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The social life of lardoAlison Leitcha Department of Anthropology, Faculty of Arts and Science, New YorkUniversity, New YorkPublished online: 17 May 2010.

To cite this article: Alison Leitch (2000): The social life of lardo , The Asia Pacific Journal ofAnthropology, 1:1, 103-118

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THE SOCIAL LIFE OF LARDOSlow Food in fast times

Alison Leitch

Let us begin with the scene of a feast. Imagine a medieval village high up in themountains. The village appears quite precariously perched along a rocky ridge,overlooking vast rivers of white marble rubble shifting ominously in themoonlight. Constructed from marble tiles, the walls of the houses also look likethey are crumbling into the ravines below. Packed into the small, central villagesquare are scores of revellers, some seated at one of many lines of long, trestletables swaying under the weight of plates piled high with glistening white porkfat. Others are standing, shouting, perhaps applauding with pleasure at theprovocative pose of one of the scantily clad local village models strutting along araised platform constructed for the parade of intimate lingerie. Everyone isdrinking, eating, literally stuffing themselves with pork fat. Nearby, on anotherstage, there is a karaoke competition, and if you look towards the belltower youmight see a group of muscular, young quarry workers displaying their masculineprowess by swinging on ropes tied to the top of the tower. When the band beginsits renditions of popular '50s love songs, red-faced, satiated couples stagger -their flesh potruding - as they twirl themselves around the crowded dance floor,late into the night.

This Fellini-esque scene of fleshy excess is enacted at the lardo festival, afeast dedicated to this local culinary speciality - cured pork fat - held annuallyover three days in late August in the tiny village of Colonnata. Located at the endof a narrow, winding mountain road traversing one of the three main, marblevalleys of Carrara in central Italy, Colonnata is one of several villages in the areaknown locally as the 'marble villages' which claim hereditary links to marblequarrying. A village which has produced many generations of skilled stoneworkers, Colonnata also has a reputation for political independence. According tolocal mythology even its name is derived from an original group of runawayRoman slaves who were among the first to excavate marble in this area. Visualand aural references to this history abound. Weird conical shapes ressemblingancient medieval towers and surreal rock formations forged through centuries ofhuman labour loom mysteriously through the nightly mists, while during daylighthours the rumblings of explosives and high-pitched wails of excavators leave

The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology 1(1) 2000:103-118

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104 THE SOCIAL LIFE OF LARDO

audible traces of the enduring importance of marble quarrying to the local

economy.However, these days Colonnata is more famous for its own brand of cured

pork fat, or lardo, which I first tasted there while conducting research into marble

production and craft identity in the late 1980s. The village has become a frequent

culinary destination for tourists, both local and international. Lardo is sold in a

number of modest village delicatessens, as well as in the more up-market regional

gourmet grocery shops. It has been promoted with great acclaim by Pecks,

Milan's famous epicurean mecca, and has even been nominated as a delicious,

albeit exotic, delicacy by writers as far afield as the food columns of The New

York Times (La Nazione 18/2/1997). It is the most frequently requested item on an

extensive menu at Venanzio, one of the region's more exclusive restaurants.

Located in the main square of Colonnata, Venanzio is named eponymously after

its owner, a local gourmet and lardo purveyor, who has been a central figure in

the organisation of the annual lardo festival held in the village since the mid-

1970s.At one level the lardo festival is clearly an example of sagre, the many

kinds of food festivals which take place throughout Italy during the summer

months. Like the lardo festival, these events are often organised by village

committees and promoted by regional tourist authorities. They are usually low-

key affairs, not necessarily linked to particular political factions or individual

economic self-interest, and mostly dedicated to valorising locally produced

products or regional culinary specialities. Apart from lardo, other Carrarese

culinary specialities include chestnut-flour pancakes called castagnacci, pancakes

dressed with pesto called testaroli or sometimes panigazzi,1 wild herb tart and

polenta. Nowadays, these foods are rarely eaten at home, partly because they

require substantial preparation time, but also because they are associated in the

popular imagination with poverty and the hunger of the war years. The popularity

of food festivals in post-war years can be traced to a complex mixture of the

growth of domestic tourism from the 1950s when people began to travel in newly

acquired cars and motorbikes, and campanilismo, or localism, which in Italy is

often expressed through the association of towns and villages with particular

products or foods.2

At a deeper level of analysis the recuperation of these kinds of proletarian

or peasant foods could be interpreted as part of a pervasive nostalgia in modern

societies for the past, for lost community, for the 'good old days'. For example,

