Donna Gabaccia

Culinary Historian Finds Pittsburgh Interests
In Heinz, Primanti's, Strip District

Donna Gabaccia can offer a simple explanation for why the study of food is a valuable approach to history.

"We are eating before we are talking," Gabaccia says. "It's our earliest experience, our earliest relationship to other people."

Gabaccia recently arrived in Pittsburgh from Charlotte, NC, where she taught at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Gabaccia, now the Mellon Professor of History at Pitt, has done distinguished work in immigration and labor history, but she is best known for her book We Are What We Eat: Ethnic Food and the Making of Americans (Harvard University Press, 1998).

Food, Gabaccia explains, both unites and divides cultures. The rules of eating vary from culture to culture, often bound up with social and religious taboos. Because people are aware of these differences, food is a marker of cultural identity: The "other" doesn't eat what "we" eat, and vice versa.

But at the same time, Gabaccia says, eating is a universal human experience.

Looking at food and immigration, Gabaccia explores changes in food habits. Although people seek the comfort and familiarity of mom's cooking, she says, people also seek novelty, and foods move and become familiar, like soy sauce in the United States.

Gabaccia says that this mixing is not unique to the United States, citing peanut oil, originally from Africa, in Chinese cooking. Peppers, potatoes, and tomatoes, all originally from Central and South America, are other famous examples.

Gabaccia says that everywhere in the world food is borrowed from another culture.

"No one borrows everything from the other society," Gabaccia notes. "Americans haven't adopted eels for Christmas Eve. Americans tend to adopt meat, sweets, and fast food, like pizza and tacos."

One cultural difference remains unchanged over time, Gabaccia points out: "Americans don't eat innards."

Gabaccia says that she finds Pittsburgh a fascinating place to do culinary history, with its important place in the history of canning and its iconic foods stemming from immigration in the 19th and 20th centuries.

The Primanti Bros.' sandwich, with French fries and cole slaw on it, interests Gabaccia.

"It's related to sandwiches like the Italian muffaletta. It was probably developed by an Italian grocer for someone to take along for lunch at the plant or factory," says Gabaccia.

Gabaccia hopes to teach students to pay attention to the history of the Strip District and Pittsburgh's role in the canning industry, particularly that of the H.J. Heinz Co.

"Pittsburgh," Gabaccia says, "was an incredibly important distribution center for food."

Gabaccia has worked for a number of years with University of South Florida Professor Fraser Ottanelli in cultivating relationships with a worldwide network of scholars to study the diasporas of Italian workers around the world in places other than the United States.

"The majority of Italian workers went elsewhere," Gabaccia says, although most attention has focused on Italians in the United States. Gabaccia and Ottanelli put together newsletters and corresponded with more than 150 people. Several articles and three books have come out of the project, including Gabaccia's Italy's Many Diasporas (University of Washington Press, 2000), and Italian Workers of the World: Labor Migration and the Formation of Multiethnic States (University of Illinois Press, 2001), edited by Gabaccia and Ottanelli. • BC