She lived her childhood during the second world war, her mum taught her how to feed children with just 2 ingredients: eggs and flour. Whenever I sat in her kitchen growing up, she’d make pasta while sharing memories of that time. I soon realized my generation was missing something important: not just the handmade pasta technique but an entire tradition passed down through the ages. I decided to share this gem with the rest of the world.12
The economic value of this Experience trades on the asset of a tradition dwelled by the Italian nonna and channeled by her granddaughter. The grandma’s minimalist cooking—not out of choice but out of necessity—is a rarity from a past time, which, similar, for example, to the moon rock that we saw in Chapter 2, is framed as a document of human civilization reaching the status of heritage. Here, however, a platform entrepreneur is assigning this status to grandma’s cooking, rather than to an institution like a museum; the Experience is then marketed as a historical vessel that passes this heritage down to current generations. Sharing an “entire tradition” suggests an altruistic gesture beyond economic calculations, it is actually not about selling but about giving. Thus, similarly with artists who “afirm the irreducibility of the work of art to the status of a simple article of merchandise” while at the same time also afirm “the singularity of the intellectual and artistic condition” (Bourdieu, 1985: 3), the experience-maker casts the Experience as both irreducible to economic calculations and unique, that is to say, commodifiable. The commodity relation is obscured as travelers or experience enthusiasts can now become the proud new heirs of an authentic practice, the romantic knowledge-holders passing this authentic knowledge over to others. In other words, the Experience’s exchange value is not just cooking but the experiencing of a recipe with a moving story that animates a lost yesteryear, a romantic story that enlivens values of community, slowness, and honesty— values alien to today’s hyper-industrialized world.
The grandma is then the “true” host of this story: “I learned how to make pasta since I was really young by my grandma, Nonna Nerina […] she is the true host and the true protagonist of this story”.13 Yet, despite being the true host, Nonna Nerina cannot be entrepreneurial enough to curate an Airbnb Experience on her own and run this in diferent time zones (not least because she could not speak in any language other than Italian and whenever she had
The Babushka–Nonna Experience
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