there is the recent surge in popularity of so-called 'nursery puddings' and appeals

for the protection of the great British 'banger'. Staffordshire oatcakes, once a

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ALISON LEITCH 105

staple breakfast food of mining families, are now apparently sold in mail-ordercatalogues niche-marketed to the upper middle class (James 1997:79-81). There isalso a huge publishing industry based around the marketing of what I like to call'Tuscanopia', in which Tuscan peasant cuisines, house renovation projects andpicturesque rurality all seem to have become key fantasy spaces of modern urbanalienation.3 These increasing trends towards the objectification andcommodification of rural and proletarian nostalgia can be seen as the ironicmarkers of a global economy concerned as much with the production of signs,memories, and images as it is with the production of distinct objects andcommoditities (Lash and Urry 1994; Baudrillard 1981).

My interest, during fieldwork, in the subject of lardo stemmed from localreverence towards such an obviously proletarian and elsewhere despised food,associated, for example, with the notion of fat as 'poison' in modern Americandiets (Rozin 1998; Klein 1996). During the years I spent in Carrara, lardo-tastingvisits to Colonnata became one of the ways I entertained foreign visitors who,more often than not, registered the appropriate signs of disgust at the meremention of feasting on pork fat. I was certainly not to know that several yearslater lardo di Colonnata would become even more acclaimed, as the key exampleof an 'endangered food' for a national consumer movement known as the SlowFood Movement.

Briefly, Slow, or Slow Food - as it is called in Italy - formed in the mid-1980s as a loose coalition of Italians opposed to the introduction of American-style, fast-food chains, notably MacDonalds. Its founder, Carlo Petrini, is a well-known food journalist and wine expert, who was born in 1948 and is publicallyassociated with specific elite intellectual circles of the 1960s Italian left. In 1989,Petrini launched the International Slow Food Movement in Paris, 4 and it is now alarge organisation with over 80,000 members in thirty-five countries dedicated tothe protection of foods linked to particular localities and cultural traditions.

More broadly, Slow could easily be seen as part of a continuum ofconsumer/farmer coalitions in Europe which are currently lobbying against thecorporatisation of food production, specifically the importation of geneticallymodified produce and the homogenisation of food tastes. It is a movement whichis deeply concerned with the question of European identity, with Europe's futureas well as its past. It is a movement which is deeply caught up in what has beencalled the politics of risk discourse (Beck 1992). Issues such as the introduction ofgenetically modified foods, the widespread use of antibiotics in animal fodder, thespread of diseases like Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE) - colloquiallyknown as mad cow's disease - or the 1999 Belgian chicken dioxin scandal, as

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106 THE SOCIAL LIFE OF LARDO

well as cases of mass food-poisoning are now central topics of conversation inmost European nations. Public anxiety over these risks, both real and imagined, issymptomatic of other widespread fears concerning the rapidity of social andeconomic change since the Maastricht Treaty of 1992. These questions of foodand identity are thus rapidly becoming the 'Euro' of public debate: a single,common, discursive currency through which to debate Europeanness and theimplication of economic globalisation at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

How does lardo di Colonnata figure in this story? Leaving aside, for themoment, the wider question of food, European identity and the politics of riskdiscourse, let me begin with interrogating the local meanings of lardo.Specifically, can the meanings of lardo for local people be totally divorced fromits production? Have these meanings changed in relation to its appropriation as asymbol of endangerment for the Slow Food Movement? How, in other words,might lardo now circulate in a global, or even national, economy of signs?

EATING LARDO

Many entries in my diaries indicate a preoccupation with how I was going tosurvive the gastronomic excesses of Italian fieldwork. Even after the initialhoneymoon period had worn off, meals in my neighbours' households were oftenthree-course events with generous amounts of meat, rich pastas, fried vegetablesand always accompanied by a great deal of alcohol. Recalling the food scarcitiesof his youth - often at Sunday lunches where Alda, his wife, always preparedenormous quantities of homemade lasagna - my neighbour Elio frequentlyremarked with emphasis that, 'Today, every day is feast day'. But, during thethree years I spent living in Carrara between 1986 and 1989 no-one ever offeredme a plate of lardo when I visited.

