The [Fascist] colonial government intervened at the level of East African bakeries and flour types.⁴¹ In 1938 from January to June, the [Fascist] ministers of the East African colonies introduced ‘La disciplina della panificazione’, a set of laws that used the colour of consumers’ skin to determine the colour of the bread they were permitted to eat.⁴²
Article one dictated the standard bread recipe for [Fascist] military personnel. Loaves for the [Regio Esercito] and road construction crews should be made from at least 80 per cent local wheat flour, mixed with no more than 10 per cent of local teff, dura, barley, and corn flours, or with imported soft wheat flours.⁴³
Article two standardised bread recipes available to Italian colonists: ‘Il pane per la popolazione civile di razza bianca deve essere confezionato con farina di grano, abburattate ali 80% miscelata fino al 20% di farine di cereali locali od importati’ (‘Bread for the white civilian population must be packaged with 80% wheat flour, blended with up to 20% of local or imported cereal flours).’
The legislation included some exceptions. Bakers’ recipes could offer as low as 70–72% wheat if their product was prepared for consumers with special dietary needs, like hospital patients. Italian bread products, such as grissini, were also exempt.⁴⁴
Any baker in possession of pure wheat flour was commanded to immediately sell their stocks to the Azienda Annonaria Governatoriale at the price dictated by the Comitato Vigilanza Prezzi della Federazione Fascista.⁴⁵ On 26 July 1938, governor of Addis Ababa Canero Medici established the bread recipes for East African labourers.⁴⁶
Article two stated: ‘Per l’alimentazione della mano d’opera di colore dovranno essere usate dalle imprese soltanto farine di cereali locali diversi dal grano (dura, taft, orzo, ecc.)’ (‘For the feeding of labourers of colour, only local cereal flours other than wheat (durum, teff, barley, etc.) must be used by companies’.)
Put telegraphically, Italians were to eat white bread made from wheat, and East Africans were to eat brown bread made from local grains, like barley. Culinary legislation in the colonies centered on questions of racial identification and division. It allotted different foods to different people, based on skin colour.
To enforce the rules, a new Commission for Control of Breadmaking (Commissione di controllo sulla panificazione) was established, consisting of a representative from the Partito Nazionale Fascista, a health inspector, and a baker.⁴⁷ This group would, from time to time, be called from East Africa to make their reports in Rome. Twice a month, this group would inspect the bread ovens from Gondar to Azozò, making sure that their owners obeyed the law. Violators were subject to jail time of up to one month plus a 500 lire fine.⁴⁸
(Emphasis added. Less bizarrely, this research also confirms that pasta companies profited from Fascism.)
Food history, and the history of corporations, show how hard it is to separate the food supply chain into discrete stages ruled by either agriculture or industry. The two are mutually constitutive. Agrarian policy under Fascism holds a mirror up to the history of the Italian food industry, particularly for firms that processed wheat into pasta.
As noted by Anthony Cardoza and Domenico Preti in their studies of Emilia Romagna, local business élites primarily benefited from the new agrarian policies, leading to what Cardoza termed a ‘fascist conquest of the countryside’ (Cardoza 1983; Preti 1982).
Federico Cresti, Alexander Nützenadel, and Paul Corner added geographic breadth to these findings, Cresti in his incorporation of new source bases (colonial agriculture records from the Ministero degli Affari esteri in Rome and Istituto agronomico per l’Oltremare in Florence, 1996), Nützenadel with his centering of agrarian autarkic production (1997), and Corner in his foundational analysis of detailing the régime strategies for increased domestic wheat production under the Battle for Grain in Emilia Romagna (1975).
Building on this previous scholarship, the Barilla pasta company offers a case study to illustrate how the régime attempted to graft private industry onto agrarian policy in Italian East Africa.
[…]
The Barilla company did better still at the Second Wheat Exhibition, held in Rome five years later, on 2 October 1932, the tenth anniversary of the March on Rome. It was a high‐profile event. Royalty, including King Vittorio Emanuele and Prince Umberto, sat in attendance for speeches from Mussolini and Minister of Agriculture Giacomo Acerbo. Here, Barilla received the gold a second time. What’s more, their exhibit also drew the personal attention of the Duce.
