The Pizza Effect
I’d never heard of the pizza effect. That is, until Bob Lucky commented on my Cornish pasty post.* The Cornish pasty’s export to other parts of the world with emigrants, its transformation, and its reintroduction to Cornwall, he said, was an example of the pizza effect.
The large, laden American pizza. Wikimedia
Bob went on to mention that the anthropologist Agehananda Bharati had introduced the concept of the pizza effect** in religious and Asian studies in the 1970s. So off I went to Wikipedia and Google Scholar, and came across a strange tale.
But first, the pizza effect. Bharati used the term in a scholarly article “The Hindu Renaissance and Its Apologetic Patterns” in the Journal of Asian Studies 29. 2 (1970), 267-287 (available on J-Stor for those readers who have access), as a pithy way to talk about the creation of national traditions more generally. Here’s what he says about pizza.
The original pizza was a simple, hot-baked
bread without any trimmings, the staple of the
Calabrian and Sicilian contadini from whom well
over 90% of all Italo-Americans descend. After
World War I, a highly elaborated dish, the U.S.
pizza of many sizes, flavors, and hues, made its
way back to Italy with visiting kinsfolk from
America. The term and the object have acquired a
new meaning and a new status, as well as many
new tastes in the land of its origin, not only in
the south, but throughout the length and width
of Italy.
Bharati’s very scholarly article (in which pizza is just a mere footnote) explores the back and forth, or rather forth and back, of ideas about the nature of Sanskrit, yoga***, Tantrism, mysticism, transcendental meditation from India to the West and back again. It’s a thesis that has received scholarly approval as the ninety plus citations in Google Scholar indicate.
Who, I wondered, was Bharati? Well, originally he was Leopold Fischer, sone of a well-to-do Viennese family, born in Vienna, Austria in 1923. (See also here).
As a boy he met Indian students studying in Vienna and became interested in the languages and culture of the sub-continent. When Hitler formed the Free India Legion in 1941 (another story that was new to me), the eighteen-year old was assigned to the unit as a translator.
Following the war, in 1949, Fischer finally made his way to India, which had fascinated him for so long. He persuaded one order of Hindu monks to take on this foreigner and, on becoming a monk himself, changed his name to Agehananda Bharati.
Besides traveling across India, he taught at the University of Delhi, Banaras Hindu University, the Nalanda Institute, a Buddhist academy in Bangkok, and the University of Tokyo.
Then he migrated to the United States and by the early 1960s was chair of Anthropology at the University of Syracuse, shortly after becoming an American citizen.
Agehananda Bharati (on left). Bharati Memorial Award, Syracuse University.
Bharati published prolifically, his scholarly interests now converging with many of the hot button topics of the 60s and 70s: the Tantric tradition, LSD, and mysticism. Among his more popular writings were his autobiography, The Ochre Robe and Fictitious Tibet, a searing indictment of the misunderstanding and misinterpretation of Tibetan religion at the hands of Madam Blavatsky and followers. Here he is lecturing in Hyderabad.
And yes, this does get back to food. In 2005, a charitable foundation, The Lotus Trust, with Hindu underpinnings, was established in the UK. One of their initiatives, that has support from the European Union Lifelong Learning Program, is called the Pizza Effect Project.
For Lotus Effect Presentation. Don’t Use !!! Please. Lotus Trust
Lack of confidence in one’s own culture, combined with the blind acceptance of all things new and foreign, often results in a phenomenon that social scientists call the “Pizza Effect,” a phrase that was coined in as late as 1970 by an anthropologist named Agehananda Bharati.
This project will unite adults around a common idea of healthy simple food, appreciation of one’s own and other’s culture, and active social integration into the European community.
Pizza Effect Project. Lotus Trust
Through several cooking workshops, the partners will establish communication, encourage peer learning within target groups of adults, as well as intergenerational interaction. Using food as an integrating topic, the project aims to update the knowledge and skills of participating staff by improving their competencies necessary for managing organizations.
As a result of the project “Recipe book – Pizza Effect” with the descriptions of culture and way of life of participating countries will be published and distributed locally by partners.
And if, by now, your head is spinning with these complex links between national cultures, migration, colonialism and settlement, and food, well, so is mine. Food takes one down strange and unexpected paths. But I like the setting of food changes in the much broader context.
And I want to come back to the Cornish pasty ere long. Lots new to say about that.
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*When Bob Lucky comments, I follow up. Bob’s a cultural anthropologist, has lived across Asia, and in the 1990s published an indispensable newsletter, The Asian Foodbookery, which I have carried from Hawaii to Mexico and now to the US.
**There is another kind of pizza effect having to do with the changes in glycemic index particularly in those with diabetes following the eating of foods such as pizza. Needless to say that’s completely different.
