The Italian Ministry of Agriculture has a recent history of operating at the curious intersection of neofascism and culinary purism. Zaia’s “zero-tolerance policy” on food fraud became famous with his 2008 bust-up of cheating Brunello di Monalcino producers, which was hailed as a victory for consumers. But in a less-reported crackdown the following year, Zaia, a member of the extreme-right-wing Lega Nord—the political party that has advocated the seccession of Northern Italy—also instituted, with Berlusconi’s backing, a policy banning new “ethnic” restaurants from opening in certain northern Italian cities, including Lucca and Milan. It was a move that the left-wing newspaper La Stampa called “culinary ethnic cleansing.” Reporting on the policy, the Times of London quoted Lucca city spokesman Massimo Di Grazia as saying that “French restaurants would be allowed”; he was “unsure, though, about Sicilian cuisine. It is influenced by Arab cooking.” Continued the Times: “Asked if he had ever eaten a kebab, Mr Zaia said: ‘No—and I defy anyone to prove the contrary. I prefer the dishes of my native Veneto. I even refuse to eat pineapple.’” This, from the country’s Minister of Agriculture.

Sometime in 2001 or 2002, I recall meeting, and discussing pure-ingredient fervence with, Giorgio Alemanno, who was Italy’s Minister of Agriculture at the time (this was two Ministers ago). The man talked about wine with great passion. And like Zaia, he was also an absolute right-wing zealot. As mayor of Rome, Alemanno was famous for praising Mussolini, expelling immigrants, and mowing down gypsy camps. “Upon his election,” reported the Telegraph at the time, Alemanno “was greeted by crowds of supporters, among them skinheads, who chanted ‘Duce! Duce!’ and raised their arms in a fascist salute.” It’s interesting to see Zaia, with Berlusconi’s backing, continuing in this tradition.

Certainly, when we buy mozzarella di bufala—or Brunello di Montalcino—we want to get the real thing. But if we’re enjoying what’s sold as Brunello or bufala, and feel like we’re getting our money’s worth, is the cow/Cab crime really so great?

I’ve previously discussed the thorny issue of the overzealous advocacy of a traditional recipe to the exclusion of all others. In response to Florence Fabricant’s claim, for instance, that “for any pasta all’amatriciana to be authentic, it must be made with guanciale (pork jowl),” not bacon or pancetta, I responded that “too many food writers construct a counterfactual Italy of culinary dogmatism, a population of finger-wagging guanciale zealots, a nation…harrumphing around about how the world is going to shit now that people are making amatriciana with pancetta…People and recipes aren’t anthropological tokens. They’re living things, the products of neural assemblies and proteins and chemicals bouncing across the ages. Narrow your gaze and squint your eyes too tightly in the search for authenticity, and you might miss that whole, beautiful landscape.”

Perhaps I should revise this statement: clearly, there are some finger-wagging guanciale zealots in Italy. They tend to gravitate, it seems, toward the Ministry of Agriculture. The question of whether “zero tolerance,” when it comes to food, is fascist, patronizing, noble—or all three—is certainly one for further contemplation.

Florence Fabricant, in a recent article, embodies a common attitude amongst American food writers when she reveals the results of an exhaustive search for the true recipe for bucatini all’amatriciana, one of Italy’s most beloved pasta dishes: “After half a dozen plates of it during a recent trip to Italy, one detail became clear: for any pasta all’amatriciana to be authentic, it must be made with guanciale—cured, unsmoked pig jowl.”

Although it would be a difficult hypothesis to test empirically, Andrea and I had the same immediate reaction to this statement—his from growing up in Italy, mine from living there for a while: in Italy, almost nobody would care in the least bit whether pasta all’amatriciana were “authentic.” People would care whether it tasted good.

Now, just because people in Italy wouldn’t care whether amatriciana were authentic doesn’t mean we shouldn’t. The preservation of culinary history, lest old recipes be lost in time, is a noble endeavor. But historical documentation doesn’t seem to be the purpose of the food writers who go around enforcing amatriciana’s authenticity. It’s more the idea that there’s one, and only one, way to make this dish—a blend of I’ve-been-there-and-you-haven’t self-righteousness with cultural/culinary naïveté.

To wit: “Italians take guanciale for granted, but it’s fairly new to American kitchens. Almost all the recipes in American cookbooks,” continues Fabricant, “call for ordinary bacon—which is too smoky—or Italian pancetta, which is too lean…‘Good guanciale makes all the difference,’ said the actor Michael Tucker, an accomplished cook, who, with his wife, the actress Jill Eikenberry, has a house in Umbria. In his book, ‘Living in a Foreign Language’ (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2007), he describes buying guanciale from Ugo Mazzoli, the butcher in Campello sul Clitunno, near his house.”

