Retromania – it’s where we’ve been, where we’re at, and
where, it seems, we’re going to stay.
For the last decade, a predilection for the retro has influenced
everything from clothing-, home decorating-, and car-design to taste trends in
the food and beverage industries. No
doubt the build-up of a critical mass of nostalgic Boomers and Gen X-ers in key
corporate positions as well as in key consumer groupings accounts for much of
this moping over the past. But there
seems to be something else afoot, as well.
In our globalized world, trends, like diseases, spread
across borders with shocking rapidity and what was hip in the Windy City this
morning will become hip in Windhoek, Namibia tonight. This, of course, also works in reverse: we
emanate, but we also absorb. And, to
further complicate things, this entire process is subject to a sort of refractive logic. Like so many
concentric circles spreading from different points in a pond, the world’s
nostalgias meet and mingle with each other and linear time warps sharply upon
itself. What was mine is now yours, what
was yours is now mine – and what was mine is returned to me through you and
what was yours is returned to you through me.
It’s a mixed up, muddled up, shook up world, except for Lola.
And, maybe, except for chinotto.
If it's not familiar to you, chinotto is an Italian soft
drink made from bitter orange. It was
introduced into the U.S.
a few years back, though it’s been on the Italian market since, at least, the
1950’s. It’s often sold here as a
chi-chi alternative to Coke and other common soft drinks, but, interestingly, in the 1970’s,
well before it began being imported into the States, Italians were snobbing it
for chicer soft drinks like – Coca-Cola.
In fact, poor chinotto shows up in a film, Vacanze di Natale 1983,
as the archetypal beverage for the archetypically
unfashionable.
Today, Italians are once again loving chinotto’s slightly
acerbic, complex flavor. What happened
to reunite this product to its people?
I can only speculate. Perhaps the reunification was simply part of that generalized retro trend that arose in Europe and
the States in the 1990’s, a trend, I fear, that reflected peoples' attempts to look backward so that they might avoid having to look forward.
But perhaps the reunification of Italians to chinotto was
the result of something quite different, something positive, something akin to a rediscovery prompted by refracted foreign appreciation.
Chinotto has been well-received in the States and in other countries in
which it is sold and this welcome reception by Americans and others might have been experienced as an invitation to both a new generation and to older generations of Italians to re-evaluate this tasty beverage. If so, this retro trend represents the triumph of revival
rather than the failure of retreat, a looking inward through the appreciative eyes of foreigners rather than a looking backwards through the eyes of fear.
What foods and food practices might Americans wish to revisit and revive? Maybe we, too, shall be fortunate enough to receive some positive feedback concerning one of our forgotten foods and be able to take those first tiny steps in that wonderful process of reconnection and remembering.
8:42:34 PM 
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