the most incredible thing to me about Italian cruisine is the fact that the tomato is not even native to Italy.
No tradition or culture can claim to be purely from one place. Everything has mixed in the world by now. All of us are immigrants.
Failing to do so often and on an industrial scale quickly becomes cultural appropriation.
In HN terms: it's like systematically violating FOSS licenses that require attribution.
Also, about not butchering something and/or making false claims its originality.
- if it's an exact copy, give attribution
- if it's inspired-by but different, say it
- if it's a new thing, don't give false attribution (e.g. with a misleading name)
- if the origin is forgotten or unclear, don't claim ownership
The Culinary Cultural Appropriation Police are not going to come after anyone for not explaining spaghetti or tacos to an American audience. Everyone knows what those are even if they don't know every bit of the history of those items.
But if you're going to introduce a lesser-known dish, it'd be better to provide some context. When a white chef puts his twist on Ghanaian groundnut soup on the menu, that's ok - but don't just call it "Tim's Tasty Nut Soup" without referring to what it was inspired by. Give credit to the culture that invented the thing (and no, I don't think your menu needs to dive into the fact that it contains tomatoes which aren't native to Ghana, etc).
Also don't slap the name of a food that people heard about on something very different.
I think peppers are the one that blows my mind the most. They're centered in quite a few food cultures, and I got quite far into life not realizing how relatively new that phenomenon is.
You can also read up on the ancient roman diet, there are many sources on that.
My understanding is that pizza maybe originally from Italy, but it was popularized in the US by Italian-Americans. When American tourists started traveling in Europe in large numbers, they wanted "authentic" pizza, so Italians obliged by serving them a reinvented pizza.
Sweden and Southern Germany had pizzerias before WWII. Same for São Paulo (Brazil) and Buenos Aires (Argentina), both cities with a big Italian immigration on the 19th century.
The town of Nice, in southern France, has pissaladiere as a local dish since the end of 19th century.
And then there are the hundreds of different versions of flat-breads from Asia to North Africa.
Edit: Come to think about it, tomatoes in Italy have existed longer than Italy itself.
(Specifically in the post above I was referring to the chip, on the basis that the potatoe "came" to England in a similar timeframe to the quote of the tomato beginning commonplace in Italy from.)