Breathless coverage in Il popolo d’Italia described the conversation between Riccardo Barilla and Benito Mussolini, ‘His Excellency the head of government showed a keen interest […] stopping with special interest at the stand of the Barilla pasta factory of Parma.’ He especially enjoyed Barilla’s ‘symbolic homage of fragrant bread’. Conspicuous wins like these led to further meetings between Barilla’s management and key figures of the Fascist régime in Rome during the mid‐1930s.
Multiple accounts attest to Riccardo Barilla’s ongoing curation of positive relationships with Achille Starace and Benito Mussolini, as well as lesser‐known officials with ties to the colonial armies (Segreto 1988, 4–5). On 2 October 1934, Riccardo Barilla welcomed Guido Marasini, former president of the Provincial Federation of Farmers to a factory visit followed by a private reception in the company garden.¹¹
In Marasini’s then new capacity as the executor of trade union regulations, it was a valuable friendship for an industrialist to have. In the early 1930s, Barilla relied on government contracts for the majority of its business, both [under Fascism] and abroad. In every [Fascist] colony, Barilla pasta was now available for purchase (Segreto 1988, 4).
Military supplies accounted for the majority of Barilla’s business with the [bourgeois] state in the 1920s and early 1930s. Pietro Barilla described how pasta companies gained these contracts, ‘auctions were held, companies competed and whoever won the auction got the production contract: at the time there was a lot of military work and very little civilian work’ (Barilla, cited in Gonizzi 2003, 234). In Emilia Romagna, the economic depression of the early 1930s brought unemployment to historic highs, reaching 20 per cent of the working‐age population in Parma.
Still, the military contracts meant that Barilla fared better than other local food industries like dairy and canning. After studying at the Calw international college in the Black Forest region of Germany in 1932–3, Pietro Barilla returned to Italy with a new zest for ‘order and organisation’ (Gonizzi 2003, 234) that he applied to corporate strategy.
[…]
By 1936, Barilla was convinced that the future of the company lay in moving away from overseas work orders, including those for the [Regio Escerito], and towards the emerging middle‐class market.
A second trip to Germany in December 1936 brought Pietro Barilla into the orbit of leading [Reich] industrialists. He wrote of his meetings, ‘Very interesting visit to the Schram factories. I had the pleasure of spending half a day with an industrialist who has a lot to say with regard to pasta. Lufthansa behaved very well, and in this field too, which is new to me, I had the opportunity to get to know a proper organisation’.¹⁵
In the agricultural sector as in the pasta industry, profits of the Battle for Grain went to northern landowners. Po Valley landowners arguably gained the most from wheat autarchy. As owners of the fertile plains and paddies, they reaped huge profits from braccianti, the seasonal hired hands who owned no land of their own. Willson draws the regional differences as one of farming approach: ‘Whilst Northern farms increased output through productivity gains, many Southern farms did so largely by expanding acreage’ (Willson 2002, 14)[.]
Even though the Battle offered generous state subsidies to the latifondisti, the southern landowners, in the form of high duties on imported grains, Helstosky, drawing on statistician Benedetto Barberi’s analysis of food availability [under Fascism], notes ‘the south and the islands lagged behind with only a 20–30 per cent increase in yield […] the campaign could not provide more wheat at cheaper prices for Italian consumers […] the average amount of wheat available, per person, decreased between the decade 1921–30 (178.5 kilograms per person) and 1931–40 (164.4 kilograms per person)’ (Helstosky, 2004aa, 76). Hunger in the Mezzogiorno posed a problem.
Click here for events that happened today (July 15).
1933: Fascist law set up the Reich Food Estate under the leadership of the NSDAP’s chief agrarian spokesman, Walther Darré, to oversee agricultural production and marketing. As well, the German Reich required all corporations to be a member of a cartel so as to gain monopolistic efficiency.
1936: Fal Condé, leader of the ardent Catholic Carlist movement in Spain, agreed to call out his 8,400 strong Requetés Militia to support the Nationalist cause.
