TWO The Packaged-Food Revolution The Taste of Soup Of all the things I ate during my first year in Italy--like the grilled whole fish with the crackling skin and a green salad by the seaside, the handmade fettuccine with earthy-smelling black Umbrian truffles shaved on top, and the slice of crisp pizza topped with buffalo mozzarella, ripe tomatoes, and basil--it was a bowl of soup that really linked my present food-filled Italian life with my small-town Ontario childhood.   In the winter of our first year here, we went to Tuscany for the weekend with some friends. We all stayed together in an old stone house in the Val d''Orcia. It was early December and it was cold. The wind whipped through the valley below the old house and sent gusts of chilled air through the cracks around the windows. We decided to seek warmth and dinner in the nearby village of San Quirico.   The six of us bustled into a restaurant and asked for a table near the open fire. We soon thawed out, thanks to the fire, a bottle of red wine from nearby Montepulciano, and a basket of bread.

At the urging of Giuseppe, one of our friends at the table, we ordered a farro dish to start. Farro is a grain that tastes rather like barley but is denser. It had been cooked slowly in a broth the way you make risotto and was served with mushrooms and Parmesan cheese. We ate it while someone cooked our meat--small pieces of pork and lamb--over the fire beside our table. When the meat was done, it was served to us with rosemary-scented roasted potatoes and big plates of leafy green vegetables that had been cooked in salted water, then drained and squeezed, and cooked again in a pan with olive oil, garlic, a few chilies, and a sprinkling of salt. It was simple, well-prepared, comforting food.   It was the next afternoon at lunch that I ordered the soup. I had to be convinced to order it because I thought I didn''t like soup.

It was a ribollita , which simply means "reboiled," with white beans and barley cooked with a little bit of guanciale (pork cheeks), tomato, and dark-green cavolo nero. There was so little liquid that it was more of a stew than a soup, but it reminded me quite forcefully of food from my childhood.   Maybe it took nearly a year to make this connection because my palate needed that time to recover from the barrage of flavors that I frequently ate in Canada (and missed, I must admit): the spicy Asian foods, the hot wasabi with sushi, and likely the ramped-up artificial flavors in the processed foods I wasn''t even entirely aware I was eating, things like crackers with rosemary flavoring, bottled spicy Szechuan peanut sauce, flavored yogurt, industrial bread, and adulterated bagels.   The soup was savory, earthy, and rich, full of subtle flavors that blended smoothly and created this satisfying, comforting, homey dish on a wintry day. I''ve tasted this before, long ago, I kept thinking, as I spooned up every last drop of the soup, while knowing that I could not possibly have tasted this exact soup before. But I had tasted something like it. Soups like this are classic country dishes the world over. They are made with leftover bones or the last remains of a scrawny, too-tough chicken.

Leftovers go into the soup pot; small bits of fatty meat add flavor to an otherwise grain, legume, and vegetable soup. The Tuscan ribollita is the natural extension of winter soups from the Middle Ages, made in the region from cabbages, turnips, greens, onions, garlic, and fat (olive oil or animal). Hearty soups like this were originally made by people who couldn''t afford to waste food. They are peasant dishes, loved by everyone. With the skill and knowledge that come from eating them and watching how they are made, each generation keeps the pot simmering. Soups like this are found in kitchens everywhere--in Arab countries, where they might use couscous and mutton; in the southern United States, where bacon and cayenne pepper are added to bean soup; in Quebec, where pea soup is made with a ham bone. Such basic soups vary with the region and the season. Marcella Hazan, my helpful guide in the Italian kitchen, wrote that the ingredients in a vegetable soup "can tell you where you are in Italy almost as precisely as a map.

