In 2010, Italian celebrity chef Gino D’Acampo demonstrates for British daytime television how to prepare the ‘Italian version’ of a pasta bake. This dish, known as pasta al forno, is often confused with its creamy casserole neighbour. His TV recipe combines penne, peas and ground nutmeg with eggs yolks and various cheeses to showcase an appetising vegetarian meal without the need for cream. Yet it is during the taste test with the two show hosts that the infamous observation is made – “you know, if it had ham in it, it’s closer to a British carbonara”. The camera cinematically pans to Gino’s astonished face and after a moment’s silence, the chef responds in his thick, southern Italian accent: “and if my grandmother had wheels, she would have been a bike”.
Thirteen million views later and this show segment is still adorned with online praise. “The greatest comeback in television history”; “this guy is a living embodiment of Italy”; “the most brutal exchange between the British and Italians since WW2” are among some of the most recent, popular comments on YouTube.
A video like this is in its thousands. It stands as only a single example of how difficult it is to negate the intrinsic link between ethnic nationalism and its subtle representations via social media. The affronted wit of Gino D’Acampo is a vessel through which an unimaginable but entirely serious analogy is communicated to two British TV personalities. While laughable, it also sparks reflection as to the kind of image D’Acampo is promulgating regarding the Italian and their approach to food. Therefore, it is via meme culture online that ethnic nationalism continues to thrive. Something as deceptively elaborate like notions of ethnicity, is further exacerbated when food enters this digital space, further confirming the link between digital identity and a nation’s (ongoing) construction.
Prominent academic Michael Billig introduces the idea that displays of nationalism are often natural embodiments, occurring in the minutiae of quotidian life (1995). He reflects that nationalism is difficult to conceptualise but by extending its connotations to elements banal and trite, the idea of a nation – and therefore that nation’s nationalist – is established. A symbol as simple as the flag, which has no arbitrary link to Italy for example, is how Italianess is conceptualised. Drinking tea has the same effect for the British; its meaning as a conversational buffer to personal pick-me-up, labels the tea drinker with a certain national sense of self and one particularly forged in opposition to their neighbours. Food is therefore a reinforcement that we are together (the British) and apart (the non-British) at the same time, creating a nationalist image as constitutive of a lived reality, thus universalising nationalist ideology in space and time. In other words, tea drinking is quintessentially a British affair.
While it may seem obvious, it is worthy to note that at the time of Billig’s initial publication, the technological landscape was far different from what it is today. The internet was certainly in widespread use, but it was not as pervasive or central to daily life as it is now. Even social media platforms like Facebook and YouTube either did not exist or were in their infancy. Email and instant messaging were popular forms of communication, but smartphones with constant internet access were not yet commonplace. The vast globalisation of the internet, fuelled by the incessant need for on-demand interconnection via social media, fertilises the propagation of national pride.
The Italian context provides a preview as to how online media consumption is readily present across Western Europe. According to global data platform Statista, January 2023 saw the largest spike in Italian social media usage, namely attributable to gen Z’s growing fascination with Instagram, YouTube and TikTok. The country has counted 51 million active internet users, of which 86 percent are present on all three of these social media platforms. By the end of 2028, Italy is forecast to have reached over 78 million users – a moderate but consistent growth.
So, what exactly are Italians doing on these platforms? Whilst it is difficult to pinpoint one source to answer this question, there are commonalities in results across previous social media studies. Statista claims their data shows Italians favouring instant messaging features and the ability to like or share other user’s posts but not necessarily post content themselves. This is confirmed by Bouriser et. al. who investigated the social media activity of Italian users during the COVID-19 pandemic. Talking to physically isolated friends and sharing popular posts ranked the highest in their activity findings. These ‘popular posts’ in question tended to come from accounts with a large following, running into the millions and posts are normally co-directed by multiple people or admins. Weber and Millicent call these ‘playful social media accounts’ and in their review conducted on Twitter, findings reflected that this account type was the most popular among gen Z users. What they miss in analysis are the levels of ethnic nationalism also manifesting in the accounts’ background subtilties.
