April 6, 2009--Food Fight

In late November 1990, members of the World Trade Organization gathered in Seattle. As at the recent G-20 meeting in London, anti-globalization protesters demonstrated in the streets

Via images broadcast around the world from Seattle, those who tuned in saw up to 40,000 representatives from anti-free trade groups, anti-capitalists, environmentalists, and animal rights groups clash, often violently, with the police. Again very much as in London last week.

But there were differences.

In Seattle, targets of the protesters included American clothing manufacturers whose products they claimed were made in overseas sweatshops (Nike, Levi’s, Old Navy, and the Gap) and fast food companies such as McDonald’s, who it was claimed contributed to the destruction of rainforests and the slaughter of animals; and Seattle’s own Starbucks, who, in the over-heated words of the protesters, were called out for being “peddlers of an addictive substance [caffeine] whose products are harvested at below-poverty wages by farmers who are forced to destroy their own forests in the process.”

In London, though, American global companies were substantially ignored (perhaps because of the popularity of our new president) while the Royal Bank of Scotland was the target of most of the action, including window breaking. Because RBS is Britain’s A.I.G., their financial institutions’ poster child, it was attacked specifically and symbolically for being responsible for the economic meltdown in England.

Meanwhile, a world away in Italy, while all of this was happening in London, in the walled medieval town of Lucca, the center for olive oil production and other forms of culinary delight, another kind of street protest was underway.

In Lucca’s case, against the proliferation of kebab houses.

Though this may seem trivial by comparison to the heavy-duty issues that were at stake in Seattle nearly 20 years ago and recently in London, Luccans were also, in their own way, protesting globalization. The politically center-right town council, ignoring criticism that they were being racist, recently passed a law prohibiting the establishment of ethnic food restaurants in the town’s historic center. (See New York Times article liked below.)

Lucca is “very closed,” said Rogda Gok, a native of Turkey and the co-owner of Mesopotamia, a kebab restaurant. “In Istanbul there’s other food, like German and Italian, it’s no problem,” she added. “But here in Lucca, they only want Luccan food.”

And if you think Lucca is only xenophobic about anything not Italian, it is so conservative a place that even restaurants that want to serve Sicilian food are discouraged.

But times they are a changing in Lucca and elsewhere in Italy. No longer are the populations as homogenous as they were back in, say, Etruscan days. In virtually every city there are growing populations of immigrants from the Middle East and elsewhere. As a result, Siena and a number of other Tuscan cities have enacted similar bans. And lest you think foodstuffs of Turkish origin are the only “foreign” products being resisted, Venice recently acted not to allow Coke machines to be placed along the canals of that magical city.

How in the first place did Lucca get into this mess? Though no one feels entirely comfortable admitting this, the first four kebab joints opened under the radar of town magistrates because they didn’t know what kebabs were. To them, a bit out of touch with the culture or cuisine of the globalizing world, for all they knew these were a new kind of scarf or pocketbook.

Not surprisingly, the ban has actually been good for business. Luccan youth, who see themselves more wired up to their iPods than interested in pappardelle in wild game sauce, want their freedom to partake of this forbidden food and so they have been flocking to the kebab restaurants that have been allowed to remain open since they predate the prohibition.

But to tell you the truth, though as a liberal I support the preservation of all sorts of freedoms worldwide, if you served me some of that pappardelle topped with a generous portion of sliced white truffles, you could probably convince me that the kebabs have to go.