George Clooney is looking for an “Italian mamma”. Not to replace his wife Amal, but to run the kitchen of a restaurant he’s opening in Provence, near one of his estates. His business partner Graham Porter has told The Sunday Times that Clooney is searching for a “proper Italian mamma to come and run the show”, adding that if the actor “asks any woman in the world between the age of 45 and 70, she’ll come”, before the planned opening in May.

Normally, speculating on whether someone’s private life makes them appropriate for an important job is a one-way route to an HR complaint. But when such specific requirements are offered, questions naturally follow. Should she be single? Can her family come too? It smacks of a Hollywood idealisation of Italian rural life and domesticity, projected onto the hire.

You will be familiar with the fetishisation of an Italian mamma or nonna. Picture a weathered older woman, sitting outside her orto (kitchen garden) on an upturned crate, shaving puntarelle (chicory) into ice water. Throw in a toothless village baker, the wizened hands of a pastaia (pasta maker), and you have the perfect B-roll for a romantic film set in Tuscany.

Increasingly, we judge cucina povera (peasant cuisine) by the identity of its maker, rather than the food itself. Authenticity is an ingredient that somehow gets stewed in the pot with the tomatoes and garlic. But there’s something rather unpleasant about this romantic attachment to other people’s poverty.

Food historian Rachel Laudan, in her 2001 essay A Plea for Culinary Modernism, refers to “Culinary Luddites” who turn their nose up at supermarket bread, frozen food and modern agriculture. Her mother described the “grinding, chopping, and cooking” as “servitude” to a household of eight to 10 people, every day of the year.

Laudan recalls Italian peasants suffering terrible illnesses from monotonous diets, and a Mexican friend chastised by foreign tourists for serving Italian food. “Why can’t we eat spaghetti, too?” she complained. We’ve also forgotten how enthusiastically our grandmothers embraced canned goods and food processors, precisely because they made life easier. By treating modernity as cultural vandalism, Laudan warns, “we are reducing the options of others.”

Anthony Bourdain helped popularise this obsession, making a career of discovering obscure restaurants and weathered cooks. Later, reflecting on his own contribution, he told Eater that authenticity was “an increasingly meaningless term” involving “an aspect of I-know-and-you-don’t”. Discovery becomes a badge of superiority. Access to the right grandmother, village or family recipe signifies the status of the diner. Good food and good company take a back seat to smugness.

Such snobbery also produces increasingly rigid rules about what constitutes authentic food. Take carbonara, whose silky eggs can easily become scrambled. Adding cream is now treated as culinary heresy, despite Gualtiero Marchesi, the father of modern Italian cuisine, including it in his 1989 recipe. Some of the earliest recipes even contained Gruyère, garlic and pancetta, all of which are now considered unacceptable. When I opened a restaurant whose menu included carbonara made with cream, a man called us from Italy to tell us to “close-a your fucking-e ristorante”.

Of course there’s nothing wrong with traditional cooking, or a 65-year-old Italian woman choosing to move to France to run Clooney’s restaurant. But one suspects she’s being hired to perform a role, to play the Italian mamma for paying customers and satisfy their appetite for authenticity. Is she there to be a talented and respected chef, or to be a curiosity, wheeled out for the customers?

Ironically, Porter recognises the tension in Clooney’s expectations. Discussing the village of Cotignac where the restaurant will be, he declared that they “don’t want too many tourists” and that “it needs to keep authenticity.” Naturally, he said this while promoting a celebrity restaurant to a national newspaper.

Perhaps this vision of authenticity is the greatest luxury of all. The wealthy can retreat to their second or third homes in the countryside, surrounded by residents whose lives seem untouched by modernity. Multi-millionaires can admire these people’s traditions, celebrate their hardships and the dignity of their manual labour, and congratulate themselves on discovering a more honest way of life. And they can do all this without lifting anything heavier than a fork.