Authenticity and Its Perils

This article focuses on absence and exclusion within heritage food making in northern Italy. These absences and exclusions are structured by race and gender inequalities and not incidental to heritage food making but built into it. I argue for an understanding of heritage foods as what Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing (2015) has called “capitalist ruins,” or that which is left behind when capitalist structures and forms recede from particular landscapes and sites, leaving people to piece together livelihoods in the aftermath. To do this, I draw from my long-term ethnographic and linguistic anthropological research with heritage food makers in northern Italy, who primarily create various types of meat-based products, like salamis and sausages. The local concept of “nostrano” (our local) generates a type of authenticity that is also a chronotope, or a fusion of notions of time and space, which is key to how exclusions and absences are structured. Thinking of heritage food as a capitalist ruin, that is, as a product of capitalism and the inequalities it perpetuates, shows that although heritage food may be an answer for some—to save our way of doing things, our history, our livelihoods—it may also, perhaps always and simultaneously, be perilous and exclusionary for others.