1937: The Lichtenburg concentration camp’s inmates commenced construction of the Buchenwald concentration camp. Meanwhile, the Fascists commissioned Alfredo Oriani into service, and Blohm und Voss laid down the keel of Albert Leo Schlageter in Hamburg.
1938: As Werner Mölders scored his first aerial victory near Algar, Spain (an I‐15 fighter), Crown Prince Yi Un reached the rank of major general in the Imperial Japanese Army, and General Kotaro Nakamura became the commanding officer of the Imperial Chosen Army in occupied Korea (relieving Kuniaki Koiso).
1939: The Fascists commissioned U‐42 into service, and they laid down the keel of battleship H at the Blohm und Voss shipyard in Hamburg.
1940: The German Supreme Command informed the Naval Staff that the Chancellery required the invasion operation for Britain to be so prepared that it could be launched at any time from 15 August 1940. Meanwhile, somebody assigned Erich Mußfeldt to Auschwitz, and numerous Fascists captured British territories in Kenya. The Third Reich demanded unrestricted access through French North Africa. On a voyage from Barcelona, Spain to Glasgow, Scotland with a cargo of potash, the 1,255‐ton Panamanian steamship Frossoula succumbed to a bombing from the Luftwaffe and sank 240 miles north‐northwest of Cape Finisterre, Spain. She lost thirty‐three of her crew.
1941: As the Axis encircled Smolensk, Erwin Rommel officially became the commanding officer of Panzergruppe Afrika, and Werner Mölders claimed his 100th and 101st victories over the Soviet Union. He received Diamonds to his Knight's Cross for achieving 100 victories, which was to be presented later by his Chancellor personally. Similarly, Hartwig von Ludwiger received the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross for his service during Operation Barbarossa. Aside from that, Inigo Campioni became governor of the Axis‐occupied Aegean Islands (also known as the Italian Dodecanese), and the Wehrmacht’s 228th Regiment cleared four Stalin Line bunkers and crossed the Ljadowa River, a tributary of the Dniester River, in Ukraine.
1942: The Axis captured Millerovo and Boguchar in southern Russia, and Axis submarine U‐201 attacked British ship Yeoman of Allied convoy OS‐33 with torpedoes and gunfire southwest of the Canary Islands at 0146 hours; forty‐three died but ten lived. In the same area, Axis submarine U‐582 sank British ship Empire Attendant, also of Allied convoy OS‐33, at 0330 hours; fifty‐nine died. In the South Atlantic, 1225 miles west of Portuguese Angola, Axis armed merchant cruiser Michel sank British transport Gloucester Castle with gunfire at 1900 hours; ninety‐three died but sixty‐one did not.
1943: Erwin Rommel became the commander of Heeresgruppe B, and the IJN launched twenty‐four G4M bombers, escorted by about forty to fifty A6M Zero fighters, to attack various targets in the central Solomon Islands, but the Allies intercepted the bulk of this attack force in the Rendova Island, New Georgia, Solomon Islands area, and fifteen G5M bombers and thirty A6M fighters were shot down at a loss of only three Yankee fighters.
1944: Rommel communicated to his Chancellor that the Third Reich should seriously consider ending the war on favourable terms when it was still possible. (For unknown reasons, this letter became delayed in its delivery, not reaching the Chancellor until July 20th.) Apart from that, Claus von Stauffenberg met with his Chancellor at Rastenburg, East Prussia at 1300 hours. General Friedrich Olbricht activated Valkyrie in Berlin two hours prior to the meeting, expecting his troops to be in position to seize key positions in the capital at about the same moment that the Chancellor was to die from a bomb that Stauffenberg brought into the meeting. The Chancellor departed the meeting early unexpectedly, and Olbricht hastily called off the operation, announcing that the troop movement was only a drill. By the way, a V‐1 bomb massacred seven people outside the London Bridge railway station in London, England, and it demolished a block of apartments.
1945: I‐503 attached to the Kure Naval District, though she would remain in the Mitsubishi shipyard at Kobe.