5.5 Anarchist Foodies
If Finn argues that the ideals of gastronomical imagery capture the eating habits of the aspirational consumers and liberal elites in the United States, then what happens to other parts of the world and especially in peripheries? Bengali cuisine in India (Das Chaudhuri, 2019: 2) or the Siberian cuisine in Russia (Ermolaev, Ruban and Yashalova, 2021) are cases in point, but in this section, I look at another Mediterranean region: the city of Thessaloniki in Northern Greece (which happens to be my hometown), where there has been a notable boom in the gourmet food scene in the past ten years or so. This boom reached the point when in December 2021 the city has been designated by UNESCO as “Creative City for Gastronomy”,20 a label giving it access to the larger UNESCO’s “Creative Cities Network”, a network with activities as diverse as literature, media arts, film, and craft. The mayor of Thessaloniki underlined the news that gastronomy “is a significant comparative advantage of Thessaloniki […] and upgrades the travel experience”.21 The gastronomical revolution of the new dining scene in the city has been discussed informally among acquaintances, friends, and family members, from diferent political views and economic backgrounds but also in the press and on guided tours.22 A recent Guardian article titled “A unique culinary repertoire: What makes food and drink in Thessaloniki so special?” praises the city for its fusion cuisine and gastronomical heritage, including the sweet pastry-like bougatsa, and even the cold instant cofee frappe (which is incidentally and ironically an anti-foodie beverage [Johnston and Baumann, 2014: 1]).
The city’s fine dining scene emerged in the 2010s, and a part of it evolved from the collectivist and neo-anarchist political lineage of the 1990s and 2000s, particularly revolving around unlicensed university canteens run by anarchists and squats, including the now defunct Mavri Gata (Black Cat) and Yfanet, a massive squatted old factory, not far from the city center. Yfanet, in particular, was a critical site for developing a politicized creative practice in the city (and a constant target of the state threatening it with closure and confiscation of the squatted area), guided from Situationist’s principles of derive and détourment but also by a strict anti-commodity ethos, at least in their initial years.23 This milieu has been involved in the city’s restaurants at least from the mid-2000s onwards, either as restaurant owners, cooks, waiters or all of the above. Yfanet and Mavri Gata held regular collective kitchens, which ofered the organizers the cooking and organizational skills that could be later used for setting up their own businesses.
The ways that the emerging local gourmet scene in the city relates to neoanarchism are multi-layered and would require separate ethnographic and historical research to discuss them in depth; for the purposes of this section, let us assume that these connections indicate the involvement of the underground into the city’s creative economy (similar to what was discussed in Chapter 4 with the Warhol Economies). Thessaloniki’s dining scene follows the new gastronomical movement in the age of platforms toward food “gallerification”, in the sense that there is an increased emphasis on food narratives and on the visual and storytelling atmospheres around food. As such, it is largely characterized by the reinvention and commoditization of food traditions, which involves routine descriptions in menus about each ingredient’s (usually rural) places of origin; the use of expert narratives to frame dishes, which involves a specialized food vocabulary and ingredients widely unknown, invoking a sense of rarity related to highbrow, uppermiddle class rather than working class imaginary; the presentation of dishes as if they were works of art, where form, style, and even matching colors are significant; and the mobilization of an identity related to the handmade, the artisanal and the crafted, which contribute to the food’s overall artification. This gastronomical trend in Thessaloniki is part of a tendency in Greece, over the last ten years or so, that the anthropologist Nafsika Papacharalampous terms as the “New Greek Cuisine” (2019). Papacharalampous looks at the “rise of the Greek rural” mostly in upscale Athenian restaurants where “neglected traditional foods and humble ingredients appeared reinvented” (2019: 13). In her ethnographic account of Athenian upscale restaurants, Papacharalampous summarizes this as follows:
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Cultures of Platform Capitalism