***For a more recent study of this see Mark Singleton, Yoga Body: The Origins of Modern Postural Yoga (Oxford University Press, 2010).
“Singleton’s surprising–and surely controversial–thesis is that yoga as it is popularly practiced today owes a greater debt to modern Indian nationalism and, even more surprisingly, to the spiritual aspirations of European bodybuilding and early 20th-century women’s gymnastic movements of Europe and America, than it does to any ancient Indian yoga tradition.” See also Joseph S. Alter, Yoga in Modern India (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), Silvia Ceccomori, Cent ans de yoga en France (Paris: Edidit, 2001), and Elizabeth De Michelis, A History of Modern Yoga (London: Continuum, 2004).
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Is it generally accepted that american-Italians developed the modern pizza? 19th century descriptions of pizza in Naples doesn’t sound that different to modern pizza is Italy. This is from Dumas:
“The impression has gone out into the world, that the lazzarone lives upon macaroni; this is a great mistake, which it is time to correct. The macaroni is, it is true, a native of Naples; but, at the present time, it is an European dish, which has traveled, like civilization, and which, like civilization, finds itself very far from its cradle. The macaroni, moreover, costs two sous a pound; which renders it inaccessible to the purse of the lazzarone; except upon Sundays and holidays. At all other times the lazzarone eats, as we have said, the pizza and the cocomero; the cocomero in summer, the pizza in winter. The pizza is a sort of bun; it is round, and made of the same dough as bread. It is of different sizes according to the price. A pizza of two farthings suffices for one person, a pizza of two sous is enough to satisfy a whole family. At first sight, the pizza appears to be a simple dish, upon examination it proves to be compound. The pizza is prepared with bacon, with lard, with cheese, with tomatas, with fish. It is the gastronomic thermometer of the market. The price of the pizza rises and falls according to the rate of the ingredients just designated; according to the abundance or scarcity of the year.”
Good question, Adam. I checked in the two books that I find most useful on the history of Italian cuisine. Carol Heltosky in Garlic and Oil relies on La pasta e la pizza (1998) by La Cecla. Her line is that it was specifically Neopolitan, urban (obviously being made of wheat flour and commercially prepared), and that it became globally popular with the migration of southern Italians beginning around the turn of the twentieth century, and more popular with troops moving up Italy in WWI.
John Dickie in Delizia is blunter. He points out that it is part of a large Mediterranean family of flatbreads. He argues that any street food from Naples was suspect elsewhere in Italy because of the squalid living conditions of the poor and the consequent cholera. In 1884 it killed more than seven thousand in little more than a month. In 1889 reconstruction of the city was begun under King Umberto and Queen Margherita, the latter a great advocate of hygiene. Pizzas were delivered to her (Dickie compares her interest in them to Princess Diana embracing an AIDS patient), though it’s not known whether she ate them.
So at late as 1947, a Neapolitan journalist writing for a wider Italian audience put the word pizza in quotation marks as if his readers might not recognize the phrase. He believes it was in the 60s and 70s that pizza became a national dish.
Oh and on a personal note, I first tried pizza in the mid 1960s as an economical but exotic dish, preparing a fried version from Elizabeth David’s Italian book. Then I had it at a pizzeria in London. On my first to the States a couple of years later, I was taken aback to discover the huge extravaganza that was the American pizza.
Hi Rachel,
this sounds a bit surprising frankly speaking :-)
What I can say is that until the ’70s there was a rather small selection of pizzas (margherita, napoli, marinara, romana and a few more) which certainly contrasts with the huge selection we can see nowadays but I can only talk of the northern part of Italy where at the time there were very few pizzerias. The boom came later, around the ’80s and now we virtually have a pizzeria every 100mt.
The fact is we tend to forget that italian cooking flourished when immigrants from the south moved to the north, bringing a much broader variety of ingredients on our tables (so between the 50s and the 70s). Before then local cuisine was very limited and subject to the availability of seasonal products.
But as far as hindus are involved, we’d be better of speaking of “chicken tikka masala effect” then ;-)
Hi, Flavio, Good to see you back.Can I assume that by “this” you mean that Bharati’s assertion that pizza was transformed in the US and reintroduced to Italy? Certainly scholars like Massimo Montanari think that many aspects of Italian cuisine were established in the US though he doesn’t address pizza directly. It looks as if I will have to do some kind of round up post on the history of pizza about which I happily confess to being pretty ignorant.
In any case your comments on pizza in northern Italy are really interesting and further evidence of the very recent establishment of pizza as a national dish (like most other national dishes everywhere). And it’s also interesting that you think the use of Mediterranean-type ingredients was as late coming to northern Italy as it was to (say) Britain, which I know better.
