The American Business of Italian Food

This chapter examines the layered worlds of the Italian food business and consumer marketplace in East Harlem. In order to understand the central role of food in the making of Italian American identity, it is necessary to look at how Italian American food entrepreneurs in New York sought to link food with ethnic identity. This chapter first discusses the history of American-made Italian food and food consumption among Italian migrants between 1890 and 1920, along with the development of the U.S. food industry at the turn of the twentieth century. It then looks at the emergence of a new generation of consumers and food businesses during the period 1920–1940. It also considers the marketing strategies of Italian food producers and the response of Italian American consumers in the interwar years in relation to ethnicity and modernity. It shows that the centrality of food created an entrepreneurial ethnic middle class based in the food trade, which nurtured—and in turn supported by—the symbolic connection between the consumption of Italian food and the construction of diasporic Italian identities.