Nationalist polemic can recast a food staple as foreign cultural contamination.

Evidence

F. T. Marinetti, futurist poet and propagandist, and author of a curious work on gastronomy entitled La Cucina Futurista , attributed the degeneration of Italy to the Germanic importation of noodles in the Middle Ages. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 2524

Categorization

• CANDY: A bombastic futurist blamed spaghetti’s ancestors for Italy’s decline — a perfect elevator anecdote about how nationalists weaponize cuisine.
• XREF: Resonates with Gramsci’s elsewhere-noted ‘Italian cosmopolitanism’ and his argument that invention-of-tradition gestures replace real national history. — connects to: Wartime nationalism drives renaming ordinary foods to purge enemy associations; Political conflicts trigger renaming of everyday foods to signal ethnic hostility. — , Rudman, Laurie A - On the Nature of…, 1274; Official nationalism redirected resentment onto imported ethnic minorities — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on…, 382 (+2 more)
• SEED: Angle: ‘Eating the Nation’ — how purity politics attaches to food origins in nationalist rhetoric from Marinetti to modern nativism.
• yield-rescued: below the book’s yield-target cutoff, included anyway for connecting to: Wartime nationalism drives renaming ordinary foods to purge enemy associations; Political conflicts trigger renaming of everyday foods to signal ethnic hostility. — , Rudman, Laurie A - On the Nature of…, 1274; Official nationalism redirected resentment onto imported ethnic minorities — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on…, 382 (+2 more)