«Many people ask where imperialism is: look on the plates you eat from. Imported rice grains, corn, that’s imperialism. There’s no need to look any further». A famous phrase by Thomas Sankara tells, in a colonial context of decades ago in Africa, all the political, social and economic meaning of a dish. In a different way, even today the dishes, in our Italy of 2024, tell a global model: at least to those who stop and question themselves, peeking at the prices at the supermarket, opening their refrigerator, anxiously waiting for the last one to sit at the table before consuming the traditional Sunday meal.
The heartbreaking, inhuman, unforgivable story of Satnam Singha farm worker abandoned by his employer and bled to death after an accident at work (yet another in Italy) that cost him an arm, he screams revenge: not against a plausible criminal, but against a system. A system that tolerates, justifies, fuels exploitation, violence, pain of invisible and defenseless people, just to allow a dish at the lowest cost. Satnam Singh apparently grew or harvested courgettes; and, like him, an immense and anonymous crowd of men and women who came from other continents to lend their arms, sweat and silence to decorate our tablecloths. And entice our palates with the taste of saving.
The same happens every day – far from our eyes, beyond the confines of our land and our imagination – on board fishing boats: armies of industrious ants tirelessly move the gears of the nets to guarantee the catch of the day, possibly in every corner of the planet. The inevitable coagulating ingredient of the mechanism is the abuse and forced labor of migrants imprisoned continuously for months – if not for years – on ships destined for the high seas without any stop on the mainland. Not coincidentally, the protocol (of 2014) relating to the Forced Labor Convention of 1930 (Convention No. 29 of the International Labor Organization) expressly refers to migrants as the category most exposed to «become a victim of forced or compulsory labor».
A hinge – the one that unites in the same basket the supply chains of zero-kilometre fruit and vegetables and exotic fish (and not only) – woven along the teeth of poverty in the countries of origin, of the sale of migrants by unscrupulous traffickers, of mediation illegal workforce, the involvement of criminal organizations, the absence of regularization and protection in the workplace, and exploitation by agricultural cooperatives and industrial fishing companies.
An infamous and lacerating fate therefore unites migrants and submerged of the world, in the sun of the countryside as well as of the oceanic expanses, to please those who – guiltily lacking in awareness or scruples – sometimes blush just because of the embarrassment faced with the choice between the seafood menu and the land menu. Too often unaware of the wounds, physical and human, social and political, that that full plate can hide; but which forces us to knock on the door of the abyss of conscience into which the value of human suffering has sunk, to the point of allowing an employer to no longer even hear the thud of an amputated arm of one of his employees, thrown together with the macerated fruit.
I don’t know if the awkward choice in a restaurant menu between Asian tuna and agro-pontine salad has an imperialist flavor: I know that anything will be fine with me, as long as it’s at the right cost.
