The Invention of Taste: Guilds, Law and Mortadella in Bologna

There were the beccai, the butchers, who controlled the slaughter and primary cuts. The salaroli, who managed salt—arguably the most powerful commodity in the premodern food system. And the lardaroli, specialists not in meat, but in fat, who understood how to transform what most cultures treated as excess into something precise, even luxurious. Mortadella sat at the intersection of all three. This was not subsistence. It was coordination.