The world may agree that Italian food, from pizza to pasta to oil-drizzled tomatoes, tastes great — but Giorgia Meloni is convinced it means so much more than that.
The Italian prime minister spelt it out at a food show in Sicily before a G7 agriculture meeting this weekend, claiming the country’s cuisine was no less than “an extraordinary part of our identity”.
While other hard-right politicians around the world boast of their anti-migrant stances to prove their patriotism, Meloni has set herself apart by choosing food as the flag she wants to wave while promoting Italy’s uniqueness.
In a video she posted before she took office two years ago, Meloni urged her supporters to buy only Italian food at Christmas, proposing the famous lentils produced in Castelluccio in Umbria as well as tomatoes from Pachino in Sicily.
Italy’s national cuisine is touted by Meloni’s government as the perfect expression of the country’s proud identity
PIERO CRUCIATTI/AFP
“It’s a way to say you wish Italy well,” she said.
Aldo Cazzullo, a columnist with Italy’s leading daily, Corriere della Sera, said Meloni’s foodie nationalism was a winning recipe. “It’s not such a bad idea because Italians feel close to the land, to wine and food — if you go back two generations many families were farming,” he said.
The prime minister’s culinary identity has been backed by her brother-in-law Francesco Lollobrigida, who she named minister at the grandly named Ministry of Agriculture, Food Sovereignty and Forests.
“Food for us is not just nutrition, but the product of thousands of years of cultural cross-pollination,” he told The Times. “We’ve had the Greeks, the Romans, the Barbarians, the Arabs, the Normans and the Spanish in Sicily. All this created a culinary tradition recognised globally as excellent.”
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He added, “It is no wonder there are 250,000 Italian restaurants or restaurants serving Italian food around the world.”
As Italy’s national cuisine is regularly touted by Meloni’s government as the perfect expression of the country’s proud identity, the prime minister has eased off on attacking illegal migrants.
After once calling for the sinking of boats that rescue migrants, she now avoids the inflammatory claims about the danger of migration made by her hard-right peers Donald Trump, Viktor Orban and Marine Le Pen.
Her policies, which include restricting the movement of migrant rescue ships and building a migrant centre in Albania make Meloni a hardliner on migration, but she does not post on social media about migrant crime like her firebrand deputy prime minister, Matteo Salvini.
Salvini’s race-baiting and bulldozing of gypsy camps during his spell as interior minister six years ago was enough to drive up the number of racial assaults in Italy.
Meloni’s culinary patriotism is not, however, just about celebrating Italian identity — it does also on occasion take aim at foreigners.
Meloni has opened a school to teach young students the merits of Italian food
Lollobrigida’s ministry has launched a ban on meat created in laboratories, seeing it as a threat to real Italian meat hatched by multinational firms, while the EU has been blamed for trying to foist flour made with crushed insects on unsuspecting Italians.
“I have no intention of trying cultivated meat — people who’ve eaten it said it tastes horrible, and it could also be dangerous,” said Lollobrigida.
But whether or not Meloni’s food patriotism can slide into nationalism, it is unlikely to lead to violence. Foreigners may be assaulted after hate speeches about migration but no one has yet been beaten up over a lab steak.
Lollobrigida has previously warned of the danger of “ethnic substitution” involving migrants filling the gaps left by Italy’s plunging birthrate, but he admitted that Italian food production often depends on migrants, from Sikhs tending cows that produce parmesan cheese in Emilia-Romagna to Africans picking fruit and vegetables in southern Italy.
“That’s why we have increased the entry quotas for migrants. We need migrants who enter the country legally,” he said.
Between 2023 and 2025 Meloni’s government has allowed the entry into Italy of 452,000 foreign workers.
Meloni has opened a school to teach young students the merits of Italian food, telling the first year’s intake: “You are the future of this country”.
The food historian Alberto Grandi said Meloni’s promotion of mozzarella and pesto as the key to Italy’s identity was a clever way to steal support from left-wing parties in Italy. “Cuisine has long been the left’s vote-catcher, and right now they don’t know what to do,” he said.
He added that the prime minister did face one problem with linking Italy’s ancient culinary traditions to national identity: some of those traditions are not very old.
“The truth is that Italian cuisine is often based on innovation, not tradition. Think of prosecco, which was invented in the 1960s or the modern industrial version of balsamic vinegar made with caramel which was dreamed up in the 1970s.”
He added: “It is, however, proving an effective way to create consensus.”
Food, glorious food
From real Neapolitan pizza to lasagne baked in Bologna or a cannolo wolfed down in Palermo, the best thing about Italy’s top foods is that they are utterly regional, reflecting a nation where many still speak local dialects the rest of the country do not understand (Tom Kington writes).
A homemade Neapolitan pizza
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Basil from Liguria farm
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The same goes for raw materials, starting with succulent small tomatoes from Pachino in Sicily, tangy basil from Liguria which is the basis for pesto sauce, parmesan cheese and prosciutto from Emilia-Romagna or tasty lentils from Castelluccio in Umbria.
Olive picking in Puglia
DAVIDE PISCHETTOLA/NURPHOTO/GETTY IMAGES
For those who find Tuscan olive oil too strong, Puglia’s oil is more mellow, while buffalo grazing in Campania give the world top mozzarella and the woods around Asti in Piedmont deliver precious white truffles.
Mozzarella from Campania
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The twist is that dried pasta, considered the most Italian food of all, was banned by Italy’s wartime fascist government which considered it a foreign food.
Once favoured by Neapolitans and Sicilians, dried pasta was taken by emigrants to America where it took off among the wider Italian community and was popularised back in Italy by migrants returning home.
That was enough to trigger the ire of dictator Benito Mussolini, who condemned it as an alien food that was difficult to digest. By the end of the war, he had been lynched by partisans and pasta was on its way to becoming Italy’s national dish.