Lardo was, however, almost always nominated in the oral histories Icollected detailing the conditions of work over past generations. In many of thesenarratives, the past was distinguished from the present through tales of foodscarcity and physical hardship. The absence of meat was a constant theme. Othersources of protein - including stoccofisso, the air-dried cod which travelledalong trading routes from the coast, or cheese made by local shepherds in themountains above the city - were expensive. Until quite recently meat was aluxury item in diets which consisted predominantly of various grains, legumesand vegetables as well as produce gathered from the woods and forests likechestnuts and mushrooms, or wild, edible roots and herbs. Many householdsmaintained small vegetable gardens which kept them going during periods of

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ALISON LEITCH 107

unemployment and some households with access to land kept pigs or cows. Oneof the by-products of these pigs - lardo or cured pork fat - thus constituted akind of food safe for families in the region and was an essential daily source ofcalorific energy in the quarry worker's diet.

Like sugar and coffee, lardo was a 'proletarian hunger killer' (Mintz 1979).Eaten with a tomato and a piece of onion on dry bread, it was a taken-for-grantedelement in the worker's lunch or companatico.5 Lardo was thought to quell thirstas well as hunger and was appreciated for its coolness on hot summer days. Givenits dietary importance, it is perhaps not surprising that it was also adopted as acure for any number of health ailments from an upset stomach to a bad back. 6 Onelocal restaurateur and lardo maker, nicknamed Ometto or 'the little man', was amine of information on lardo's curative powers. As he put it, when one went tothe butcher and asked for lardo, 'everyone knew there was someone ill at home'.

Apart from its nutritional, or curative value, lardo can easily be seen as theperfect culinary analogue of a block of marble (Leivick 1999). Both materialsconvey parallel ideas of metamorphosis. Elsewhere I have written about the waysin which quarry workers utilise organic metaphors to talk about the transformativeproperties of the stone (Leitch 1993, 1996, 1999). Marble is often described as aliving material which reacts in an anthropomorphic manner to the activity ofhuman labour. It 'sleeps' and 'wakes' and is sometimes said to contain a 'soul'.As workers excavate deeper and deeper into the rock, the mountain shifts andmoves. Like a living person it makes a noise. It 'groans'. It literally changesshape, a visual reminder of the reciprocal relationship between nature and humanagency. Already a metamorphic rock, the stone's transformation is, however, onlyfinally affected once it is cut out from its 'raw' state in the mountain, when itbeomes a block of marble left to 'cook' in the sun. In this process of'interanimation' of person and place, craft identities are forged, and the physicallandscape becomes wedded to that of the imagination (Basso 1996). Lardoembodies similar ideas of metamorphosis. It is transformed from its natural stateas pig fat through the curing process, and this process is also narrated as onewhich encapsulates ideas of craft and individual skill.

Although recipes for lardo vary in their finer details, marble, preferablyquarried from near Colonnata at Canalone, is always cited as an essentialproduction ingredient. Its qualities of porousness and coolness are vital, especiallybecause lardo makers do not use any kind of preservative apart from salt.Apparently the crystalline structure of Canalone marble allows the pork fat to'breathe', while at the same time it contains the curing brine. If at any stage thelardo goes bad, it is simply thrown out. Just like marble workers who have often

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suggested to me that marble dust is actually beneficial to the body because it is'pure calcium', lardo makers say that the chemical composition of marble,

calcium carbonate, is a purificatory medium which extracts harmful substancesfrom pork fat, including cholesterol.

The curing process begins with the raw fat - cut from the back of selectpigs - which is then layered in rectangular, marble troughs resembling smallsarcophagi called conche. The conche are placed in the cellar, always the coolestpart of the house. The majority of these cellars are quite dank and mouldy. Somestill contain underground cisterns, which in the past supplied water to householdswithout plumbing. Cellars are also commonly used as repositories for wood andother household equipment. Before it was recently transformed into a rustico - afashionable rustic-style dining room - my neighbour's cellar in the village of

Gragnana was used to store household tools, as a laundry, and occasionally, tobutcher wild boar. Although it was hard to get agreement, most of the lardo

makers I interviewed suggested that the curing process traditionally began in thecooler months of the year, often in the autumn when the pigs were butchered andmade into salamis to provide food for the winter months. Once placed in thetroughs, the pork fat is covered with layers of rock salt and a variety of herbs andspices, including pink-jacketed garlic, pepper and rosemary. Finally, a small slabof bacon is placed on top to start the pickling process and six to nine months laterit is ready to eat. Translucent, white, veined with pink, cool and soft to touch, theend product mimics the exact aesthetic qualities prized in high-quality stone.

