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Dialogues@RU is published
annually
by the
Writing Program at
Rutgers, The State
University of New Jersey
Volume Three
Spring 2004
Italian-American Foodways: A Personal and Academic Look Into Sunday Dinner - Page 4
by
Joseph DiPiazza
There is a final question about what keeps the Italian-American community unique. How does it resist cohesion with mainstream American culture? Again, I will use my own experience growing up in both a predominantly Italian-American town and ethnic family to illustrate this point. As we know, my grandmother still cooks dinner every Sunday for our family. We generally eat traditional Italian dinners of pasta, meatballs, and fish. In this way, we resist homogeneity into aspects of mainstream American culture, which are comprised of eating fast food in a non-household setting without family present. I remember from my childhood the first time I ate at a friend’s house who was not of Italian descent. I was very surprised to see how differently the customs between our families were practiced. There was no formal table setting or time in which his family engaged in dinner-in fact, we ate dinner from Burger King on the couch in the living room while watching television. This was absolutely unheard of in my home. First, any food from a fast food venue like Burger King, Mc Donald’s, or any restaurant for that matter, was considered to be junk food by my grandmother. It was not fit to make up a proper dinner. Second, we always ate dinner at the table together in a group in the dining room or kitchen-never on the couch or in front of the television. In this instance, it is quite evident that social identity theory in the form of self-concept had a major bearing on my perception of who I was. This phenomenon is what Hogg, Terry, and White’s theory of social identity refers to in their article “A Tale of Two Theories: A Critical Comparison of Identity Theory with Social Identity Theory.” Looking back, I was part of a social category that held family interaction and gathering for dinner in high esteem. Being a member of that community made the customs I was exposed to at my friend’s house (eating fast food and watching TV during dinner) very foreign to me. Those beliefs and feelings were directly attributable to the circumstances under which I was raised and the community I was a part of. In my community, as was exemplified in the event of Sunday dinner, those circumstances included things like eating home-cooked meals and conversing with other family members during dinner. Though it was done unconsciously at the time, I classified myself as an Italian-American at a young age by recognizing the differences between my friend’s customs and my own and realizing the methods my family practiced were not the same as everyone else’s.
Up to that point in my young and naïve life, I thought everyone lived like me and practiced the same customs. But as I’ve learned from then on, many people do not. In fact, very few of my non-Italian friends practice the same eating habits my family does. This bears a major significance by portraying the examples in which Italian-American foodways have resisted cohesion into mainstream American culture-a culture which does not contemporarily hold family values and food events (like Sunday family dinners) in the same regard as the Italian-American culture in which I was raised.
We see that an analysis of my family’s weekly Sunday dinner shows that the foodways of Italian-Americans define them as a community and keep them both resistant and adherent to change. From the examination of a pertinent ethnic food event, the interdisciplinary application of several fields of study (folklore, anthropology, psychology, and sociology) has provided a finely tuned analysis of a broad and generally overlooked subject—the intersection of food and culture. By illuminating this topic it is easily seen that food plays an integral role in our lives by not only satisfying our physical human needs, but by acting as a cultural medium that communicates the importance of family and community.
Works Cited
Camp, Charles. American Foodways: What, When, Why and How We Eat in America.
Little Rock: August House, 1989.
De Salvo, Louise and Edvige Giunta, eds. The Milk of Almonds: Italian
American Women Writers on Food and Culture . New York: Feminist Press, 2002.
Hogg, Michael, Deborah Terry, and Katherine White. “A Tale of Two Theories:
A Critical Comparison of Identity Theory with Social Identity Theory.” Social
Psychology Quarterly 58 (1995): 255-69.
Malpezzi , Frances and William Clements. Italian-American Folklore. Little Rock:
August House, 1992.
Mele, Deborah. Home page. 2003. http://www.italianfoodforever.com/.
Noyes, Dorothy. “Group.” Journal of American Folklore 108 (1995): 449-78.
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