Benedict Anderson’s theory ‘imagined communities’ is consequently rife in the online space (2010); memes themselves help turn the imagined ethnic identity and accompanying ethnic mateship into tangible concepts. This is exactly what flourished in the comment’s section of D’Acampo’s pasta al forno recipe. Whilst the video gained popularity for use of random analogy on live British television, the comments section is where the imagined community congregates. In source 1, @JohnTompazidis indirectly reveals his ethnic identity without explicitly stating it. @DavidRodiriguez-hi5df does the same, emphasising that these two individual users can stand in as collective representatives of the Italian, Greek and Spanish nationality respectively. The rest of the comments in this thread (viz: source 2) further contribute to Anderson’s imagined sense of ethnic comradery, wherein @graemewallace8868 similarly elects themselves chair “British person” to help validate earlier claims made by fellow English commenter @laalaa4303.
Despite the original TV segment wanting to highlight an Italian take on traditional casserole dishes, it is in the user-defined and unregulated space of the internet that memes, and therefore representations of ethnic nationalism, take on lives of their own. Light is cast away from D’Acampo’s valid historical reflections on the al forno, ergo the recipe and main content of the TV segment itself, towards his Italian persona, effectively reducing the Italian chef imaginary to a goofy, playful idiom.
However, meme culture is not always internalised with the same comical relief as appraised by D’Acampo. @Trash_italiano is a public Italian platform on Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube. On the 28th of January 2024 @trash_italiano interrupts its usual witty spam to dedicate a post to the French food activists vandalising Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa with cans of soup. The post itself is relatively simple, featuring tourist footage from a separate TikTok video and reads like a news headline. One activist is filmed with her left hand in the air wearing a ‘Riposte Alimentaire’ t-shirt while the other speaks to “the right to a healthy and sustainable diet”, something unimaginable with cans of soup despite this being the nutritive reality for many Parisians bearing the brunt of the cost-of-living crisis. The only nod to Italianess is the painting itself but yet again, a sense of Italian imagined community flourishes in the comments (viz: source 3). Top commenter @mostrachiinganna speaks in sarcasm to the Parisian hunger plight – “thanks for this gesture, finally all your problems are resolved”. This is followed by angered verified account @stefaniasugarfree who claims “at concerts, we can’t bring in our biscuits but at the Louvre, you can come in with sauce. I doubt you’re making a pasta bake for Leonardo Da Vinci. Who let these two enter? My God.”
Both users are clearly taking a stab at the art gallery security system for the vandalism, ignoring the political message coded within the protest itself. Moreover, the post indirectly facilitates reflection on the broader, unresolved nationalist tension between the French and Italians for rightful ownership of the Mona Lisa. Since the painting resides outside of Italy, any act of extremism towards it is internalised by an Italian as directly offensive to their individual identity. This aligns with Anderson’s and Billig’s theories simultaneously – the meme attempts to conceptualise abstract phenomena – the Gioconda-Italian allegory – as more concrete (Anderson, 2010) but is simple enough to appear ordinarily on an Italian’s Instagram home feed (Billig, 1995). @Stefaniasugarfree even goes as far as to hint towards Italian venues having far superior security, for even the quintessential ‘biscotto’ fails to pass concert surveillance, thus confirming Italy as the painting’s rightful owner. The piece is no stranger to vandalism, where previously in May 2022, it was used as target for a cream cake in an environmentalist picket. It is through growing popularity online that something as seemingly banal – such as a painting or some cans of soup – become a part of contemporary extremist politics, demonstrating that memes have their own way of spawning into unchecked forms of nationalism.
Multifaceted, subjective and contested are all terms used to define nationalism. By adopting a nationalist lens and applying it to the online Italian space, the tie between the banality of social media scrolling and the banality of foodstuffs can be documented. As Billig (1995) suggests, nationalism appears not in obvious markers but can be observed across negligeable facets of daily life. In the 21st century, daily life is impossible to detach from social media scrolling and the internet more broadly. It is through the Italian microcosm of food that memes help turn an imagined Italian identity and the associated mateship into tangible concepts, with varying levels of nationalist rhetoric appearing in the unregulated and user-generated world of social media.
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