But lardo is, of course, more than just a visual culinary analogue formarble. It is a perfect example of the relationship between food and identity,implied also in Brillat-Savarin's (1971[1826]) famous gastronomic essay The

physiology of taste which includes the oft-quoted aphorism: 'Tell me what you eat

and I will tell you who you are.' There is now a substantial body of literature onfood as a marker of classic sociological categories such as class, gender andethnicity. 7 Other scholars, such as Claude Fischler (1988) have noted theimportant phenomenological aspects of eating, suggesting for example that it isthrough the principal of incorporation - 'the action in which we send a foodacross the frontier between the world and the self, between "outside" and "inside"our body' - that we become what we eat (1988:279).

For local people lardo is deeply reminiscent of a shared past characterisedby poverty and food scarcity. In diets distinguished by protein scarcity, lardo wasan essential calorific food for men who, in the past, laboured up to fifteen hours aday cutting and hauling huge blocks of marble. To eat lardo, especially in thecarnevalesque space of the lardo festival, is to remember and celebrate this past as

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ALISON LEITCH 109

collective history and corporeal memory. This is a performance of sensuousdisplay and consumption where the skin, fat and flesh of lardo is counterpoised tothat of its consumers. The juxtaposition of two kinds of beautiful bodies and flesh- lardo and human - is a way of rephrasing, or resculpting, two kinds ofsmooth, sensuous, luxuriousnesss: lardo and marble. So just as lardo tastes ofmarble, it also mimics it. Through the curing process, lardo and marblemetaphorically become one and the same. Through its physical incorporation,memories of place and self are actually ingested.

THE POLITICS OF PORK FAT

In 1998, after a five-year absence, I made a brief fieldwork trip back to Carrara. Ihad timed my return to coincide with the annual May Day celebration which thatyear, quite unexpectedly, was a rather sombre affair. The marble industry wasagain in crisis, with the price of high-quality stone at its lowest point andunemployment figures at their highest in ten years. Over the past decade severalmanufacturing plants along the coast had shut down, and the former industrialarea had come to resemble a vast wasteland. To make matters considerably worse,on the eve of the May Day celebration, an entire cliff of marble sheared off in theBettogli quarry, burying two young men and their equipment. Collective grief andoutrage were palpable in the town. Over the next week numerous debates wereheld to ponder the future of Carrara's marble industry and its homegrown visionof modern, rational efficiency.

Catching up with friends and neighbours, I was surprised to learn that whilethe marble industry was in crisis, lardo di Colonnata had become a newlycontroversial topic. It was indeed playing a central role in a growing nationalconversation over the fate of traditional Italian foods threatened by trends towardsagribusiness in food production, multinational monopolisation of food distributionnetworks, and increased application of European Union hygiene legislation. It wasin this context that lardo di Colonnata was nominated by the Slow FoodMovement as one of Italy's ten most 'endangered foods'.

The events which led to this declaration had apparently begun two yearsearlier. In March of 1996 the local police force had descended on what onenewspaper called 'the temple of lardo' (La Nazione 1/4/1996), namely theVenanzio restaurant in Colonnata. Protected by the constabulary, local healthauthority personnel proceeded to remove several samples of Venanzio's lardo andsubsequently placed all of his conche under quarantine. Later, samples were also

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110 THE SOCIAL LIFE OF LARDO

taken from several other small lardo makers in the village, but Venanzio and one

other wholesaler, Fausto Guadagni, were singled out for special attention.This action led to a barrage of media commentary which soon reached the

national dailies. Apart from the predictable undertones of conspiracy theory at thelocal level, the main preoccupation was the possible threat to the 1996 lardo

festival. The reasons for the quarantine were never entirely clear to the lardo

makers involved. When I asked them later, they flatly denied it had anything to dowith the spread of Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE) which,

nevertheless, was a topic of immense anxiety at the time. Obviously, BSE hadlittle to do with pigs, but collective hysteria over the spread of this disease had,for example, provoked numerous articles in the local press about the benefits ofvegetarianism. And in the wake of this hysteria, it may not have been entirelycoincidental that regional health authorities decided to take a closer look at lardo,

a product which had never undergone scientific analysis of any kind. However,local lardo makers simply interpreted the whole affair as a completely

unreasonable attack on their autonomy to make a product which they had beenproducing without a single problem for many years.

