Note: this article originally appeared in my printed zine Bread & Salt a few years ago.  Since only a few people read that, and it points out some important things about “authentic” foods, I’m reprinting it here.

“Gris was provincially Spanish, and Gertrude Stein used to say that only a true Spaniard could behave as he did; that is, he would speak Spanish and sometimes return to his family in Spain.  It was really quite marvelous to see.”

-Woody Allen, “A Twenties Memory”

Every September there’s a gathering of food historians in Oxford, England.  I’ve wanted to go for some time now, but I never seem to get around to submitting a paper by the deadline.  This year I had some lead time, but the theme of the meeting had me stumped: authenticity.  What could I write about authenticity?

I’m in the Kansas City area so I thought about writing something on authentic barbeque, or maybe something about authentic versus inauthentic ethnic restaurants, but these ideas never seemed to go anywhere.  The concept of authenticity percolated in the back of my mind for a few months until one day I realized that the question of authenticity is bogus: there is no such thing as authenticity, at least as we usually think of it.

When we talk about authenticity, we usually have the idea that there is one central thing that is truly authentic, something that everything points back to.  Take Italian cooking: authentic Italian cooking includes pasta, obviously, and some sort of sauce on the pasta, maybe a marinara sauce.  For it to be truly authentic, it should be made from fresh ingredients.  There are gradations of authenticity: a less authentic dish may include canned tomatoes, while an inauthentic dish would have the Hot Pockets logo on the outside of the package.

The problem is that pasta in marinara sauce can’t be authentically Italian, meaning the sort of thing that has been made in Italy for hundreds of years, because tomatoes have only been used in Italian cooking for less than 200 years.  Before that they were feared as a possibly poisonous relative of nightshade.  Furthermore, Italy itself is a creation of the 19th century (1861 to be exact); before that the region was a loose collection of city-states.  How can Italian cooking have been around for a few hundred years if Italy itself is less than 150 years old?

Maybe Italian cooking is a bad example.  Let’s try this: imagine your still-living grandmother came over from Croatia as an adult (it could be any country, I’m just picking a random one).  During your childhood, she made many meals of Croatian foods and you developed a liking for it, but as an adult you moved away and haven’t had it for years.  You go visit your grandmother when her church is having a fund raising dinner with all your favorite Croatian foods.  You go and it’s just like reliving your childhood: cooking smells wafting in from the kitchen while older men and women speak Croatian in low tones.  You taste the food and it’s exactly like you remember: it truly is authentic Croatian food.

Your grandmother, sitting beside you, takes one bite and says, “Bah!  This isn’t how we used to make it.  The onions are cut too small–did they use a machine?  You have to do it by hand!  And this soup, it’s too salty.  It’s all wrong.  This isn’t real Croatian food!”

Clearly, there’s a difference of opinion.

Let’s take this one step further.  A few months later you decide to go back to the old country to see what it’s like.  You fly to the capital city, take a train to the small town your grandmother grew up, and pop into the first restaurant you see.  You peruse the menu, looking for your Croatian favorites…and they’re not there.  They have spaghetti, and pizza, and baked potatoes, but nothing that’s really Croatian. When the waitress stops by you ask for some of the foods from your childhood.  “No, we don’t serve any of that,” she says.  “No one eats that anymore, except for my grandpa.  And who could?  It’s all butter and cream–I’m watching my weight as it is.  Salad and tuna fish is the way to go.”  She saunters off and you’re a little more confused about authenticity–is “authentic Croatian food” what Croats used to eat, back when your grandma lived there?  Or is it what Croats currently eat?  And if that food is just like the food most Europeans eat, is it really Croatian?

The problem here is with the concept of authenticity.  Like I wrote above, when we think of authenticity, we usually think of something that matches back to some more pristine idea, like a snapshot in time.  However, this pristine idea doesn’t exist in reality, only in our heads.  And because it only exists in our heads, it shifts and changes without our knowing it.

Anthropologists call this “invention of tradition.”  It’s a process that has much more to do with people in the modern time than people in the past, since the modern people are defining what is and isn’t included in a tradition.

Take, for example, today’s “traditional” Thanksgiving meal: turkey, mashed potatoes and gravy, dressing, desserts.  We believe it’s a reflection of what the Pilgrims ate at the first Thanksgiving in 1621, but the single surviving account of that meal mentions only that they ate deer and fowl.  Europeans weren’t eating potatoes by that point, so today’s mashed potatoes aren’t “authentic.”  And the fact is that the idea of having a holiday called “Thanksgiving” only came into vogue in the 19th century, so the holiday itself is less than about 150 years old.

However, having lots of food at Thanksgiving is our way of telling ourselves that we are a rich country, and having family around on that day reminds us that we are family-oriented.  Neither of these things may be true for an individual celebrating Thanksgiving, but the tradition overall reinforces those ideas about our identity.

And authenticity is often tied up in ideas of identity.  If we eat at an “authentic” Italian restaurant, don’t we in some way absorb some of that authenticity (literally, by consuming it)?  A person who knows the difference between an authentic French chardonnay and a cheap imitation makes himself or herself a little purer by drinking the authentic wine.  Again, authenticity exists in the eye of the beholder, not in reality, so its connection to identity makes it a prime target for advertisers: beware the authentic microwavable Italian meal.

So authenticity is bogus, on some level, but still exists in our minds.  Unlike eggs, which are the focus of the next Oxford food symposium.  The deadline for papers is a few months away but, alas, I can’t think of a thing to write about relating to eggs.

Or maybe I could present a paper titled “Our Ideas of Authenticity: The Chicken or the Egg?”