I’d be happy to speak of the tikka masala effect. Of course Bharati couldn’t have doen because the dish had not been invented when he wrote that classic article.
Hi Rachel,
thanks for your reply.
Habits have changed a lot over time.
I remember my mother preparing tomato sauce with butter, something that you’d rarely see today as everybody is using olive oil.
For many decades knowledge of regional dishes relied on printed magazines, being “La Cucina Italiana” the flagship of culinary magazines, established during the dictatorship of Mussolini in an intent to build a sort of “national conscience” even in cuisine but I guess most of the people could not afford to buy it until after the 60’s.
Concerning the pizza, I remember also my mother saying that the “original” pizza, whatever she meant, was the fried version portrayed in the movie “L’oro di Napoli” with Sophia Loren, where she sells these “pizzas” to take away (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2xMmAOrLd4Y), however the legend or history has it that the margherita was invented during the visit of Margherita di Savoia, in the late 19th century at restaurant “Brandi”.
Flavio
Quite fascinating Flavio. A correspondent in India told me that even there people are shifting to olive oil or what purports to be olive oil. And I don’t know if you saw my comment but the first pizza I made was a fried one. I’d not connected it Sophia Loren!
“Purports” is right. The story of what’s happening with olive oil in India is depressing and I’ve had run ins with some of the people who are pushing olive pomace oil in a big way.
Tom Mueller has been helpful, passing on information that I can use but the pomace people are determined and no wonder given the sort of profits they are making. Here’s a piece where I look at that and which, as usual, got a furious response:
http://blogs.economictimes.indiatimes.com/onmyplate/entry/little-luxuries-virgin-territory
The one small mercy is that soon after this piece came out the main pomace proponent (who I carefully did not mention in the piece) sold his company. Then again, he sold it to Cargil, so maybe that’s not much consolation!
Aghenanda Bharati was an interesting character though some of the German Hindu converts were rather dubious – Savitri Devi being a good example. Bharati/Fischer seems to have had some Nazi link in his youth, but presumably it was not deep enough to stop him getting his professorships in the US after WWII.
Purely by coincidence, and taking the links in a radically different direction, around the time you posted this I happened to read about Bharati in a book about MN Roy, the international Communist agent (Peter Hopkirk writes about him in his very entertaining Setting the East Ablaze). They met in Bombay and got on well and there’s even an anecdote about Roy making fun of the Swami’s huge appetite, but probably not for pizza.
Well, as you say when olive oil is promoted as the elixir of life, the cash registers start tinkling. I’m just amazed that some Indian entrepreneur has not come up with similar marketing techniques for sesame or mustard oils. What a golden opportunity. Ghee’s perhaps more complex because of its complex cultural history.
I’d missed Savitri Devi in my meanderings but of course I googled her. And that led me to Miguel Serrano. And the dark side of ecological movements. And then MN Roy takes me back to Mexico. What a set of wanderings. And name changes. And allegiances. Quite dizzying. I enjoyed Peter Hopkirk’s Great Game so Setting the East Ablaze is now on my must read list.
T contribute: Pellegrino Artusi (Father of “Italian” cuisine) in his book from 1891, mentions 2 recipes for pizza: “pizza alla napoletana” and “pizza gravida”, both are sweet, the napolitan with a topping of ricotta cheese, almonds and lemon peel, the gravida with a topping of pine nuts and ‘passolina’ raisins.
Just to complicate things a bit.
Excellent, Nick. Kicking myself for not looking there myself. Perhaps sweet pizzas are safer?
Another seeming example of food exchange driven by an immigrant experience — a little different but sort of a pizza effect:
In Today’s LA Times (June 11) … “Pink Burger: Guelaguetza founder’s burger spot in Oaxaca for those homesick for L.A.”: about an immigrant from Oaxaca to LA who had a restaurant for homesick fellow immigrants and who has now retired (left the LA rest. to his kids) and opened a hamburger place in Oaxaca for homesick fellow returnees.
Perfect, Mae. Reminds me of a Mexican friend who on returning from Texas opened a fajitas place in the touristy town in Mexico where he lived. The Mexicans loved the American food, the Americans loved the Mexican food. Everyone was happy.
The Syracuse Uni link can be accessed via the Wayback Machine: https://web.archive.org/web/20160216001808/http://archives.syr.edu/collections/fac_staff/sua_bharati_a.htm
SImilarly the enacademic.com link: https://web.archive.org/web/20160802150015/http://hinduism.enacademic.com/28/Agehananda_Bharati%2C_Swami
Many thanks for these useful links. Beyond my computer capabilities.