Neo-Artisans Innovating Italian Street-Food Tradition: An Ethnography from Milan

In Italy from 2013 to 2018 there has been a steep increase in the number of street-food businesses (source: Italian business register). Street-food businesses are growingly led by young people under 35 years old and a trend is observable by which many of them are innovating and upscaling the sector, making use of the imaginaries of creative economy and food authenticity. In particular, they have imported the most diffuse model from the U.S., the food truck one, adapting it to the peculiar Italian context. My ongoing research is an ethnography of the neo-artisans that compose the food truck scene of Milan, the Italian city with the highest number of them. Through interviews with the artisans and participant observation at street-food festivals, we aim to answer to two main research questions: on one side the motivations that bring people to work in new artisanal production and their identity and artisanal practices, paying attention to how the concepts of authenticity and creativity are incorporated; on the other side how they reinterpret and embed food truck economic imaginary in the Italian environments, very different from the American one and with an established tradition of low-scale artisanal street-food production. Preliminary results suggest that artisanal workers perceive themselves as cultural workers with a strong ethical mission, for the which they are ready to sacrifice economic profit, and that they try to insert into the consolidated mechanism of Italian food economy searching for distinctness through local regionalism