Porta Palazzo: The Anthropology of an Italian Market

Chapter 6. Kumalé: Ethnogastronomic Tourism

chapter 6 Kumalé: Ethnogastronomic Tourism Constructing Edible Exotica When I first started frequenting Porta Palazzo, everyone kept telling me I had to talk to Chef Kumalé if I was interested in foreign cuisine. In fact, I kept seeing this name on stickers on the doors of Chinese dry goods shops and Moroccan butchers in and around Porta Palazzo. Who was this mysterious character, the ubiquitous point of reference when it came to foreign cuisine and Porta Palazzo? Was there another anthropologist already in the field I had chosen? Not exactly, but Kumalé seemed to be asking some of the same questions that struck me as I got to know the market: in particular, can food create greater understanding and harmony between Italians and migrants ? The chef was organizing tours of the market, its neighboring ethnic food shops, and even abroad in Morocco. He was on television talking about Italy’s new immigrants and the exotic cuisine they had brought with them. He was on radio playing world music. He was everywhere I turned. What struck me was that Kumalé was trying to communicate through food: his message was that immigrants were not a huddled mass of unapproachable Others. They could be known through delicious encounters at the table, in the kitchen, and even in the market. Getting to know Chef Kumalé and following his activities and writings afforded me a number of interesting points of investigation concerning the Porta Palazzo market, ethnogastronomic tourism, and immigration in Italy. Can Chef Kumalé’s activities be considered a new form of gastronomic tourism ? Can he really help educate Italians about other cultures and the new people they are so reluctant to host? 120 chapter 6 After hearing all kinds of stories about Kumalé, I made an appointment to meet with the chef. We arranged a meeting before a Japanese cooking class he had organized as part of a cycle of ethnic cooking courses that he ran out of the Circolo de Amicis space in the upscale neighborhood of Borgo Po. Chef Kumalé turned out to be Vittorio Castellani, a middle-aged freelance journalist from Turin. Vittorio talked a mile a minute, with an entertaining aside ready and rehearsed for each topic as he carefully guided the interview I was supposedly conducting. Castellani revealed that he had given up his day job to follow his passion for culture and food full-time. This is how the character Chef Kumalé was born. The title chef denotes the character’s position as someone who prepares food as a profession, and it also gives a sense of status and authority—he is not a cook or a “hash-slinger.” The name Kumalé initially sounded Egyptian to me, or like a name from some far-off exotic place, but there was something familiar about it. In reality, for most Torinese, the name is easily identifiable because it is one of the most common expressions in the local dialect of Piedmontese: “cum a l’é,” closely related to “come va” in Italian, which means, “how is it going?” Many of Vittorio’s activities and programs use similar play on words to engage the curiosity of Italians and to make approaching other cultures a less daunting idea. Castellani’s guide to ethnic food in Turin, Pappamondo: Uomini, migrazioni e pietanze (2001), uses similar word play. This title turns around the words pappa (food, sometimes used for referring to baby food and food more generally) and mappamondo (globe of the world), and the play on words comes out as a reference to global food. Popular marketing campaigns for food products underline this point that language can make food more palatable to potential consumers (Schor and Ford 2007). In Italian advertising, through a jingle or friendly cartoon character, from Parmigiano cheese to ready-made pasta, food becomes fun. Is this what the chef was up to, making the Other easier to swallow? Besides writing guide books and organizing ethnogastronomic tours of the Porta Palazzo market, gastronomic tours abroad, and ethnic cooking classes, Vittorio Castellani also appears and helps orchestrate a variety of events in Italy and abroad that promote ethnic cuisine, writes articles for the Italian press, and hosts a world music show on a local radio station. For 121 kumalé: ethnogastronomic tourism some time, Castellani was the “world food” point person for Slow Food. According to the extremely energetic and motivated Castellani, all these activities are aimed at promoting multiculturalism...