Guanciale is lovely in amatriciana; few would dispute that. But Simone, the Genoese guy who taught me to make amatriciana, does it with pancetta—like his mother did. Would Simone love a well-made amatriciana with smoky American bacon, too? Of course he would. He’s not a lever-pulling lab rat. He’s just a dude who, like many other Italians, likes good food.

Is amatriciana made with guanciale? Yes.

Is it made with pancetta? Yes.

Is it made with Tyrolean speck? With French lardons? Probably, somewhere in Italy, yes.

To illustrate the absurdity of Fabricant’s point of view, Andrea offers the following hypothetical: imagine an Italian food critic undertaking a careful investigative journey through the American pastoral hinterland in search of the authentic hamburger. She tries a half-dozen burgers, reads a few cookbooks, and concludes, in her article in Corriere della Sera, that “for a hamburger to be authentically American, it must be made only with Wisconsin cheddar cheese, lettuce, and tomato, and it must be served with french fries.”

Fabricant is not wrong, exactly, about how to make a good plate of bucatini. But she, like too many food writers, constructs a counterfactual Italy of culinary dogmatism, a population of finger-wagging guanciale zealots, a nation full of Ugo Mazzolis harrumphing around about how the world is going to shit now that people are making amatriciana with pancetta.

People and recipes aren’t anthropological tokens. They’re living things, the products of neural assemblies and proteins and chemicals bouncing across the ages. Narrow your gaze and squint your eyes too tightly in the search for authenticity, and you might miss that whole, beautiful landscape.

Wine is still the thing to accompany a family dinner or elaborate restaurant meal in southern Europe, which is why their per-capita wine consumption remains higher than ours. But because Americans increasingly tend to order wine at bars, and Europeans generally don’t, this gap is closing rapidly. The US now beats Italy in total wine consumption.

In Italy, amongst young professionals, a far more popular nighttime endeavor than going to the sort of upmarket (or so-called “gastronomic”) restaurant where you’d order wine is getting a big group together at a pizzeria. And contrary to US stereotypes, the Italians actually almost never drink wine with pizza—it’s strictly beer (or Coca-Cola).

In most of Spain, it’s the cervecería—not the wine bar—that defines the nighttime casual-eating-with-groups culture, and there, draft beer (“caña,” typically poured in tiny glasses) is beautifully paired with what’s often eaten: raciones of fatty jamón iberico and sweet pan con tomate; marinated fish, garlicky shellfish, and vinegary vegetables; boiled octopus drizzled with olive oil and sprinkled with paprika; or pinxtos/canapés (bites of food served on slices of baguette), which often come free with each round of drinks.

When Spanish or Italian beer comes fresh from the tap, its elegant taste profile can yield extraordinary pleasure. Mahou, Nastro Azzurro, Estrella Damm, Forst, and Cruzcampo may not be dissimilar from each other, but they’re all models of balance, clean, bright, and refreshingly bitter. They’re usually poured properly—allowing the head to collect into something creamy and dense—and, like dry Basque sidra, they’re well suited to the occasion, which is precisely what seems to have been lost in translation in America’s rapid adoption of wine as a cocktail.

Even at Spain’s expensive restaurants, beer is often offered as an apéritif—an alternative to dry Manzanilla or Oloroso sherry, before you start with the wine—something I’ve rarely seen elsewhere.

Because Spanish and Italian beer doesn’t have the sort of hopped-up, boozed-out complexity that caters to critics—it’s not trying to be Belgian or Oregonian—you won’t see them much at, say, New York’s beer bars, and there’s a popular misconception that these countries just don’t do beer well. (That misconception is backed up by the fact that when you order, say, Peroni by the bottle at a bar in the US, it almost always turns out to be something skunky and/or honeyed and legitimately disgusting. Don’t ever order Italian beer when it’s imported in bottles. But that’s an article for another day.)

Yes, the wine bar concept is spreading through southern Europe, and that might be applying a gentle upward pressure on wine consumption amongst the trendsters there.

But the wine bar is still really an American thing, and it hasn’t really yet permeated mainstream yuppie culture anywhere across the Atlantic. Generally speaking, in Europe, the words “wine bar” signal a New York fetish nightclub, or a restaurant with terrible pan-Asian cuisine and an overpriced list of Champagne magnums and Grey Goose bottle service. These places typically serve crappy imported beer, and often don’t even run a tap—the ultimate fuck you to the country’s authentic beer culture.

Why must hot bodies and a well-conceived drink program so rarely overlap?