The “Italians Mad at Food” Twitter Account Is Too Real to My Life

Like many Italians, I was raised to love good food and tell stories about it.

Here’s one.

My nonna, dad, and aunt crossed the Atlantic on a boat from Italy in 1953. Dad was four and my aunt was six. They ate well on that journey: pasta, minestrone, eggs, and bread that was crunchy on the outside, soft on the inside. When they docked in Halifax, Nova Scotia, an attendant handed my aunt a sandwich—a slippery slice of ham between two pieces of mushy white bread. She started crying. “It’s cake!” she sobbed, knowing on some level that the culinary standards she had enjoyed so far had been left behind on the boat she stepped off of.

In fact, many Italians who immigrated to Canada around that time started calling the locals mangia cakes, meaning “cake eaters,” because whenever they pulled out their lunches, there it was: soft, perfectly shaped white bread that looked, to those whose bread was brown and crunchy on the outside, like dessert. Since before Italy was a nation, Italians have been mad at food that is not good or at least not their particular region, city, or hamlet’s version of good, and I hope they stay that way forever.

Italians are also exceedingly proud of their culinary traditions. And why shouldn’t they be? These people invented pizza. Thanks to the internet, Italians are quickly discovering what North Americans—namely food content creators like Tasty and Tastemade (and yes, even Bon Appétit)— are doing to their beloved dishes, and they’re not happy about it.

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A magnificent and highly entertaining Twitter account called Italians Mad At Food is documenting the best of Italians commenting on abominations of their national cuisine. These are emotional, over-the-top reactions generally written in Google-translated English or just shoddy regular English because internet comments. They’re usually along the lines of “YOUR ‘PASTA’ BELONGS IN THE GARBAGE ALONG WITH YOUR PRESIDENT.” These people are way too dramatic and need to calm down because it’s only food, and I am absolutely one of them.