This paper explores the topicality of intra-European intercultural tensions, centering on German–Italian relations. Grounded in Burke’s interpretation of literature as “equipment for living,” this paper employs Marisa Fenoglio’s Never without a woman—a novel about an Italian Gastarbeiter in Germany—as a case study and proposes a critical cultural assay of German–Italian food-related rhetoric as reflective and constructive of German–Italian interculturality. This paper invites a nuanced grasp of the rhetoric of European foodways as representative of the modern European culture and intercultural communication as we are what we eat.