DOI 10.60531/INSIGHTOUT.2023.1.5| TAVAKOLI: BUTTA LA PASTICHE!_ INSIGHTOUT 1(2023) 34only in Italy but across the world, involving itself inthe production of European Union food and safetylegislation and organising food archiving projectsbased on the premise that both tradition and locality are being lost in an estranged, globalised world.7Above all, the organisation champions some notion of the“authentic” or“natural”, in this instancethrough the altogether inauthentic and unnaturalfusion of Dante and butchery in a mock Tuscany located in Copenhagen.Sociotechnical Imaginaries,Gastronationalism, and CampIntroduced by Sheila Jasanoff and Sang-Hyun Kimin their text“Containing the Atom: SociotechnicalImaginaries and Nuclear Regulation in the UnitedStates and South Korea”, and elaborated upon in“Dreamscapes of Modernity: Sociotechnical Imaginaries and the Fabrication of Power”,the sociotechnical imaginary encompasses“collectivelyheld, institutionally stabilized, and publicly performed visions of desirable futures, animated byshared understandings of forms of social life andsocial order attainable through, and supportive of,advances in science and technology”8. Put differently, the sociotechnical imaginary is an animating force, one that organises and guides systemsof meaning relating to the production or practiceof science and technology. Important here is thatthe transfer of influence does not only move oneway. While imagining in the present provides afoundation for what might come, collective understanding of what the future might look like, mightrequire or deny, shapes the way science and technology projects are funded, practised, or popularly interpreted today.If we are willing to accept that food production andpreparation constitute a kind of specialised knowledge, involving specialised instruments and technologies—and we should—then it would be fair tocharacterise the vision evoked by Cecchini, and, byextension, Slow Food, as a kind of sociotechnicalimaginary. Where Cecchini and Slow Food departfrom our standard case studies of sociotechnicalimaginaries is that, rather than envision some promising future as a means of informing practice in thepresent, they turn to a vision of the past. The futureis an ominous foreboding here.Where we wish to be is where we havealready been.Gastronationalism, too, relies on collective vision. Inher study of foie gras, Michaela DeSoucey identifiesGastronationalism as an extreme form of Gastropolitics, with conflicts unfolding between social movements, state regulators, and cultural markets wherefood functions either as a boundary object or an obligatory passage point between interests.9The similarity to sociotechnological imaginaries lies in the wayin which the word“gastronomy” itself simultaneouslyrefers to identity, geography, and practice. Gastronomy is, in other words, an example of the way inwhich visions of“ought” shape what“is”, with Gastronationalism encompassing those instances in whichtransformations from vision to practice are appliedto populations themselves as well as to the protection or policing of those populations.Existing literature on Gastronationalism has, in themain, focussed on overt expressions of xenophobia7Alison Leitch,“Slow Food and the Politics of Pork Fat: Italian Food and European Identity”,Ethnos, 68/4(2003), 437–462 at 440.8Sheila Jasanoff and Sang-Hyun Kim(eds.),Dreamscapes of Modernity: Sociotechnical Imaginaries and the Fabrication of Power(Chicago, 2015), 4.9Michaela DeSoucey,Contested Tastes: Foie Gras and the Politics of Food(Princeton, 2016).