"   Well, here I was, sitting in a restaurant in the heart of Tuscany, eating soup that reminded me of the soup my mother made in Jackson''s Point, Ontario, in the late 1960s. Hers was influenced by the soup her French-Canadian mother made for her family in Toronto in the 1930s, and the soup her French-Canadian grandmother had made for her fur-trapping family in Northern Ontario at the end of the nineteenth century. Of course, the soup I was enjoying in Tuscany tasted of hearty cavolo nero , which is that long, rippling Tuscan kale, olive oil, and Parmesan, while my mother''s tasted of her own chopped, preserved tomatoes, barley, beans, cabbage, and, most likely, bacon or lard. Both soups were thick, with a slightly meaty-tasting stock and with beans and grains that absorbed the liquid and most of the flavor. My mother''s soup sat on the back of the stove simmering away (an accidental ribollita? ). We would eat some and let the rest keep simmering. There was always a pot on the go; in fact, it seemed that everyone had such a pot in those small towns, because I can remember eating chicken soup at a friend''s house. Her mother was famous, not least among children, for her rich, savory soup, which was thick with some kind of grain and carrots.

  In the intervening thirty-odd years, I had forgotten all about soup. We moved to Toronto in the early 1970s, and we started to eat differently. Canned soup came into the house more often. It was such a time saver for my busy mother, who was raising a family on her own (my father died when I was a baby). Why would you spend hours simmering soup when you could simply open a can, heat, and eat something that, well, maybe it didn''t taste as good, but didn''t really taste bad? Why would you go to the trouble? With the exception of turkey soup, which my mother made with the remains of the Thanksgiving and Christmas birds, she rarely made soup anymore. And I guess that''s why I stopped eating it and somewhat unconsciously avoided it on menus.   The Change in North American Food But really, how could the foods of Italy evoke my childhood meals in a small Ontario town? It''s the authenticity of very simple, well-prepared food, I suppose, that links these two disparate culinary worlds. Canadians and Americans have rarely thought of our countries'' culinary past in the way you might think of the food history of Italy.

The food in Canada and the United States was heavily influenced by the foods of their diverse populations and then by big industrial producers of fast and processed foods.   Before the processed foods though, before industrial farming and the food industry dominated food and eating, North American and European foods were more alike than different in a few fundamental ways. There was no chemical fertilizer or pesticides on North American farmlands when those areas were first being settled. There were no biotech foods, no chemical additives and preservatives. The food was grown and raised locally, and most of it was prepared and consumed at home. Culinary techniques and recipes brought from diverse parts of the world were handed down through families. The best of American and Canadian cuisine, which really is a fusion of various cooking styles with local foods, springs from this tradition. Some of it still exists, though it is no longer the norm.

  By the 1950s, the food industry was working hard to figure out how to convince American women to use packaged foods, to change their view of themselves as cooks, even to convince them that they didn''t have time to cook. The food historian Laura Shapiro says the industry manufactured a sense of panic about cooking, creating the idea that women neither enjoyed cooking nor had time for it. The fast-food industry pushed that even further by making fun, tasty food cheap and easily available in family-friendly environments.   I remember as a child in the 1960s going to a restaurant on occasion for a hamburger and French fries. But I also remember that this was a treat. French fries were hard to make at home, so we ate them out. In the 1960s, many people were still cooking without food products. New immigrants to Canada and the United States were cooking, reinventing, and adapting dishes they were used to making in their home countries to the ingredients they found around them.

Sondra Gotlieb, the irreverent writer and somewhat undiplomatic wife of a former Canadian ambassador to the United States, even titled one of her cookbooks from the period The Gourmet''s Canada and dedicated it to "the gastronomic resources of [Canada] and the wealth of its culinary traditions."   Canada had culinary traditions? I might have sneered at Gotlieb and thought her book an exercise in stretching a point, had it not been for my Proustian moment with the bean soup. But the soup brought back memories of the table set for dinner every night, of my older brothers coming home for Sunday dinner, and of the frosted, double-layer cakes that my mother made for those dinners every week. It wasn''t what we later came to call gourmet food, but it was built around hearty soups and stews, roasted meats and root vegetables, vegetables fresh or frozen in winter, and summer salads from the garden.   In the 1960s, my busy mother used to bake bread two or three times a week. After we moved to the city in the 1970s, she rarely, if ever, made it. By 1970, only 15 percent of all flour sold in t.