CALL it pizza, pitta or fougasse: when Europe’s
holidaymakers head for the Mediterranean this summer, they will feast on some
type of flatbread with condiments. Such dishes have age-old roots. In the
“Aeneid”, Virgil’s heroes ate forest fruit laid on pieces of hard bread on the
grass. Famished, they munched the bread, too: “See, we devour the plates on
which we fed.”
Of all these edible platters, it is pizza that has become
the world’s favorite fast food, plain dough onto which each country bakes its
own flavors: mussels in the Netherlands, Teriyaki chicken and seaweed in Japan.
Born in Naples, the modern pizza was the poor man’s meal.
One 19th-century American visitor, Samuel Morse (inventor of the telegraph),
thought it “like a piece of bread that had been taken out of the sewer”. For
Alexandre Dumas, it was “the gastronomic thermometer of the market”: if fish pizza
was cheap, there had been a good catch; if oil pizza was expensive, there had
been a bad olive harvest.
These days pizza is a gastronomic mirror, reflecting Italy’s
anxiety about globalization. Italians are rightly proud of their food, yet
dismayed at its bastardization by the rest of the world. They fear that the
best in Italian civiltà is being looted by others. It is
America, not Italy, that has turned
everything from pizza to cappuccino into profitable global franchises; Domino’s
and Starbucks are even trying to penetrate Italy.
Now Naples is fighting to reclaim “real” pizza. Last month
hundreds of red-capped pizzaioli gathered to bake the world’s
longest pizza, 1,853.88 meters of it, snaking along the waterfront with the
city’s fabled vistas of Mount Vesuvius and Capri. It was all in support of
Italy’s bid to have the art of Neapolitan pizza recognized by UNESCO as a
treasure in the world’s “intangible cultural heritage”, alongside Brazil’s capoeira dance.
A ruling is expected next year.
In 2010 the European Union registered Neapolitan pizza as a
Traditional Speciality Guaranteed (TSG) product. It stipulates that certified
“Pizza Napoletana TSG” must consist of a base of hand-shaped dough (no rolling
pin), no wider than 35cm. It must be 0.4cm thick at the center and 1cm-2cm
around the rim. It may be garnished in just three ways: with tomatoes and
extra-virgin olive oil, or with certified mozzarella from either buffalo’s or
cow’s milk. It must be baked in a wood-fired oven and eaten on the spot, not
frozen or vacuum-packed.
This is culinary dogmatism. European food-inspectors surely
have better things to do than take a ruler to pizza. The pizzaioli say
they want only acknowledgment of their tradition. One oft-heard fear is that,
Heaven forbid, America might try to gain recognition for its own inferior
pizza. Should Hamburg then copyright the hamburger? Tellingly, Italy has
secured protection for 924 food products, wines and other drinks, more than
France (754) or Spain (361).
Chefs and farmers, pizza-makers included, have every right
to brand their dish and set their own standards. The state must obviously
ensure that food is safe. Governments have an interest, too, in guaranteeing
the quality of some premium appellations—Champagne, say.
Yet, the
name-craze limits scale, productivity and innovation. But the sacralization
of heritage is a millstone.
Italy’s love of tradition makes for idyllic holidays,
wonderful wines and delightful Slow Food. Italians like to think that their
art, culture and way of life will lift them out of economic torpor. However, Italy
has seen almost no productivity growth in more than a decade, in part because
its firms remain small: on average they count seven employees, about the size
of a family-run pizzeria. Artisan products offer no salvation. Italy has no
global food chains to speak of (or even big retailers, such as France’s
Carrefour). It may be home to espresso, but the next-door Swiss invented
Nespresso.
If pizza embodies Italy’s woes on a plate, it also offers
hope. Look closely at a Neapolitan pizza: the succulent tomatoes came from the
New World; the best mozzarella is made from the milk of the buffalo, an Asian
beast that may have arrived in Italy with the barbarian tribes who conquered
Rome; the aromatic basil originates from India. Neapolitan migrants carried
pizza across Italy and America. The genius of Italy lies in its inventiveness
and adaptability—not in an imagined tradition canonized by the state.
