The Taste of Resistance in Ethiopia’s Enduring Food Traditions
When Italian forces crossed the Mareb River in 1935, they carried more than rifles and chemical weapons. Packed into supply crates—and embedded in the logic of occupation—was a quieter apparatus of control: a plan to reshape how people in the Horn of Africa would eat.
The invasion of Ethiopia, Eritrea and Somalia was not only a military campaign. It was also an attempt to recast identity through the regulation of calories, crops and the rituals of the table.
In “Gastrofascism and Empire: Food in Italian East Africa, 1935–1941,” the historian Simone Cinotto traces how the Fascist regime under Benito Mussolini treated food as an instrument of empire. The colonial administration envisioned East Africa as a “granary” for Italy—an agricultural hinterland that could help secure food autarky by producing wheat, beef, coffee and bananas for the metropole.
But this vision was not merely economic. It was racial, spatial and sensory.
Cinotto shows that the colonial food system operated within a rigid hierarchy, enforced not only through labor and land policy but also through everyday acts of consumption. He describes the emergence of what he terms “food apartheid”: a regime of enforced separation between colonizer and colonized. Laws prohibiting “interracial commensality” made it a punishable offense for Italians and Ethiopians to share a meal.
In cities like Addis Ababa, this translated into a redesigned urban landscape. Markets, cafés and restaurants were segregated, with access and quality determined by race. Dining became a boundary line—one that mapped power as clearly as any checkpoint.
The policy, Cinotto argues, was intended to insulate the Italian “civilizing mission” from local influence. By policing taste and proximity, colonial authorities sought to preserve a distinct European identity, uncontaminated by indigenous culinary traditions.
Control extended beyond the plate to the soil itself. In pursuit of agricultural expansion, the administration resettled thousands of Italian farmers, expropriating lands labeled “unproductive.” They introduced new seeds, livestock and farming techniques designed to replicate the Italian countryside on African terrain.
Cinotto characterizes this as “bio-imperialism”: an effort to overwrite indigenous agricultural systems with one calibrated to Rome’s needs. Supply chains reinforced the project. Ships arriving through ports like Massawa and Mogadishu carried canned goods, mineral water and wine, assembling an imported Mediterranean diet in the middle of the Horn.
The result was an artificial foodscape—one that mirrored Italy while standing apart from its surroundings.
Yet the project was never complete.
Even as the colonial state sought to industrialize and segregate food production, Ethiopian foodways persisted. The cultivation of teff, the fermentation of injera and the deeply communal structure of dining practices endured, not simply as tradition but as a form of quiet defiance.
Cinotto notes that local farmers continued to plant indigenous crops, often in subtle resistance to colonial agricultural directives. In doing so, they preserved more than sustenance. They maintained a cultural system—one that resisted incorporation, even under occupation.
In the markets, the steady exchange of indigenous spices and grains formed a quiet but critical infrastructure of resistance. Despite Italian attempts to impose a “hierarchy of taste”—one that elevated European flavors as inherently superior—the Ethiopian palate remained anchored in local soil and inherited recipes.
In “Gastrofascism and Empire,” Cinotto describes how the Italian military depended on a long, fragile supply chain extending back to Europe, leaving it exposed to disruption. By contrast, Ethiopian patriots— Arbegnoch—operated within a decentralized and adaptive food network. Moving through the highlands, they were sustained by rural communities that supplied essential local staples.
Cinotto frames this contrast as more than logistical. It was structural: a rigid, imported system confronting a flexible, indigenous one—an imbalance that shaped the daily realities of occupation.
The regime also sought to govern through the senses. Sight, smell and taste became tools for constructing racial identity. Fascist doctrine insisted that Italian identity was inseparable from the consumption of Italian wheat and wine—even under the tropical sun. To eat local food, colonial authorities warned, was to risk “going native,” a notion they countered through propaganda and strict rationing.
By 1941, with the collapse of Italian East Africa, the formal architecture of what Cinotto terms “gastrofascism” began to unravel. Italian settlers and their imported provisions either departed or were absorbed into a shifting social order. Yet the imprint of the project—particularly in agricultural policy—did not simply vanish.
What endured more powerfully was resistance. Ethiopia’s food system, defined by its indigenous grains and deeply communal dining traditions, survived the six-year attempt at replacement. In kitchens and fields, continuity proved more resilient than coercion.
The occupation, as Cinotto’s account makes clear, was contested not only on battlefields but across everyday life. The effort to recast identity through food met a persistent refusal: a commitment to local practice that preserved the distinct foodways of the Horn.
Still, the colonial encounter left traces.
Yves-Marie Stranger, author of “A Gallop in Ethiopia: Wax, Gold and the Abyssinian Pony,” notes that certain Italian culinary influences have endured. Spaghetti, once an imported staple, is now commonplace, while espresso and macchiatos are served in cafés across Ethiopia—from major avenues to modest neighborhood counters.
Stranger situates this within a longer history of exchange. Some ingredients now considered quintessentially Ethiopian arrived from elsewhere: the sweet orange, introduced by the Portuguese in the 16th century, gave rise to the name birtukan; tomatoes, chili peppers and potatoes—now central to many stews—originated in South America. Even the spread of plow-based cereal farming, he notes, unfolded gradually, reaching regions like Hararghe only in the late 19th century.
Beyond the overt politics of the 1930s, Stranger argues, certain Mediterranean habits were ultimately indigenized—absorbed into local practice, stripped of their colonial context and reinterpreted within Ethiopian culinary traditions.
Today, the terrain of influence has shifted. The pressures shaping food culture are less about occupation than about globalization and advertising. Sugary carbonated drinks, now common at any feasts, signal a different kind of cultural reach—one mediated through markets rather than mandates.
Yet the core endures.
“Empires come and go, and yet the Ethiopian habit of eating together endures,” Stranger told The Reporter. Whether centered on ancient grains or accompanied by modern additions, the shared meal—gathered around the messob—remains a durable expression of social continuity.
