My grandfather’s family used to own a pasta factory in Naples and they would go door-to-door selling their pasta. So his love of food came from his parents, which was then passed down to my mother and then again to me.

De Laurentiis traces her culinary identity to a multigenerational family economy rooted in Naples, where food was not merely pleasure but livelihood. The image of relatives selling pasta door-to-door emphasizes craft, entrepreneurship, and intimacy with community—food as something made by hand and shared person-to-person. By describing “love of food” as inherited and transmitted through her grandfather to her mother and then to herself, she frames taste and cooking as cultural memory: traditions carried through family stories and habits. The quote also functions as an origin narrative for her public persona, grounding her professional success in a lineage of Italian foodways rather than in celebrity alone.