Minister Lollobrigida noticed it because those non-Italian products with evocative Italian names – first and foremost “Carbonara” (and a coke, as a German band sang back in the Eighties) – were sitting right there on the shelves of the supermarket inside the European Parliament.
But here in Kenya we live with so-called “Italian Sounding” every day, in shops and on restaurant menus, between linguistic knock-offs that turn into mental ones, and involuntary howlers.
That’s why, this time last year, as part of the “Week of Italian Cuisine in the World” together with the Italian Embassy we published a little booklet with the cheery title “Write Spaghetti, not Spaggeti…” and I worked its themes into several of my shows, especially those aimed at Kenyans.
“Eat well if you know how to spell”, which is not exactly “speak the way you eat”, but rather “you eat better if you know how to pronounce things”. And if you know what products are called, where they come from, what story they carry, it’s much easier to spot the fake ones or the “sound-like” versions.

Up to here we’re still in the toy department: the booklet, the shows, the cute mistakes like “Lazagna” with a “z” and “Mozzarella di Buffolo” on the menu of a resort that probably thinks a buffalo is a retired Maasai gentleman. Then, however, the Minister for Food Sovereignty himself shows up, walks into the European Parliament supermarket, sees a “Carbonara” sauce with pancetta and other sadnesses, gets outraged, photographs everything and denounces it all on social media as if he had uncovered a cell of guanciale terrorists.

“Leaving aside the pancetta in the Carbonara…” he writes. And you can just picture the NAS flying over the Brussels shelves in a helicopter, between an “Arrabbiata” sauce that doesn’t get angry at all and a “Bolonnaise” that people in Bologna wouldn’t recognise even under torture.
At the ministry they call them “products that may mislead consumers and damage the image of Made in Italy”. We, more modestly, tend to call them “what lands on your plate when you insist on ordering pasta outside Italy”.

The problem, however, is serious. Italian sounding is not just the joke of grated “Parmesan” in a sachet or “Romano Cheese” that has nothing of pecorino except its regrets: it’s a real industry of fake Italianness. According to trade associations it robs Italy of billions of euros, a sort of parallel GDP made of clever labels, tricolour flags and names that sound right so you can get it wrong more comfortably.

In Europe there are even rules: if you stick the Italian flag on a product that isn’t Italian, the law calls it “misleading presentation”. There are inspectorates with unpronounceable names that send reports to systems with even more unpronounceable names, and sooner or later someone raises an institutional eyebrow. But while the system moves at the speed of a Sunday ragù, supermarket shelves around the world just keep churning out “carbonaras” with cream, fluorescent “pestos” and “bologneses” that no Emilian grandmother would ever acknowledge as her daughters.

Here in Kenya the story is more tropical but no less instructive.
You walk through a Nairobi supermarket and find “Italian Style Pasta Sauce” produced in some industrial zone that’s only ever seen Italy on Inter football matches on TV. On the coast, pizza joints pop up with names more Italian than the Italians, serving “pizza capricciosa with pineapple” and “spaggeti carbonara with cream and mushrooms”, all together, as if the Latin alphabet alone were enough to guarantee tradition.

The slightly awkward truth is that we Italians abroad are often the first accomplices of Italian sounding. Tired of explaining every single time what guanciale is, what the difference is between pecorino and grated cheese from a can, that no, cream in carbonara is not “a modern twist”, we end up saying “ok, bacon is fine” and we give in. At that moment, Italian sounding stops being just a commercial fraud and becomes cultural surrender: we’ve traded the history of a dish for the convenience of not arguing with the waiter.

For years Coldiretti has been denouncing the phenomenon as a haemorrhage: one hundred and twenty billion euros a year in fake “Made in Italy”, with the added sting that the main counterfeiters are not the poor of this world but industrialised countries – those that could easily buy the original but prefer to imitate. And among the most butchered recipes in the world, unsurprisingly, there she is: carbonara. With cream in Belgium, bacon in English-speaking countries, “Romano” cheese in America, and the “chicken carbonara” versions that, if you describe them to a Roman chef, will earn you a list of blasphemies in alphabetical order.

Then there’s the chapter of “sugo alla bolognese”, which in our country is mostly a tourist trap: in Bologna they call it ragù and make it at home, they don’t put it in a jar with the towers on the label and a gondolier – all the more so since there’s no sea in Bologna. Abroad, however, “bolonnaise”, for some reason in French – and the French are already getting as mad as in Bartali’s day – works like a universal password: you write that magic word and everything suddenly becomes “Italian”, even if the meat is a mystery, the sauce is sugary and the pasta is overcooked (maybe that’s why it comes out in French).

So what do we do with all this long-distance indignation?
On one side there’s the minister who quite rightly calls for checks, demands inspections, defends brand Italy. On the other there are us expats, restaurateurs, residents, lovers of the country that hosts us, who deal every day with tropical Italian sounding: slightly crooked signs, creative menus, cheeses that dream of becoming Parmigiano and never quite make it.

Perhaps the real food sovereignty we can afford from out here is less muscular and more patient.
It’s explaining to a waiter that “spaggeti” is spelled with two “t”s, that cream in carbonara is something else entirely, that the tricolour on the label isn’t just a decorative sticker but a promise. It’s keeping on repeating, with a smile, “Write Spaghetti, not Spaggeti” and hoping that sooner or later someone will write it correctly – and maybe even taste the real thing.

Because in the end, you can’t very well send the Central Inspectorate for the Repression of Fake Sauce to hover over Kenyan consumers or European MPs. But you can invite them to the table, tell them a story, let them taste the difference between a nicely packaged imitation and a dish that carries a tradition inside it.
And there, in front of a forkful of carbonara made the way God (and guanciale) intended, Italian sounding loses all its music. Only the best sound we know is left: a fork scraping the bottom of an empty plate.