Europe Without Foreign Kitchens

The fantasy of a culturally pure Europe requires an extraordinary failure of memory. It imagines nations formed behind sealed borders, their languages untouched, their populations uninterrupted and their recipes descending intact from some ancestral kitchen. It is a fiction easily pronounced at a political rally. It becomes rather more difficult to sustain over dinner. So let us indulge André Ventura, Santiago Abascal, Marine Le Pen, Alice Weidel and Giorgia Meloni for a moment. Let us imagine the Europe implied by their politics, a continent liberated from foreign influence and from the uncomfortable presence of those who arrived from elsewhere.

Far right Portuguese politician Andre Ventura during an alleged collapse in campaign

The borders have been restored. The outsiders have departed. Now we must decide what remains on the table.

London loses its curry houses, certainly, but also much of the vocabulary through which contemporary Britain understands pleasure. Marseille wakes without couscous. Paris is stripped of the aromas of the Maghreb, its bakeries deprived of North African hands and its dining rooms of cooks whose Frenchness is questioned more frequently than their labour is acknowledged. Berlin loses the döner, that monument to Turkish migration which has become as intrinsic to the city as beer, techno and concrete.

Lisbon must surrender not only its Angolan, Cape Verdean, Brazilian and Goan kitchens, but the imperial routes that placed spices, sugar, coffee and chillies at the centre of Portuguese appetite. Ventura may campaign against Portugal’s “open doors”, but the country he claims to protect was built through doors that Portugal itself forced open across Africa, Asia and the Americas.

Spain fares no better. Remove everything that entered through conquest, migration and exchange and the supposedly eternal Spanish pantry begins to collapse. There are no tomatoes in the sofrito, no peppers in the pimentón, no potatoes in the tortilla and no cacao for the chocolate. Rice, citrus, sugar cane, aubergines, almonds and saffron carry histories that refuse the simplicity of Santiago Abascal’s borders.

The same politicians who demand cultural obedience from immigrants preside over countries whose cuisines are archives of disobedience. Every European pantry contains evidence that people moved, traded, invaded, fled, settled, married and cooked for one another.

Abascal’s Vox treats migration as an existential threat and has now discovered a new frontier in the school canteen. Its campaign against halal menus presents the dietary accommodation of a Muslim child as an assault upon Spain itself. A plate prepared according to one religious custom becomes evidence of national capitulation, despite the fact that Spain has spent centuries absorbing Jewish, Muslim, Christian, African and American influences into the cuisine it now describes as indivisibly its own. Alberto Núñez Feijóo and the Partido Popular require a different criticism. They are not politically identical to Vox, and pretending otherwise would be intellectually lazy. The danger lies instead in accommodation. When the conventional right adopts the suspicions of the far right, it gives respectable language to the idea that some citizens are less legitimate than others. Feijóo has accused the Spanish government of effectively “manufacturing voters” through nationality provisions for descendants of Spanish exiles, despite the absence of evidence that the process was designed for electoral manipulation. Migrants and new citizens are no longer presented as people who work, eat, pay taxes and construct lives. They become demographic instruments, suspect even before casting a ballot.

France has taken the politicisation of the plate still further. In Beaucaire, governed at the time by a mayor from what was then the Front National, pork was served in municipal school canteens without an alternative meal. The decision affected primarily Muslim children and was defended as a restoration of republican order. Elsewhere, far right identitarian groups distributed soups containing pork, ostensibly as charity but formulated precisely to exclude Muslims and Jews. Here the pig ceased to be an animal, an ingredient or even a beloved component of French regional cooking. It became a border guard.

There is nothing inherently reactionary about eating pork. Europe’s traditions of charcuterie represent centuries of rural knowledge, preservation and pleasure. The political obscenity begins when food is selected not for those who can eat it but against those who cannot. In Beaucaire, the absence of an alternative was the point. A child was presented with a choice between hunger and symbolic submission, while adults congratulated themselves on having defended civilisation. Marine Le Pen and Jordan Bardella understand the potency of such gestures. A border remains abstract until it enters ordinary life. The school canteen, the market and the neighbourhood restaurant make exclusion tangible. Pork becomes a test of loyalty. Halal food becomes a sign of occupation. A lunch menu is transformed into a referendum on who belongs to France.

The AfD performs a similar operation in Germany. Its language of remigration imagines that millions of people can be extracted from German society without extracting the society they helped create. But what would remigration mean for Berlin’s kitchens? Who disappears from the bakeries, slaughterhouses, delivery vans, hotel kitchens and late night restaurants? Who prepares the food once the foreigner has been removed but his labour is still expected? The absurdity is particularly visible in the döner. Politicians may speak of an ethnically coherent Germany, yet one of the country’s most recognisable foods emerged from Turkish life in German cities. The döner is not evidence that German identity has been defeated. It is evidence that identity is made through encounter. The AfD’s hostility to multiculturalism asks Germans to enjoy the results of migration while remaining suspicious of the migrants themselves. Its notion of remigration would remove human beings from the national community while leaving behind everything Germany has already absorbed from them.

Italy offers the most elegant version of this politics. Under Meloni, food is not merely food but sovereignty, patrimony and proof of civilisational continuity. The defence of Italian cuisine appears benign because the cuisine is magnificent and genuinely worth protecting. Yet protection acquires another meaning when accompanied by a politics preoccupied with contamination, demographic anxiety and exclusion.

There is, of course, no uncontaminated Italian cuisine to recover. Tomatoes arrived from the Americas. Arab influence remains embedded in Sicilian citrus, sweets, rice dishes and the use of sugar and spices. Pasta belongs to a long Mediterranean history of movement and adaptation. What we call tradition is often foreign influence after it has survived long enough for people to forget its passport.

The far right understands that food is more emotionally persuasive than policy. A border is abstract. A grandmother’s recipe is intimate. By convincing voters that both are under attack, it turns nostalgia into authority. It offers an imaginary past in which everyone knew who belonged, women preserved the domestic order, men cultivated the land and dinner tasted exactly as it always had.

But Europe has never eaten that dinner. Its true cuisine is impure, restless and acquisitive. It absorbs what arrives, alters it and eventually declares it traditional. Europe without foreign kitchens would not recover its identity. It would discover that foreignness was one of the principal ingredients from which that identity had been made. The immigrant can be expelled from the national story. His food will remain on the table, renamed, naturalised and served without acknowledgment.