Cibo come patrimonio. Un'introduzione.

In the last years, attention for food as heritage has massively increased. This article presents the research agenda and the first research results of the COHERE WP6, which focuses on food as a fundamental element of heritage - and therefore a very important one in times of crisis. This research reaches back to the historical roots of culinary traditions as intangible heritage. It aims to deconstruct inventions and stereotypes of food. Adopting a historical perspective, as suggested by the Reflective 2 call of the Horizon 2020 program, it highlights the geteilte Geschichte (a history both shared and divided) of European cuisine, as well as the food plays a role in shifting over borders or between dimensions, i.e. local, national, and European. It also uses gender as a useful category of analysis, in part because of its fit with the research and in part because of the need to incorporate gender into heritage paradigms as recognised in the overall CoHERE project. The transmission of recipes and traditions is strongly embedded in local, regional and national identities; it is crucial for the self-perception of communities is deeply rooted in gender relationships. Traditionally women were devoted to the preparation of food and kept the memory of recipes. Since professional cooking has acquired social and economic value, men powerfully entered in this arena. The recent media turn of culinary practices is also deeply gendered. The WP research will engage with these gender aspects which strongly influenced the status of food as symbolic capital of food as cultural heritage and social distinction marker. This article focuses on the role of food in the broader frame of banal nationalism, and on recent debates on heritagization. It discusses new concepts and terms such as gastronationalism and gastrodiplomacy. It also points out at the role of recent food wars that have hit the headlines. Furthermore, it suggests that in order to show the historical complexity of the topic is crucial to reach back in time to the first steps of the heritagization processes after the French Revolution as well as in important nation – building process, such as the Italian one