Nationally, the quarantine and subsequent application of new Europeanhygiene legislation led to debates over the power of the European Union toregulate Italian food production. Like earlier popular reactions to the

standarisation and regularisation of artisanal cheese production in Britain (James1997), the lardo quarantine was widely interpreted in media reports as an attemptby the European Union to determine Italian eating habits. In the national daily La

Repubblica, Sergio Manetti (1996) penned an article entitled 'The EuropeanUnion ruins Italian cuisine' ('La CEE porta la rovina sulla tavola Italiana'). In asomewhat hysterical tone he reported that:

My dear friend Venanzio introduced lardo di Colonnata to the world. This is oneof the most divine foods I have ever eaten. It is quite unearthly and has anincredibly sweet flavor. For centuries lardo has been preserved in marble basinsand stored in cellars carved out of the rock where the natural humidity andporousness of the walls create the perfect conditions for its maturation and where itcan keep for months, even years. Now all this has gone. The cave walls must betiled up just like the floor and you need a toilet in case you want to pee. Lardo willprobably become quite disgusting. All this has happened merely because somepoor functionary from the health authority has to carry out their duty enforcing thebureaucratic rules of the European Union. These poor people have probably nevereven tasted lardo, let alone visited a cellar. Perhaps, like most city children theyhave never even seen a chicken, a lamb or a live pig. And so, therefore, soon wewill have to bid farewell to the formaggio di fossa (ditch cheese) and cheeses ofCastelmagno, to the mocetta valdostana (a type of fruit chutney). And then we will

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ALISON LEITCH 111

be forced to eat the industrial products which are made according to strict hygieniclaws (but can we be sure?), but which are absolutely tasteless and with no smelland with such detailed descriptions as to make us lose our appetites. And all thisbecause of the European Union. All of us are facing the end of the world. Or atleast that is what Nostradamus predicted in four years' time. For God's sake just letus eat what we want over these last years! My modest suggestion is as follows:immediate abolition of the European Union, the common market, the commoncurrency and the Maastricht Agreement ... If we can't have smoked salmon, thenwe will make smoked trout, which will be just as good. There should also be animmediate reduction in the powers of the health authorities who are compelled toapply these new European rules, not understanding that the whole of Europe travelshere to eat the foods we have been eating for years, but which have been forbiddento them at home (Manetti 1996; my translation).

This article was one of many similar pieces published in reaction to the lardoquarantine and it underscores recurring themes in the subsequent development ofpopular discourse concerned with the homogenisation of Italian food tastes. Itasserts the idea of a national Italian cuisine which is associated with artisanal

techniques linked to particular geographical territories. It delineates a vision of thenew Europe as an increasingly bureaucratic and rationalising political entitywhich excessively interferes in the everyday lives of ordinary people. It pointssubtly to an emergence of new European hygiene experts whose scientificknowledge is valued more than the experience of artisanal food producers. Andfinally its apocalyptic tone conveys the mood of urgency and the desire for animmediate response.

The lardo quarantine controversy also provided the perfect mediaopportunity for the political aspirations of the Slow Food Movement. Accordingto Carlo Petrini, coinage of the term 'endangered food' dated to the mid-1990s,just before the lardo controversy errupted. Up until the mid-1990s, Slow had beenpublically perceived as an association of gourmets, mostly concerned with theprotection of national cuisines. But by the mid-1990s - a period which coincidedwith a number of high-profile food scares in Europe and public loss of trust innational food regulatory authorities - Slow began to imagine itself as aninternational organisation concerned with the global protection of food tastes. Atthe end of 1994, Slow launched a project called the Ark, utilising an explicitlybiblical image of biological salvation to promote its new global agenda.According to Petrini, the Ark project was born at the moment the associationrealised the logical impossibility of being gourmets without also beingenvironmentalists. To ignore these issues, in Petrini's words, would mean to bethought of as 'stupid gourmets'.8

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112 THE SOCIAL LIFE OF LARDO

For Slow, lardo di Colonnata became the example par excellence in a long

list of 'endangered' foods which included, for example, red onions from Tropea in

Calabria, an ancient legume from the region of Le Marche called la Cicerchia,

and a plum and apricot hybrid called i Biricoccolo. In other words, 'endangered

foods' were those foods nominated by the Slow Food Movement and its scientific

committees as being under threat for reasons including: trends towards farming

monocultures; the disappearance of hybrid plants due to the disintegration of

traditional rural foodways; the extinction of shellfish or fish due to overfishing

and pollution of waterways; and the dearth of alternate distribution networks for

specialised food producers. In the case of lardo, salamis and cheese, the threat

was standardisation, due to the imposition of European Union hygiene legislation

which would considerably diminish the economic viability of many of these

artisanal producers and therefore eliminate food and cultural diversity.

