5.6 Conclusions
This chapter argued that gastronomical curating is driven by the readjustment of capital to the condition of information oversaturation through recourse to expertise and artification, so that food consumption becomes meaningful and unique. As many smaller businesses are becoming increasingly artified in their design, architectural, decorative, and labor practices, especially in big metropolitan centers, the span of gastronomical curating ranges from the boutiquization of bakeries, restaurants, and cafés, usually in minimalist, “clean” style, to the post-2010 boom in new global liquor scenes, such as crafted beer, cocktail, and wine bar milieus, and the spread of fine dining, expressed in curated menus, auteur chefs, or Michelin stars. The development of gastronomic curating encounters consumers with concepts and figures previously unexplored by capital. As locality, authenticity, and the generic babushkas and nonnas—concepts and figures previously excluded from the accumulation process or restricted to the domestic sphere—become a means to win the hearts of new consumers and thus produce capital, they need to be staged or literally put to work as a customer-desirable image of themselves. This staging further blurs the lines between reality and representation and is evocative of the disintegrated spectacles of communicative capitalism (Dean, 2013; Wark, 2014).
The substitution of manual labor with machinery in farming especially after the 1950s and the development of transnational supply chains makes food global and ubiquitous (Pratt, 2007: 286); in this context, the authentic and the local assume a new currency in the form of traditional recipes, methods of cooking, the capacity to categorize ingredients, or the insights into the qualities of materials corresponding to diferent geographies, types of soil, and weather conditions. In the global food market, locality and authenticity are the last frontier of identity; they are bound to expert knowledge as the keepers of this knowledge are entitled to mobilize their expertise for curating experiences. As we have seen, the authentic does not necessarily link to a single consumption practice; it is a currency mobilized to address diferent class backgrounds by adding a romantic appeal to consumption that is supposedly against mass culture. This romantic yearning for the past is captured in another popular idea among urban milieus, that is of “a return to nature”, or as Michael Pollan advises in his foodie bible Food Rules: An Eater’s Manual of avoiding “anything your great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food” (2013: 17). The economization of similar ideas and ideals entails the extraction of value from consumers’ emotional, communicative, and afective capacities, intensifying the regime of capital accumulation down to everyday meaning-making and subjectivity. This mass mobilization of food as a sign of status is part of a new “consumer ideology” that promises the consumer a distinction from the masses on the grounds of a presumed encounter with a mythical past that has been lost to modernity (Schmitt, Brakus, and Biraglia, 2022). Or, as Sherry Turkle keenly puts it, “I believe that in our culture of simulation, the notion of authenticity is for us what sex was for the Victorians—threat and obsession, taboo and fascination” (2011: 4).
The Babushka–Nonna Experience
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