Chang’s attack on the Italian pizza tradition is badly researched. His Netflix episode reflects how easy it is to fall into the trap of cultural appropriation.
Much has been said and written about the issue of cultural appropriation and disrespect for cultures through food. Food is a key part of countries’ and individuals’ identity. “For many people - particularly those from ethnic minority backgrounds - food can be both personal, and political,” writes Helier Cheung for BBC News. This has developed a wider sensibility in western cultures about how we should talk about foreign foods and people are outraged when they see someone disrespect or mistreat another culture’s food. For example, when Gordon Ramsey opened the Asian restaurant Lucky Cat in London, he was criticized for calling it “authentic” while naming his cocktails with stereotypically offensive names like White Geisha. Or when Alison Roman uses “ethnic” ingredients to make her staple dishes, and forgetfully seems to omit to refer to the dish where she got the inspiration from. So why aren’t we outraged when we see Italian cuisine being butchered and misrepresented? Why doesn’t an American’s chef offensive Netflix episode about pizza infuriate us?
A few years ago, I’d happened to come across the first of David Chang’s Ugly Delicious episodes about Pizza. It seemed interesting as a Netflix series. I clearly remember feeling so outraged at the end of that episode. How disrespectful of Italian culture it was. I never watched Ugly Delicious again and I forgot all about David Chang until that episode was assigned for one of my classes on Food Criticism in Journalism School. The memories of my indignation rushed back, as vivid as ever. How could Chang talk like that about such a treasured Italian dish? I felt he was personally attacking me and my heritage.
Source: Ugly Delicious, a scene from the Pizza episode with Wolfgang Puck, from Spago on the left, and David Chang, on the right.
“I don’t understand why Italian food, Italian-American food, is so beloved in this country,” states Chang. Maybe some context and historical facts might help him understand. According to PBS, from 1880 to 1924, over 4 million Italians fled to the United States in search of a better and more prosperous life. Looking at ancestry data from the 2000 Census, about a total of 15.6 million Americans today have declared they have Italian roots, making it the 5th largest ancestry group in the country. The American Community Survey from 2019 counted around 16.1 million, showing the number is increasing.
In Italy, much of our identity – national, regional, and even individual – is based on food and the culture of food. Locally towns and chefs and regions competed to perfect their dishes and be the best. It’s a culture based on thousands of years of studying food – research, tradition, and roots. It is safe to assume, that by moving to the US, many Italians brought with them their culinary traditions, their ability to transform simple raw ingredients into a mouthwatering dish.
While they debate, Mark Iacono from Lucali pizzeria in Brooklyn has a difficult time accepting any of the non-traditional pizza toppings that Chang proposes. Iacono mentions that many of the pizzerias in New York that he’s been recommended “for the most part they fall short.” That is exactly how a native Italian feel when eating at many “Italian” restaurants in the city. Most have completely lost touch with traditional recipes and tastes or are just trying to offer Italian-like dishes that cater to American tastes. Today we see a misconstrued idea of what Italian culture is, influenced by the loss of first-generation Italians and Italian-Americans becoming “mainstream”. The community of first-generation Italians I met in New York probably won’t say their favorite pizza is Roberta’s, Grimaldi’s, or Juliana’s, they’ll probably mention Ribalta, whose founders both moved to New York from Naples, or Sorbillo. They manage to reproduce the tastes of pizza that an Italian is accustomed to and looks for.
Nonetheless, Iacono feels comfortable saying “Just because it’s from Italy doesn’t mean it’s better,” which is as personal and subjective a statement as could be. As an Italian American pizza chef, he also claims “they [Italians] invented it, we Italian-Americans perfected it.” Except that when he travels to Naples he ends up realizing that he’s never tried such a good Neapolitan pizza.
Beyond the lack of context in the episode, another striking gap is the lack of research that went into the country they are attacking and dismissing. In Italy pizza isn’t only Neapolitan, that’s a style of pizza to us.
Ask any Italian and he’ll tell you, there is absolutely no way to export pizza from Naples. That’s because even the tap water used for the dough contributes to its characteristic taste of that pizza, together with the ingredients that they so proudly protect with the Associazione Verace Pizza Napoletana. It’s why pizza in Torino, Milano, or Roma has a different flavor. We aren’t reproducing Neapolitan pizza at all. Pizza all’Italiana to us is a category of pizzas that includes so many different styles, according to region, according to taste, according to locally available ingredients. The geographic and regional fragmentation in Italy resulted in such diversity in the way pizza is made. There are so many young chefs in Italy working on innovating the dish, as Gambero Rosso mentions chefs Simone Padoan, Renato Bosco, Patrick Ricci (on his website you can see a salmon pizza that closely resembles the one Wolfgang Puck from Spago makes in Chang’s episode) and Massimiliano Prete have pushed the boundaries of this dish well beyond tradition.
In Italy, we have a whole trend around the concept of Gourmet pizzerias, which offer innovative solutions that revolutionize our idea of pizza. Chefs work on the dough, with different types of flours: stone-ground, type 1, 2, or Kamut, enkir, and so on. Pizzerias like Berberè, Lievità, ‘O Fiore Mio, In Fucina, Marghe have built their success on this. Chang mentions “Italians should be proponents of the sourdough method and not the yeast method,” and if he’d done some research, he’d realize there are so many pizzerias that already do this, we call it lievitazione naturale and it has been the biggest for many years now.
The point which Chang completely fails to analyze is the significance and weight that ingredients have for Italians. Our food culture is based on the value we have for raw materials (as is shown in Salt, fat, acid, heat episode on Fat). It’s not just another way to sell more mozzarella di bufala as they say, it’s a way to protect an industry that has otherwise seen infinite copycats and counterfeits pop up all across the world. This is why we use D.O.P. for our ingredients, to protect them and ensure the consumer knows what to expect from what he is buying. We have consumer associations that protect their right to know what they are buying and get their money’s worth.
That is the point that Ryu Yoshimura chef at the Tokyo restaurant Savoy tries to get across with his Japanese pizza. “I don’t consider this fusion. This uses Japanese ingredients.” While Chang teases him by comparing him to Donald Trump, he doesn’t listen to the point the chef is trying to make about how he took something he ate elsewhere, analyzed and studied and reinterpreted it – adapting it to his culture, food tradition, and materials. He believes he was finding an alternative way to eat sushi together with the pizza he’d learned to make so well. The outcome is something else. From traveling around Japan, you can see how they respect and value all ingredients they use. Similarly, Italians are all about respecting the raw ingredients put into each plate. The love and care that goes into a single piece of nigiri can be compared to an artfully made pizza.
The search for authenticity might be a lost cause when it comes to food. We can look at tradition, and this doesn’t mean you can’t innovate or that you can have your own preference. Chang should understand that if he doesn’t want to fall into the cultural appropriation trap what you must do is respect the heritage of the dish you are creating. His personal anger and jealousy clearly transpire in this sensationalist opener to his Netflix series, where he and his friends attempt to claim that pizza is now more American than Italian – just because they prefer the taste of the Americanized version of it.
In the words of Chang’s actor and comedian friend Aziz Ansari, “Every pizza is a living thing. Each one is different.”
