Thinness is both more attractive and healthier than fatness, and it is assumed that anyone can achieve it through the right combination of diet and exercise. Natural diets are supposed to be both healthier and morally superior, although at the turn of the last century reformers were more concerned with indigestion and sexual urges than with cancer and the environment. Appreciating international and ethnic foods is supposed to be a sign of education, worldliness, and a forward-thinking appreciation of diverse cultures.
(2019: 51)
We can also speak about this gastronomical imaginary as a regime of truth in the Foucauldian sense, an expert discursive formation permeating eating and cooking values and extending across several income levels. For instance, Noma, a Michelin-starred restaurant which has won the world’s best restaurant award for several years, and the babushka are obviously addressing customers from diferent income levels; yet they both inhabit the same gastronomical imaginary in which authenticity, health, and cosmopolitanism are status-bearing symbols and food does not merely cover a functional need. While Noma will certainly not make authenticity its flagship value the same way that cooking with babushka does, the fantasy of authenticity is still a key reason for the buzz around the restaurant. Noma is repeatedly credited for the “creation of the new Nordic cuisine”, which is a rediscovery of local foodways in terms of ethical eating and sustainability.9 Thus, authenticity in elite dining becomes subject to visionary and creative gestures as agential acts of rediscovering locality, returning to one’s roots, reinterpreting traditional dishes, and so on. For instance, the star Russian chef Vladimir Mukhin and owner of elite dining restaurants in Moscow is credited with “bringing back his homeland’s colorful cuisine” (Kelly, Evstatieva, and Myers, 2018)10 while the chefs Virgilio Martínez and Pía León from Central in Lima (the second best restaurant in the world in 2022 and first in 2023) are credited for their “ode to Peru in all forms” as their “dishes celebrate the unique landscapes, history, and traditions of their homeland by using an abundance of locallysourced produce”.11 In this regard, the commodification of the ideals of the new gastronomical imaginary navigates diferent class backgrounds and social spheres: if babushkas and nonnas, as we shall see in the next section, are expected to pass the culinary traditions untouched from generation to generation, it is mostly male celebrity chefs who move these same culinary traditions forward.
Platforms and digital media ofer a new visibility to this imaginary in at least three ways: they are means for validating and difusing gastronomical expertise as food actors become influencers and celebrities whose opinion matters; they are sites where new visual and textual aesthetics around restaurants and dishes proliferate, such as in stylized dish photos and elaborate menu descriptions; and they give access to DIY production formats for aspiring chefs to perform their dishes, such as in YouTube and TikTok videos,
The Babushka–Nonna Experience
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