How the “Nonna Effect” Explains Why We Are so Obsessed With Food Authenticity
And what that says about us as human beings
Don’t mess with the food of my ancestors.
When I’m not writing articles, I run an online food and drink publication called Rooted. I deal with scores of submissions every week. On certain weeks I’d hazard that over 50% of them are stories about food about mothers, grandmothers and recipes handed down from generation to generation.
I’ve read about fights in Italy over whose nonna made it best, streets practically running red with pomodoro sauce. I’ve read about Indian kitchens with mothers benevolently dishing up dishes passed down the bloodline. I’ve read stories of writers getting very upset when TikTok de-authenticises some traditional dish.
All of this shows how much people care about the authenticity of their food. I call it the Nonna Effect. When traditional “authentic” cuisine — symbolised by Grandmothers — becomes the only way to make a dish.
Some of my writers suggest we shouldn’t worry so much about food authenticity, lest it stifle creativity and progress. But I’ve seen less discourse on why we are so wedded to food authenticity and tradition. What makes it so important that Italian men throw fits over broken spaghetti on social media?
Or what does the Nonna Effect say about us as human beings?
Your prehistoric ancestors loved their food (and what it represented)
The first thing the Nonna Effect says about us is that we are human. Food tradition speaks to our base instincts. Belonging to the tribe. Social connection.
Evolutionarily speaking, food has a “privileged target of memory in the brain” — the hippocampus.
The hippocampus plays an important role in creating long-term, formative memories. It also has a strong connection to parts of the brain responsible for both emotion and smell. As one food historian explains:
Emotion and smell no doubt contribute to the power of some food memories, but the hippocampus has more direct links to the digestive system. Many of the hormones that regulate appetite, digestion, and eating behavior also have receptors in the hippocampus.
Finding food is so important to survival that it is clear that the hippocampus is primed to form memories about and around food.
This goes a long way to explain why your Grandma’s cooking is so important to you. It’s nostalgic, and psychologists believe that nostalgia “increases meaning in life and fosters a sense of social connectedness.”
It’s no wonder that traditional or authentic recipes trump newer ones — they are reminiscent of belonging. And importantly, of identity.
It’s not really about the food
Food has forever been linked to who you are, where you come from and what that says about you. The most compelling evidence we have is what happens with migrants. One study concluded that:
There is a strong desire to preserve one’s culture through food practices especially when one’s culture is not the dominant culture in that society.
Another said:
An individual’s cultural heritage and social belonging can be signified through his or her culinary choices, just as they can act as a reminder of displacement and memory for those who are exiled from their native culture.
Living far from home can rock your sense of self. I have first-hand experience of this, living in Portugal. If you were brought up believing that food is an intrinsic part of your identity, it stands to reason you want to preserve that because it means preserving part of you. Wherever you live in the world.
But it’s not just migrants. I’ve read paper after paper that says the same thing.
Food = identity. For everyone.
Food connects, and there is little more that humans love than connection and belonging. Combine that with the psychological and physical effects of eating — nourishing your body, feeling satisfied, happy and content — and it doesn’t take a genius to understand why we want to preserve food cultures and the authenticity of the food we grew up with.
The nature of “authenticity” is important here. What does authentic really mean? It means dishes made in the same way by thousands — or even millions — of people. As one study remarks, through traditional cuisines, individuals foster a collective identity, distinguishing “us” from “other.”
Take pesto. If you are Genoese, knowing that the way you make your pesto is the same way thousands of people in your region also make theirs, lends a strong sense of shared belonging and identity.
The Nonna Effect in action.
Woe betide anyone who strays from that, as Jason Wilson found out when he devised a “pesto generator” for the Washington Post, which was met with anger by local food writers like Guilio Nepi:
These are problems for us Ligurians, since we have pesto in our blood….We are attached to our habits like snails on a rock. Pesto is Genoa, and on certain things you don’t mess around
Who wants to tell Guilio that pesto is only 160 years old, which means it probably wasn’t “in the blood” of even his great-great-great grandparents?
