In Italy in 1909, an avant-garde artistic and political movement, dubbed ‘Futurism’ by its founder F.T. Marinetti burst onto the social scene. At its essence was the rejection of the past and the embrace of the emerging future of the 20th century; if progress was inexorable, it had to be embraced, not resisted. Futurism worshipped speed and dynamism, movement and machinery – the car and the plane took on an erotic aspect for Marinetti, who praised youth, power, sex, vitalism, and violence. Futurism was modernist in the most literal sense. Every aspect of previously established life, with its conventions and traditions, was to be swept into the dustbin of history. In his manifesto, Marinetti bombastically aimed to ‘demolish museums and libraries, fight morality [and] feminism.’ His bullishly masculinist, militarist movement was deliberately tinged with more than a little ‘smear of madness.’ War was upheld as beautiful, the world’s best ‘hygiene,’ combining innovation in technology, the destruction of social structures, and aspects of speed and movement.
To put it very simply, the Futurist movement in effect merged with Mussolini’s Fascist movement in 1919, influencing the development of fascism significantly. At the end of World War II it had essentially disappeared in Italy.
Because it aimed to revolutionise all aspects of life, Futurism dwelt in some detail on the art of cookery, with some interesting results.
The Futurist foray into cuisine is immortalised in The Futurist Cookbook, published 1932. Marinetti proclaimed that his cookbook was an attempt to rejuvenate the Italian nation, ‘strengthening it, dynamizing it and spiritualizing it with brand-new food combinations in which experiment, intelligence and imagination will economically take the place of quantity, banality, [and] repetition.’
Marinetti singled out pasta as a special object of scorn, being simple, flavourfully homogenous, and nutritionally bereft. The lazy simpleton who ‘ingurgitates his bi-quotidian pyramid of pasta’ finds himself brutish instead of ingenious, slow and heavy instead of fast and dynamic, sad and depressed instead of volatile and optimistic.
To treat the sadness of pasta, Marinetti suggests a cure by means of some novel and bizarre recipes (or ‘formulas’). Having tried a few of them, I am not sure the average penne-gobbling student will find solace in many of them, however. The ‘Sweet and Strong’ sandwich combining mustard, banana, and anchovy sounded (marginally) promising but was downright vile – though the first bite is strangely titillating, the salty thwack of anchovy matched by sweetness and heat, further ingestion had me regretful. ‘Simultaneous Ice-Cream,’ made with frozen cream and raw minced onion, tasted as bad as it sounds. As a lover of both of its primary ingredients, I was intrigued by ‘Strawberry Breasts,’ ricotta domes dyed pink with Campari, but when it came to taking a bite I found myself gagging.
Many recipes are unabashedly inedible in the more scientific sense. This is purposeful, as they are meant to arouse the mind and senses, not the tongue, with ‘curiosity, surprise and imagination.’ The ‘Excited Pig,’ a stick of erect salami with a sauce of coffee and perfume, smells surprisingly pleasurable but didn’t exactly fill me with vitalistic fervour, being obviously destined for the bin from the moment of plating. I’m therefore not sure that Futurist cuisine can boast of any environmental credentials, though as a movement that scorns nature in favour of everything artificial this may be a feature. Other innovations beyond taste include musical intervals to ‘re-establish gustatory virginity,’ the illumination of food by coloured lights, and the abandonment of cutlery. In addition, the use of synthetic foods and meal-replacement liquids and pills would eventually, the Futurists hoped, allow food to exist purely as an exercise in taste divorced from its utility as sustenance.
Many have called the cookbook simply a prank, but this isn’t precisely true – Marinetti is absolutely trolling, but it’s in the service of real ideological goals and the recipes very clearly reflect the Futurist mindset. The Cookbook is funny to us insofar as we find it absurd, but the real joke is at our expense – being in the Futurist view merely sheep to traditional habits and conventional morals, the funnier we find it, the more we reveal ourselves as slaves to the past. The absurdity of Futurist cuisine has a sinister lining.
Cookery is the art which literally sustains us, and our dietary choices really do reflect our values and desires – a lesson which the rest of us would all benefit from learning from vegetarians and vegans. The aesthetic has always been ideological, and never more so than in recent years with regard to food: eating insects is either the sign of civilizational decline or the natural evolution of sustainability; zoomer-liberal-hipsters consume scampi fries, Guinness and avocados; chicken is a ‘woke sandwich filling,’ according to the Daily Mail.
For some more common examples, one need to look no further than the diets of gym-goers, or men who only drink black coffee because sweet lattes are feminine. Brits largely turn their noses up at organ-meat, horse meat and chicken feet. All of our eating habits are culturally ingrained, and often in pursuit, subconsciously when not consciously, of cultural categories and archetypes we would like to align ourselves with – usually to our detriment.
Ultimately, many elements of Futurism’s approach have coincidentally been revived in modern food culture: an obsession, fuelled by social media, with aesthetically pleasing food; food as efficient nutrition, with the rise of meal replacement drinks and protein powder; and in fine dining, gimmick accompaniments to meals. Though Futurism is no longer a force, the values of youth, power, beauty, and ‘progress’ at all costs have certainly not disappeared as vulgar cultural idols. The Futurist Cookbook should be seen today as an invitation to interrogate our own approaches to food. Futurism, with its jarring reinvention of every facet of eating, reveals the ideological aspect of food in dramatic, ferocious clarity. We have no choice but to confront it squarely.
Picture Credit: Wikimedia Commons
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