Cucina povera is one of those terms that gets thrown around so often and so carelessly that it has lost nearly all connection to its actual historical meaning. These days, you’ll find it used to describe everything from rustic pastas to elaborate offal dishes, and high-end restaurant menus use the term to justify charging twenty-four euros for a plate of cacio e pepe. If you take contemporary food journalism at face value, you’d think cucina povera was just a charming, preindustrial Italian diet built on nose-to-tail butchery and heirloom legumes. The reality is far less romantic, and far more humbling.

The phrase itself translates to “peasant cuisine,” but what was actually on the plates of the poor in Italy before the economic boom of the 1950s was not a multicourse meal of simple pasta followed by a hunk of offal. It was whatever could be scraped together to provide the necessary calories to get through the day. That meant most people were eating stale bread soaked in water and vinegar to soften it, foraged greens boiled down to a bitter pulp, or maybe—on a particularly lucky day—some meat scraps simmered in a vegetable broth. In working-class Rome, meat protein was scarce, and when it did appear, it was in minuscule portions, stretched into a meal with bread or potatoes alongside to feed as many mouths as possible. Even in Testaccio, Rome’s meatpacking district, residents ate only around 30 grams (1 ounce) of meat daily at the turn of the twentieth century, a paltry quantity that falls far short of the daily recommended 50 to 60 grams.

The modern fetishization of cucina povera is rooted in a profound misunderstanding of both historical poverty and the way Italians actually ate in times of economic hardship. While the (fifth quarter) is often cited as the epitome of , the less desirable cuts of meat that remained after the prime cuts had been taken by the wealthy didn’t always trickle down to the truly destitute. They were more likely eaten by butchers and their families, or sold at a discount to skilled home cooks who could transform them into something nourishing. The poorest Romans, meanwhile, subsisted on bread, legumes, and whatever they could scavenge.