Unlabelling Authenticity: Food and Wine in Mario Soldati

ABSTRACT This essay begins with a survey of approaches to food in Italian media culture, and then explores how food studies and the environmental humanities can come together. We take two enogastronomic projects carried out by Mario Soldati, Nella valle del Po: alla ricerca dei cibi genuini (1957) and Vino al vino: alla ricerca dei vini genuini (1968–75), as a case study. These documentaries spanned the arc of Italy's postwar economic boom and the slow opening of Europe’s economic and political borders. Soldati’s search for authenticity in food and wine was a search for what would remain recognisably Italian even after Italy and its inhabitants changed shape yet again. His enogastronomic work maps the emergence of a new code of cultural values, and enables a new method for interpreting the terrain on which consumer practice, ecology, representation, and taste intersect.