This paper explores the role of cultural heritage in food activism in Italy through an ethnographic case study from the city of Cagliari on the island of Sardinia.  Interviews and participant observation with participants in the Cagliari alternative food movement show that activists conceptualize foods to be powerfully embedded in place, culture, tradition, and identity. Cultural heritage discourse can mobilize consumption of local foods, support small farmers, and educate consumers, but can it advance the overriding goal of food activism: the promotion of food democracy?  The paper explores the tensions surrounding the constantly evolving definition of cultural heritage in food activism, its potential to promote economic justice and cultural survival, and its powers of inclusion and exclusion.

Carole Counihan is Professor Emerita of Anthropology at Millersville University in Pennsylvania and Visiting Professor of Food Anthropology at Boston University.  She has authored and co-edited several books including A Tortilla Is Like Life: Food and Culture in the San Luis Valley of Colorado (University of Texas Press, 2009), Around the Tuscan Table: Food, Family and Gender in Twentieth Century Florence (Routledge, 2004), Food and Culture: A Reader (with Penny Van Esterik, Routledge 1997, 2008, 2013), and Food Activism: Agency, Democracy, and Economy (with Valeria Siniscalchi, Bloomsbury 2014).  She is editor-in-chief of the scholarly journal Food and Foodways and has been a visiting professor at the University of Gastronomic Sciences in Italy, the Universities of Cagliari and Sassari (Sardinia), Italy, and the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in France.  She is currently engaged in a new ethnographic research project on food activism in Italy.

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