The erruption of the lardo controversy thus proved entirely fortuitous for

Petrini and the Slow Food Movement and they were certainly not slow to exploit

its proletarian exoticism. Back in Colonnata the controversy over the lardo

quarantine continued unabated for several months. And although these issues

have never entirely been resolved, the lardo festival has continued to function

with even greater acclaim. Some of the larger wholesalers, including Venanzio,

have been forced to comply with the new legislation by tiling their cellars, putting

in toilets and making lids for their conche. Others, however, have continued to

make lardo, now clandestinely, in their untiled porous cellars.

Ironically the publicity surrounding these events has amplified into yet

another threat: copying. Much to the dismay of local lardo wholesalers, big

butcheries from all over Italy are currently manufacturing a product which they

call lardo di Colonnata. When I visited them in 1998, the lardo makers in

Colonnata were lobbying regional politicians to protect the name of lardo through

its nomination as 'Denominazione d'Origine Protetta' (DOP), which would mean

that the pigs must be raised and lardo produced in Colonnata itself. Alternately, if

this failed, they wanted the Tuscan regional government to approve the title of

'Indicazione Geografica Protetta', a label which means that the raw material used

in lardo production must come from a circumscribed area around the village of

Colonnata. They were even hopeful that I could help them in these endeavours by

providing some historical or anthropological evidence of local lardo consumption.

One of the main protagonists in this story, and the largest wholesaler in

Colonnata, Fausto Guadagni, had already compiled a great deal of material on this

subject, but he was lacking essential scientific verification due to the unfortunate

fact that no-one had mentioned lardo in historical texts. A second, no less

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significant setback, was that the pigs used in making lardo are no longer raised inColonnata or even in the zone around Carrara. They are usually bought from localbutchers, or in the case of Fausto, from specialist pig producers in Reggio Emilia.So even though Fausto and others from Colonnata had attempted to scientificallydocument the essential links between product and territory, it was provingextremely difficult to unambiguously verify that lardo di Colonnata washistorically unique to Colonnata. While Fausto and the other lardo makers mayhave been incensed at Italian health authority claims that lardo was 'invented',they were equally pessimistic about the possibility of establishing a DOPtrademark. They were, however, still heavily invested in creating a collectiveprotocol for lardo production, and in fabricating historical narratives, collectionsof recipes, and books of poetry - all with the explicit aim of creating greaterauthenticity for their product. The threat of lardo's generic proliferation was asmuch an assault on collective memory as on economic livelihood and, indeed, thetwo were connected. For, as James (1997) astutely observes, authenticity alwayshas its price. Whereas local lardo wholesalers, such as Fausto, were concernedwith the protection of the quality of their product against what they consideredwere inferior versions, other Colonnatese were equally preoccupied withdefending the popularity of the lardo festival and promoting a product linked tothe history of marble production and collective corporeal memory. The possibilityof replication thus intensified both the stakes in the politics of memory andauthenticity.

When I returned to Carrara the following year, in 1999, Faustodespondently told me that while they had failed to obtain the protection of acollective trademark for lardo, ten individuals, including himself, had managed toacquire the legal copyright to the name lardo di Colonnata. But as Fausto alsopointed out, several people in this group no longer produce lardo. The ultimateirony in this story is, of course, that many other people in the village of Colonnatawho continue to make lardo for the annual festival, still do not comply with thecurrent European hygiene rules, nor are they now actually legally entitled toproduce a product called lardo di Colonnata. Thus a product which was once partof everyday diets and part of a collective social identity has been reinvented,packaged for gourmet consumption and ultimately privatised.

