Frank Bruni on Italy and Eating

Travel Blog  •  Eva Holland  •  08.20.09 | 1:02 PM ET

In a recent interview with the Book Bench, Bruni—who’s just wrapped up his five-year stint as the restaurant critic for the New York Times—offered some thoughts on food culture and social class in Italy. Here’s what he had to say about the Italian-American feasts of his childhood:

What I realized, after I went to Italy and lived in Rome, not in the rural south where my grandparents were from, that the ethos of food in my Italian-American family was a kind of peasant-immigrant ethos. I always thought of it as Italian, because it was my Italian. A bounty of food as a badge of accomplishment. What I learned later in life was that, that’s not so much Italian, as Italian-peasant immigrant. It has as much to do with socioeconomic status as it does with ethnicity.

Tags: Food, Food Writing, Europe, Italy, News and Briefs

Eva Holland is the senior editor of World Hum. Her writing has also appeared in the National Post, the Montreal Gazette, the Ottawa Citizen and WestJet's Up! Magazine, among other publications. She's based in Ottawa, Canada.


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