The Italian American Table: Food, Family, and Community in New York City

Chapter 4: The American Business of Italian Food

4 The American Business of Italian Food Producers, Consumers, and the Making of Ethnic Identities The Modern Taste of Italian Food in America From the beginning of the Italian experience in America, the importing, production , and sale of food has played an important part in the growth of the Italian American business community, and understanding the central role of food in the making of Italian American identity means understanding what the business of food represents in the economic life of the community. In New York, the largest immigrant market in the country, the relationship between economic interests and thepromotionofanItaliandiasporic identity wasparticularlystrongandenduring. Immigrantentrepreneursineverylineofthe foodbusinesssoughttolinkfoodwith ethnic identity. Italian food importers, producers, wholesalers, store owners, and restaurateurs emphasized the ethnic content of their products and invoked ethnic solidarity by asking fellow Italians to keep their money in the community by buying their products and services. Since the Italian immigrant community was by far theirmostimportantmarket,foodentrepreneurswerealwaysactiveinfosteringthe centrality of food in a developing diasporic Italianità as well as supporting Italian Americannationalism.ThischapterdiscussesthehistoryofAmerican-madeItalian food in the 1920s and 1930s, focusing on the strategies with which its Italian American producers responded to economic and social change both in the immigrant community and in U.S. society at large. In those years, Italian American producers of Italian food did not limit their enterprises to the formation of an exclusive “Italian American community of taste” but rather created innovative communication strategies to exploit the connection between American modernity and progressive capitalism and the production of “traditional” foodstuffs. In the process, many entrepreneurs took advantage of the new opportunities offered by mass media to shape the mentality and lifestyle of a new ethnic consumer. 106 . part ii Indeed, the marketing strategies of Italian food producers and the response of Italian American consumers in the interwar years can illuminate the relationship between ethnicity and modernity. In the 1920s, as industrial expansion, urbanization , bureaucratization, and mass culture redefined the terms of modern living, “Americanism” became almost synonymous with modernity, as a secular, urban, and industrial society and civilization, marked by a relative profusion of goods and services.1 To the many Italian immigrants to New York, modernity and American civilization also tended to overlap and to signify a “culture” different from their own. For the Italians of Harlem, their ethnicity came to be defined by their attachment to the notions of home, family, and community, each a place of production, reproduction, consumption, and socialization, as opposed to the specialized spaces and institutions and the values of autonomy and personal initiative that defined urban American culture. In dialogue with “American” scientific rationality, economic efficiency, and the belief in progress, immigrants insisted on group solidarity based on race, blood, and traditional wisdom as the defining characteristics of their identity. At the same time, Italian American ethnicity and modernity were not, as immigrants believed, binary opposites; rather, the making of an Italian ethnicity was itself a reaction to modernity in a process that drew on many aspects of modern life, from the interaction with many ethnic others in the spheres of everyday life—work, religion, school—to the shedding of established identities, values, and meanings in the transition to an urban, industrial society. Foods produced in distant places with advanced technologies traveled through complex networks of distribution to Italian immigrant tables, where they were enjoyed (as Italian food) in family and community gatherings that reinforced group identity. This ethnic use of industrial food witnesses that technological innovations and impersonal systems of supply often enact creative productions of authentic forms of ethnic identity.2 As the narratives of Italian immigrants in Harlem have demonstrated, Italian American foodways retained special symbolic value in the making of Italian American identity because of the assumption that they arrived intact from an Old Worldpreindustrial, premodernpast. This ideology barely hidthe factthatmodern transportation, industrialization, urbanization, mass production, and marketing helped shape an original Italian American eating pattern and provide a source for culturaldifference,ratherthanthreatenanimaginedauthenticity.Thefactthatsome foods introduced to America by immigrants managed to become mass-produced commodities that retained their ethnic character was due mostly to the Italian American food entrepreneurs who skillfully applied mass-production systems in the manufacturing of “ethnic” food while exploiting their own ethnic identity to make it credible to an ethnic marketplace. The agency of ethnic food entrepreneurs also created Italian American consumers, on the one hand, by showing immigrants how to express their ethnic affiliation through consumption, on the other hand, by 4...