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Friday, December 10, 2004
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LEFT/RIGHT RANCOR IN THE AMERICAN UNIVERSITY:
THE NUTELLA SOLUTION "THE POLITICS OF NUTELLA By Elisabetta Povoledo International Herald Tribune Friday, December 10, 2004 Is Nutella, the chocolate hazelnut spread, left- or right-wing? "Only Italians could turn something like this into an ideological question," said Gigi Padovani, who put the question to a group of students at the Velso Mucci Institute, a technical school for chefs and waiters in this small town in northern Italy. As the dark creamy treat turns 40, intellectuals throughout the country have been debating what Padovani calls the "cultural, social, artistic and gastronomic phenomenon" that is Nutella. "It's only here that people say that a shower is 'left' while a bath is 'right,' jeans are 'left,' a jacket is 'right,' or that Nutella is 'left' and Swiss Chocolate is 'right,"' said Padovani, setting off titters among the students. He was teasing, but he had a point to make: "All generations have appropriated Nutella - they all feel as though it belongs to them. It transcends generations. It is national-popular," he said, referring to a concept coined by the founder of the Italian Communist Party, Antonio Gramsci. "Today we would call it bipartisan." Padovani, who writes for the Turin daily La Stampa, is the author of "Nutella, un mito italiano," (Nutella, an Italian myth). As Italy's foremost "Nutellologist," he has had a busy year, traveling around the country, and Europe, lecturing on the pervasive popularity of his gooey specialty. Eulogized in print, in song and on screen, Nutella is one of those rare products that have transcended their nature as food to enter the collective consciousness. Over time, it has come to resemble Proust's madeleines, the small cakes that evoked for the French writer the serenity and pleasures of childhood. Want to see Italians get misty-eyed? Just ask them for an early childhood Nutella memory. ... Padovani said that Nutella had never been contested by antiglobalization activists "because it belongs to the people." Eaten by princesses and proletarians alike, Nutella is also a social equalizer, he said, "like pasta." ... Then there are the spread's "political tendencies," to which Padovani devotes a section of his book. Inspired by a celebrated scene in "Bianca," a 1984 movie by the leftist filmmaker Nanni Moretti in which the actor/director relieves his post-coital anxieties by eating from a gigantic jar of chocolate spread, Italian leftists appropriated Nutella as their own. But Padovani points out that when Italians started holding "Nutella parties" in the mid-1990s, the first were organized by Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi's rightist Forza Italia party. Padovani posits that Nutella has transcended generations to become an ideology in itself. It represents, he says, the general sense of getting along well together and "goodism," the Italian tendency "to envelop everything in something sweet, which also hides any difficulties. This is the essence of Italianness: goodness that spreads." " |