"We must protect this house" b/w "Now that's Italian."

On the DJ, I saw where there is a town in Italy that is banning non-Italian restaurants from the city center:

Lucca, in Tuscany, has banned new ethnic restaurants from the town’s historic center. A city official says the city is trying to protect local food. Others say officials are discriminating against immigrants and fail to understand that modern cooking involves cuisines and ingredients from around the world.

I can understand the impulse to want not to have kebab stands or whatever in the middle of your touristic gem, but this is napped in wrong sauce for a variety of reasons beyond simple racism. First, in a move worthy of Alice, the nameless official tries to grab the locovore mantle for political reasons. One could, conceivably, open a Thai restaurant in the city center, and with few exceptions, serve local produce and meats. The official wants to protect local culinary idioms, not local food.

More importantly, it's very difficult to conceive of where or how to draw the line. "Italian," as a principle of culinary inclusion or exclusion, is not useful. "Italy" was not a coherent state until relatively recently, and does not denote anything like a coherent culinary culture. Even in relatively provincial towns in America, there are Northern or Southern Italian influenced restaurants. Does a Sicilian dish get a pass, when an Alsatian does not? They have about the same relevance to Tuscan food. Even the tail end of the article DJ links to points to this confusion. My guess is the race of the proprietor will be the determining factor.

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[louis vuitton purses]

If that's not good enough, consider the Tim Allen corollary to Ibsen's famous dictum that if you