DOI 10.60531/INSIGHTOUT.2023.1.5| TAVAKOLI: BUTTA LA PASTICHE!_ INSIGHTOUT 1(2023) 34 only in Italy but across the world, involving itself in the production of European Union food and safety legislation and organising food archiving projects based on the premise that both tradition and locali­ty are being lost in an estranged, globalised world. 7 Above all, the organisation champions some noti­on of the“authentic” or“natural”, in this instance through the altogether inauthentic and unnatural fusion of Dante and butchery in a mock Tuscany lo­cated in Copenhagen. Sociotechnical Imaginaries, Gastronationalism, and Camp Introduced by Sheila Jasanoff and Sang-Hyun Kim in their text “Containing the Atom: Sociotechnical Imaginaries and Nuclear Regulation in the United States and South Korea” , and elaborated upon in “Dreamscapes of Modernity: Sociotechnical Ima­ginaries and the Fabrication of Power”, the so­ciotechnical imaginary encompasses“collectively held, institutionally stabilized, and publicly per­formed visions of desirable futures, animated by shared understandings of forms of social life and social 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 systems of meaning relating to the production or practice of science and technology. Important here is that the transfer of influence does not only move one way. While imagining in the present provides a foundation for what might come, collective unders­tanding of what the future might look like, might require 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 and preparation constitute a kind of specialised know­ledge, involving specialised instruments and tech­nologies—and we should—then it would be fair to characterise the vision evoked by Cecchini, and, by extension, Slow Food, as a kind of sociotechnical imaginary. Where Cecchini and Slow Food depart from our standard case studies of sociotechnical imaginaries is that, rather than envision some pro­mising future as a means of informing practice in the present, they turn to a vision of the past. The future is an ominous foreboding here. Where we wish to be is where we have already been. Gastronationalism, too, relies on collective vision. In her study of foie gras, Michaela DeSoucey identifies Gastronationalism as an extreme form of Gastropo­litics, with conflicts unfolding between social move­ments, state regulators, and cultural markets where food functions either as a boundary object or an obli­gatory passage point between interests. 9 The simila­rity to sociotechnological imaginaries lies in the way in which the word“gastronomy” itself simultaneously refers to identity, geography, and practice. Gastro­nomy is, in other words, an example of the way in which visions of“ought” shape what“is”, with Gastro­nationalism encompassing those instances in which transformations from vision to practice are applied to populations themselves as well as to the protec­tion or policing of those populations. Existing literature on Gastronationalism has, in the main, focussed on overt expressions of xenophobia 7 Alison Leitch,“Slow Food and the Politics of Pork Fat: Italian Food and European Identity”, Ethnos , 68/4(2003), 437–462 at 440. 8 Sheila Jasanoff and Sang-Hyun Kim(eds.), Dreamscapes of Modernity: Sociotechnical Imaginaries and the Fabrication of Power (Chicago, 2015), 4. 9 Michaela DeSoucey, Contested Tastes: Foie Gras and the Politics of Food (Princeton, 2016).