Prior to the March on Rome, considered by many to be the “official” start of the Fascist period (1922-1945), most Italians sat down to a dinners consisting of cereals - bowls of polenta, risotto, or pasta - with little meat, cheese, or butter to season the dish.  This did not change under Fascism.  What did change, however, was the political meaning of eating abstemiously.  As Carol Helstosky has argued in “Garlic and Oil,” the regime reframed poverty as patriotism.

Breathless newspaper coverage praised the frugality of dictator Benito Mussolini’s daily meals:

coffee in the morning, broth at lunch, some vegetables and a bit of chicken for dinner. Propaganda like this reveals how the regime reframed la cucina povera to cover its own failure to manage the national food supply.  Even the meaning of word propaganda changed. In the early 1920s, it meant the iconic advertising produced by graphic artists like Federico Seneca, Marcello Dudovich, and Gino Boccasile, who promoted chocolate bonbons and canned tomatoes in pugno nell’occhio style (Fig. 1). Posters advertising brands, a then-new concept, plastered city walls.  They were a ubiquitous visual feature of urban life. Through these campaigns, Italian brands like Perugina, Campari, and Cirio became avatars of culinary chicness and modernity across Europe.  It was all part of the push for autarky, or economic self-sufficiency. Alimentary autarky had the power to boost the domestic economy, but only if women produced and consumed more Italian food products.  At the cinema, newsreels celebrated working-class women in agriculture, who grew and weeded these foods in the fields.  Magazines like La Cucina Italiana suggested that middle class women learn how to raise their own rabbits and chickens as an alternative to pork.  By the end of the 1920s, propaganda implied not products, but politics.

For most Italians, eating patriotically under Fascism meant participating in Mussolini’s culinary battles: for grapes, grain, and rice, among many others.  These “battles” were propaganda campaigns.  They advertised the regime’s approach to Italian food culture through culinary propaganda, including food festivals, menus, cookbooks, and recipes.  In the early 1930s, the regime appointed boards to promote local foods.  They added new holidays. City centers shut down for the Festa dell’Uva parades and cooking contests (Fig. 2).  Smaller culinary festivals (sagre) celebrated local treats, like strawberries and chestnuts.  At these events, volunteers drawn from the Fasciste femminili distributed recipe booklets to encourage Italians to more cook rice grown in Lombardy, and less pasta prepared with imported wheat.  Invented traditions are a hallmark of Fascism, a means to resurrect an idealized national past.  If Italy did not need trade partners for food supply, then it could expand its empire through force.   In 1935, Italy invaded Ethiopia, establishing Italian East Africa.  The League of Nation imposed sanctions, which the regime used as a rallying cry to intensify the autarkic push (Fig. 3). With the Pact of Steel in 1939, the food situation went from bad to worse, with non-perishable Italian foodstuffs requisitioned for German supplies.  Italian cookbooks like Petronilla’s “Dinners…for these Times” and “Cooking with Nothing at All” evoke the desperation of the war years as the regime distributed ration cards.  Sugar, flour, rice, coffee, and oil for cooking became scarce, more often found in black markets than on grocers’ empty shelves.   Ultimately, Fascist food policy meant poorer Italian diets, marked by missing ingredients.