We’re attached to a movable feast
The link between authentic food and identity becomes even more interesting when you consider how recent some “authentic” food traditions are.
Pasta Carbonara, for instance, was only invented in the 1940s. Ciabatta was invented in my lifetime — the 1980s. The Portuguese bifana sandwich only became popular in the 1960s. Yet Carbonara is considered intensely Roman, and the bifana is considered intensely Portuense.
Some food-based identities are far more recent than many people realise, likely because it’s a very personal thing. It’s related to you and your experiences. You don’t need to know that your great-great-great grandparents didn’t make pesto, for instance, because you didn’t know them. But maybe you knew your grandma, and she did make it.
Hence the Nonna Effect.
Here’s something else to consider. When it comes to “cultural blending” — essentially the “inauthentic” world of fusion food —one study concluded that Gen Zs and Millennials are receptive to it because they “have a great appreciation for novelty and inclusivity in dining experiences.”
This suggests that younger people may be more receptive to non-authentic food. When you look at how many younger people were brought up, this isn’t especially surprising.
I grew up in the 1980s, a time of microwave meals and fast food. I don’t have memories of my mother or grandmother cooking traditional food, I have memories of turkey dinosaurs and alphabet chips. There was no Nonna Effect in my home.
I’ve written before about how food aspirations changed in the 1980s. Anne Helen Peterson puts it best:
Their understanding of aspirational, middle-class cooking was to cook everything canned with recipes from Better Homes and Gardens…we’re coming out of the depression…suddenly we have a dishwasher and we’re expected to cook uniquely with cream of mushroom soup.
There is nothing especially authentic about that.
My personal lack of attachment to food authenticity is further compounded by the fact that I am British, a country where 92% of us eat “world cuisine” at home. I grew up in a melting-pot nation with easy access to foreign ingredients. Living thousands of miles from these world cuisines meant I also had little knowledge about how to make dishes “authentically.”
It stands to reason that growing up like this would change the way you consider authentic dishes (whether you think this is a good thing for food or not). If you are not wedded to authenticity in the first place, will you get so upset when someone messes about with a traditional recipe? Or would you be more open to new ways of doing things?
In my experience, it’s almost always the latter.
Despite rapidly homogenizing lifestyles and the cultural standardization of a late-capitalist world, food and how it is processed remain at the heart of cultural specificity and differences between cultures — The Cultural Significance of Food: More than Just Nutrition
For many people, food will always be linked to their identity. And for nearly all of us, food is a source of connection, belonging, and family. Our lizard brains don’t want us to mess with food traditions because being bonded by food makes us human.
It’s why people fight over the “correct” recipe. It’s why Ligurians get mad when someone devises a pesto generator. It’s not so much about the pesto itself but about what the pesto represents.
It’s why the Nonna Effect exists.
Even for those of us who grew up on a steady diet of frozen TV dinners and hamburgers, I’ll bet there is something that makes you feel warm and cosy inside. Something you defend if someone tries to mess about with the recipe (for me, it’s pies specifically with a pastry bottom — none of this pastry lid business).
You’re only human after all.
I like your explanation of authenticity as tied to personal experience or people you know well. It would be interesting to find out if there’s an “authenticity threshold” - how long does something have to exist or how far does it have to go back in a certain place for it to be considered authentic? I’ve just been working on a piece about this with wine and what we call ‘native’ grapes, even if they’re originally from somewhere else.
You made me think with this article. Grilled cheese with American sliced cheese and congee arroz caldo are definitely among the food items with the "Nonna Effect" in my mind while Kraft Dinner and seed pie occupy the same place in my husband's mind. I'm a second generation immigrant Millenial while my husband's family has lived in Canada for generations. With more cuisines becoming mainstream and fusing with others every day, it makes me wonder what kinds of food and food practices from the 2000s will be considered authentic in the 2050s. That's not a bad thing of course. It doesn't matter what kind of food culture they are raised in their formative years, their taste and definition of authenticity will be personal and right.