Food Frontiers and Cross-Border Foods
Pizza has been a well-known food in Naples since at least the 16th century, but spread almost around the whole world in the 20th century, especially after the Second World War. A dish with archaic roots that has become the symbol of modernity, pizza has transcended history, as it has geographical and cultural barriers. Nonetheless, this cross-border food product has not eliminated borders ; its adoption is always accompanied by a reappropriation process where it is imbued with aspects of the local culture and is integrated with ease into a pre-existing set of rules. Once this reappropriation process is achieved, with its unique flexibility allowing it to relinquish its hold, pizza then creates new frontiers for other groups than those which developed it and worked with it. Pizza is a cultural object, providing a particularly interesting example of how diversity is maintained and is renewed in the flux of borrowing, and at the same time makes it possible to examine the scenarios of cultural and culinary homogenisation, or the breakdown of frontiers which the globalisation process brings about. It is a point in fact that it is precisely pizza that, more often than is its turn, is used to indicate the erosion of cultural differences.