CONCLUSION

A recent focus on the consumption process in the social sciences has drawnattention to, among other things, ways that consumption is mediated by the

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images, ideologies, the desires, the 'texts', that are inscribed within them. Thus itcan be said that all industries which produce commodities for mass consumption

- for example food - are essentially culture industries involved in circulatingcultural goods as much as they are in circulating economic goods. Morepointedly, as Igor Kopytoff notes, 'the production of commodities is also acultural and cognitive process: commodities must be not only produced materially

as things, but also culturally marked as being a certain kind of thing' (1986:64).Commodities, Kopytoff asserts, have cultural biographies. They have, inAppadurai's (1986) celebrated phrase, 'social lives'.

This paper has attempted to trace the recent social life of lardo as it hasmoved from being a commodity with a relatively contained set of meanings forlocal people to its current role as a new symbol of a national and internationalmovement around the politics of food production and consumption in the newEurope. In this brief account I have traced the struggle for the meaning of lardo asit has escalated into the appropriation of lardo as a symbol of 'endangerment' forthe Slow Food Movement. At the local level this struggle is as much about thepolitics of memory as it is about the economy. A product once associated with acollective social history and corporeal memory, is now privately patented by agroup of people - some of whom may not even make lardo but can sell therecipe. This is a story, in other words, not of the 'invention of tradition'(Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983) but the commodification of tradition. It is a storywhich speaks to the way that memory replaces tradition as we move from

modernity into post or late modernity; a process which writers on other cultureindustries - such as art and music - have tracked as a commodification ofnostalgia (Feld 1995).

Colonnata still promotes itself through its annual lardo festival, and thereare plans to erect a huge statue of a pig in the main square just outside theVenanzio restaurant. Once again, Carrara will memorialise its popular history in amarble monument.

NOTES

1 Actually, testaroli and panigazzi really refer to two different kinds of pancakes. Both areunleavened, but differ in appearance and modes of preparation. Sometimes also calledtestaroli, panigazzi are thin pancakes cooked on flat, metal pans and are mostly found inthe lower Lunigiana region. Testaroli are more common in the region around Pontremoliin the upper Lunigiana and are much larger and thicker pancakes, traditionally cooked onterracotta or metal pans and covered with a lid. Testaroli were great travelling foods,

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because they could be re-heated over steam. They were the classic food of travellingPontremolese booksellers.2 Campanilismo is a widepread and much commented upon aspect of Italian sociability.The word is derived from campanile or 'belltower'. It literally refers to an identificationwith those who live within the sound of the local belltower.

3 These trends are by no means confined to Europe. According to anthropologist SouchouYao, traditional peasant foods like chunky Hakka dishes of fatty pork stew and pickledvegetable stews, have recently become very popular among young, wealthy, urbanMalaysians, whereas for actual rural families, meat dishes are still 'show off' items (pers.comm.).4 This date was significant for two reasons. Firstly, 1989 marks the first cracks in thepolitical dissolution of Eastern Europe. It was also the bicentenary of the FrenchRevolution. During the Revolution, French cooks lost their positions working for thearistocracy but eventually became self-employed restaurateurs for the new middle classes.Thus, 1989, also marks the bicentenary of the development of the modern Frenchrestaurant industry.5 In Italian companatico literally means 'something which is eaten with bread'. It isinteresting to note that, at Carrara, companatico is associated with ideas of workersolidarity, partly because all quarry workers - whatever their position in the hierarchy ofskill - more or less ate the same thing, often sharing their food. As Leon Kass (1994) hasobserved in The hungry soul the English word company is also derived from the sameLatin root: com 'together' and panis, 'bread'.6 This essay is, of course, dedicated to my former thesis supervisor Paul Alexander, whosework on the cultural construction of economies, inspired my research on the Carraramarble industry. Paul and Jenny Alexander first tasted lardo when they visited me inCarrara in the late 1980s, and I believe they can personally attest to its unexpectedcurative properties.7 For a succinct summary of this huge body of literature see Caplan 1997. For class andstatus see the classic works of Veblen 1953[1899]; Elias 1978[1939]; Mennell 1987;Finkelstein 1985, 1989; Bourdieu 1986[1979]; Mintz 1985; and Goody 1982. For recentworks on food and gender in Britain, the United States and Australia see Bordo 1993;Murcott 1995; Charles and Kerr 1988; and Lupton 1996. For works on food and ethnicitysee Sobo 1994; Massara 1989; Ohnuki-Tierney 1993; Douglass 1984; and Bradby 1997.8 Information on the history of Slow Food has been gleaned from a variety of mediareports, as well as an interview I conducted with Carlo Petrini in June 1999 at the SlowFood Association head office, located at Bra in the region of Piemonte.

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