The Invention of Authentic Food: Constructing Traditionality Through Ingredients and Matters

The centrality of authenticity in contemporary food cultures has been argued by many relevant contributions from consumption, cultural and sociological studies (DeSoucey, 2010; Johnston & Baumann, 2014; Ocejo, 2017; Thurnell‐Read, 2019). This contribution analyses authenticity in food cultures through the epistemic lenses of “material-discursive” (Barad, 2003) or “material-semiotic” (Haraway, 1988) practises, drawing results from semi-structured interviews to forty bartenders and street food vendors in Milan (Italy). The aim is to develop a critical analysis of food authenticity concept analysing the intra-action (Barad, 2007) between discursive, material and technological practises happening between the worker, the food object and the context. Drawing on the results, we argue that the ingredients are the matter that confers the quality of ‘being authentic’ to the food object. Ingredients must have peculiar material features to frame the final product, at a discursive level, as ‘typical’ of a particular local tradition. They become a material vector that allows a semiotic synecdoche, translating the quality of a component to the entire product. The recognition of the quality of authenticity is contemporarily discursive (experienced connecting the ingredient to a local tradition) and material (experienced connecting the taste of the final product to peculiar features of the ingredient). At the same time, we argue that the analysis of the intra-action between the material and the discursive practises enable to critically de-naturalise authenticity, reading it as a ‘technicised myth’ (Jesi & Cavalletti, 2014), using ingredients to evoke a ‘genuine myth’ but converting it into to an ‘efficient zero’.