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In this article, I attend to how nineteenth-century Italian children's writer Collodi portrayed food, particularly in the schoolbook Il viaggio per l'Italia di Giannettino (Giannettino's travel throughout Italy). My analysis builds on recent contributions – such as Montanari's (2006), Ferguson's (2020), and Pezzotti's (2020), – that examined food and its related cultural background as significant indicators of character, whether individual, regional, or national. Scholars have turned their attention to how governments, writers or even communities employed food as part of material culture to consolidate imagined communities, or invent or recycle traditions. Existing analyses of the relationship between food and nationalism in Collodi's works have limited their focus to Pinocchio, and so have not considered Collodi's schoolbooks, which is what my article contributes to the scholarship. This article analyzes the substantial space Collodi dedicated to local foods in his schoolbooks. I argue that Collodi uses local foods to emphasize the importance of multiculturality as a valuable resource for national bonding. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Eating local food has become a mainstream proxy for virtue and a reliable model of sustainable dieting. It suffers, nonetheless, from genuine criticisms and limitations. In this paper, we suggest theoretical amendments to reorient the local food movement and turn eating local into a robust concept—comprehensive, coherent, and inclusive, affording a firm grip over structural aspects of the food chain. We develop our argument in three parts. The first contends that 'local' can be said of lots of entities (e.g. whole or multi-ingredient foods, recipes, menus) and that its meaning varies depending on which entities are under consideration. The second examines three dimensions of being local: the distance from the place of production; the geographical origins; the social links to consumers and producers. The third presents our robust conception of eating local, grounded on a more realistic model that accommodates for heterogeneous and complex actors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]