Feeding Fascism

Feeding Fascism uses food as a lens to examine how women’s efforts to feed their families became politicized under the Italian dictatorship.

Diana Garvin is an assistant professor of Italian at the University of Oregon.

Lucas René Ramos:
“Garvin deftly strikes a balance between explaining the process of food distribution and describing the subjective experiences of women within the macroeconomic transformations that concerned food production at the time.”

Megan Kirby, York University:

"Feeding Fascism is an excellent contribution to the scholarship on Italian women, labour, food production and policy, industrialization, and architecture."

Prathap Nair:

"Feeding Fascism is for a general audience, and Garvin succeeds in making the material accessible – no dry prose or unfamiliar academic jargon here. By using the less-explored lens of women’s food work, she sheds light on a moment in history that threated to profoundly changed Italian culinary traditions."

Amy King:

"Feeding Fascism looks past the gilded hearths of Fascist leaders, and transports us instead to rice paddies, factories and working-class kitchens. This important intervention in Fascism scholarship examines cooking, foraging, and labour in fields and factories to understand ‘what happened between rebellion and consent’ throughout the ventennio."

Anne Wingenter, Loyola University:

"Feeding Fascism contributes much to our understanding of women’s lives under Mussolini’s dictatorship and is a welcome addition to a growing body of scholarship that challenges the consent-resistance dichotomy that long dominated studies of interwar Italy. Fascists rarely missed an opportunity to celebrate what they were doing or to explain to people how they wanted them to act and feel. By subjecting the kitchen cabinets, factory cafeterias, ration cards, and recipe collections of the period to scrutiny, Garvin has brought the experiences of at least some Italian women into the frame."

"Feeding Fascism is a fascinating journey through the food, kitchens, and work of women in an era of intense political ideology and citizen stewardship, where nutrition and food science, design and modernity were all used to facilitate that stewardship."

Annie Sciacca :

Garvin’s book is a fascinating look at how dinner tables, café menus, cookbooks, and kitchen utensils can help us understand the intersection of politics and daily life. In this case, Garvin takes readers on a journey through women’s experiences of Fascism under Benito Mussolini’s regime by exploring their cooking, agricultural labor, and industrial food production in Italy from 1922 through 1945."

Emanuela Scarpellini, Professor of Modern History, University of Milan:

"A fascinating journey into the world of food during the Fascist era that challenges widespread stereotypes and sheds light on women’s unexpected socially and politically important role, both as producers and as consumers. Thanks to archival documents, publications, oral accounts, and elements of visual and material culture, Diana Garvin's book stands out as a reference point in gender studies and food studies."

Lizzie Collingham, Author of The Taste of War: World War II and the Battle for Food:

"Using case studies ranging from the songs of women labouring in the rice paddies to the design of the model Fascist kitchen, Diana Garvin cleverly elucidates how Fascism was woven into the fabric of Italian women's daily lives."