Italian Food: The Pride of a People without Borders.

Since the first Italian immigrants landed in the USA, food has been the heart of the Italian-American experience. Original ingredients, home cooking and family were so meaningful to their traditions that the newcomers recreated the familiar atmosphere of Southern Italy in the new world by planting gardens and raising animals to cook for family dinners. Grocery shops, butcher shops, and street pushcarts spread throughout the Little Italies of New York. Sunday dinners, festivals, religious ceremonies, and educational manners became stronger and more popular than the homeland, representing two new underlying meanings: ethnic group identification and food abundance. Italian immigrants were so proud of their cultural heritage that they did not want to fully assimilate to American lifestyle. They adapted their habits, enriched their dishes with new available ingredients, and Americanized some of the flavours. But tenacity and authenticity have always distinguished this ethnic group from the others, even during food process industrialization. Italians have used food as a distinctive source of ethnic pride and this helped them to maintain a strong and unique identity even today. What is happening in recent years is a cultural phenomenon: Italian-American associations, clubs, and food experts are spreading all over the USA. With a strong presence on social networks, TV shows on Italian home cooking are followed by thousands of Americans. At present, one of the most famous Italians is Master Chef judge Joe Bastianich, who runs several Italian-American restaurants after his own name. Around 260 cookbook titles are being sold online, written by chefs and authors such as John Mariani and Giada De Laurentiis. Hundreds of blogs, websites, and homemade videos are crowding the internet, where Lidia Bastianich and Mario Batali are the stars of Italian-American food media and emporia. They are all competing for a taste of 'authentic' Italy, which makes them fashionable and original. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]