.

“What is tradition?” Zaccuri retorts. To create her own interpretation of Italian food, the chef draws from food traditions like Chinese tofu and Japanese seitan, which predate Italian traditions. She makes curries from India, sauces from Thailand. Her restaurant is a reflection of cultural fusion, a modern reality so easily overlooked by politicians and food purists who’d like to turn back the clock.

In fact, Italian food has always been a fusion. Pasta was probably imported from Asia or the Middle East, and pizza was popularized by Americans. In their current states, according to Garvin, these popular dishes have only been around since the mid-1900s. Before then, the tomatoes for sauces, corn for polenta and potatoes for gnocchi all came from the New World. Influenced by culinary traditions and ingredients from around the world, Italian food is still evolving in the present. The grain for a nonna’s pasta comes from as far away as Canada, and Salvini is right in clarifying that the hazelnuts in Italian-made Nutella come from Turkey; though his refusal of the chocolate-hazelnut spread is likely due to prejudice.

Gastronationalism in Italy

Gianfranco Marrone, PhD, an Italian professor at the University of Palermo, studies the symbolism and discourse around Italian food. He, like chef Zacurri, is skeptical of far right food politics. According to him, there is something about gastronationalism — which means using food to conserve a country’s political identity — that “makes no sense.”

A sitting minister yelled to a crowd that he likes pork, and that vegans should “get over it,” and Italy’s largest agricultural lobby declared that “test tube meat erases the popular identity of an entire nation.” On the one hand, conservative politicians have concerned themselves with a minority of Italians who, they feel, are corrupting the nation’s culture. On the other, though, it doesn’t take much to see through what Marrone calls their “completely false identity of Italian cuisine.”

When asked if meat is as central to the Italian identity as some politicians claim, Zaccuri says, “it depends on the region,” and Italy has many regions, each with their own cuisines. While Northern Italian cuisine has historically been shaped by heavy, savory meat dishes, the South follows the more vegetarian, Mediterranean diet — albeit with plenty of seafood. Overall, Marrone says, “meat in Italy has a strong gastronomic tradition, but not like in other European countries or America.”

The Meat Industry and Meat Consumption in Italy

Italians eat, on an average day, about a third of a pound of meat less than Americans, who consume almost a pound of meat a day. They also eat less meat than the French and Spanish. The Italian meat industry slaughters in the range of 600 million animals and produces about 4 million tons of meat annually, but is dwarfed by America’s production. Italy’s meat industry has grown considerably since the eighties, while the U.S. meat industry — which slaughters around 10 billion animals and produces 48 million tons of meat in a year — has been steadily increasing production.

While a reason for Italy’s recent obsession with vegans and immigrants who don’t eat certain meats could be found within industry concerns, the reality is that facism — especially food facism — doesn’t have to make a spoonful of sense. Gastronationalism is much more about nationalism than cuisine; the facts don’t matter compared to what politicians say, and what people feel. Food represents so much more than what’s on the plate, and our sense of taste is so subjective.

A country’s culture is shaped by people but molded by politics, and the far right in Italy, like a conceited food critic, believes it has the authority to dictate it. The popularity of a vegan fusion restaurant in Northern Italy might explain why the nation’s far right extremists are trying their very hardest to put an end to evolution.

G.F. Fuller’s reporting was made possible in part by the Institute for European Studies and Brooks School of Public Policy at Cornell University.