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# Curation in the Age of Platform Capitalism  The Value of Selection, Narration, and Expertise in New Media Cultures

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While Finn focuses on the emergence of this discourse in the United States, in particular in reference to class anxieties of the 1980s, the values of the food revolution are performed by (aspiring) middle-class consumers all over the world (see for instance, Chaudhuri, 2019). Avocado, granola, quinoa, kale, brewed cofee, and craft beer are just few of the “universal” symbols of this gastronomical imaginary, adapted in varying intensities and degrees in local cuisines. Similar to the aspirational class, the new food consumers are mainly “college-educated, afluent, and liberal” crowds (Currid-Hackett, 2018:13), who value informed or even oppositional consumption (see Section 3.5); they come from “the professional middle class, or even more narrowly, the left-leaning part of it sometimes referred to as the liberal elite” (Finn, 2019: 21). However, these new consumers can also be conservative or apolitical, who simply engage in feelgood and purpose-driven consumption (Pine; Gilmore, 2007).

As these new food consumers overwhelmingly reside in urban settings, the “rural” becomes a romantic component that bestows distinction to food. This is an aspect that the experience economy both exploits and performs. To go back to the previous section, Pine and Gilmore target the urban and aspirational dwellers who desire “active, authentic, and participatory experiences” in “more authentic, indigenous, or organic venues” (Gilmore and Pine, 2007: 4), for whom distinction and aspiration are interwoven in acts of self-perception. Yet, as the quest for distinctive food experiences becomes a prevalent consumer and business ideal, at least in big metropolitan centers, Currid-Hackett’s idea of an aspirational class may be delimiting as it fences of a specific group of elite consumers from the rest. Similar to what was argued in the previous section about “authenticity seekers”, we can argue that aspirational consumption occupies a wider structure of feeling in neoliberal societies, to borrow again Raymond Williams’ term (1977), that is, an emerging sensibility that colonizes working- and middle-class desire. The spreading of this sensibility, extending from apps with Curated News8 and Experiences of drinking with locals, is a result of the expansion of the institutions of the market in more spheres of life and the ideology of interlocking consumption with personal fulfillment or success. Speaking about the gastronomical imaginary, Finn summarizes the contours of this structure of feeling as follows:

Gourmet foods are supposed to taste better, at least to people with welltrained palates, often because they contain more expensive ingredients.

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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,

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Instagram reels, and Airbnb Experiences, as they can now try their luck in the global food economy. In this sense, platforms compress time and space to such a degree that encounters with gastronomic others can simply happen by scrolling one’s feed or by clicking on a “how-to-cook” video. With space and time being compressed in an exploding whirlwind of new images and narratives about everyone and everything, expert place-bound knowledge becomes a token of value. Against the superficiality of images and narratives about everyone and everything, the place-bound knowledge delivers authenticity, either as unbroken tradition or as reinterpretation of this tradition, promising to uplift the cosmopolitan and sophisticated profile of foodies.

5.4 “Handmade Pasta with Italian Grandma”

The COVID-19 lockdowns brought a severe crisis to global tourism, and as a result the hospitality and foodservice sectors had to find ways to cope with this unsettling condition. If the babushka was unable to organize her authentic cooking Experience with pelmeni because of the pandemic, then another grandmother, an Italian one this time, proved more tech-savvy and led a cooking class via digital platforms. With the online interactions becoming the “new normal” in many professional activities after COVID-19 (Barile; Kompatsiaris, 2020), Airbnb introduced in April 2020 the Online Experiences (OE) in order to substitute the dramatically decreasing demand for physical Experiences. The Airbnb OE has received praise for inaugurating a whole new economic sector in the field of tourism and hospitality, dubbed “virtual tourism”, which would presumably play a future role in tourist economies (Cenni; Vásquez, 2021). Learning how to cook the authentic way from the comfort of one’s home was now just a few clicks away.

The host of the Experience “Handmade Pasta with Italian Grandma” was the granddaughter, based in a town near Rome, called Palombara Sabina. From this small town, grandmother and granddaughter could virtually reach every corner of the world via Airbnb and Zoom. I opted for taking her OE cooking class in Airbnb titled “Handmade Pasta with Grandma” just before the Christmas of 2021. The demand for cooking authentic Italian pasta with the Italian nonna was extremely high: leading up to the Christmas day, one could hardly find a free slot, even 10 days in advance. The slot I managed to find was late in the evening, at 11 p.m. (GMT+3) local time, which made me the only participant out of the ten aspiring cooks outside of US time zones. The Experience ofered slots for cooking classes virtually during the whole day (apart from a nearly four-hour break from 4.30 to 8.30 a.m.), with often more than one slot being held at the same time—which would make it impossible for the same grandmother to work the whole schedule. The classes were held in English and Japanese but not in Italian, indicating that the Experience was unambiguously selling Italian tradition to the rest of the world.

As with her Ural counterpart, the figure of the “Italian grandma” was the anchoring point of the OE. Nonna embodied a grassroots expert who cultivated her cooking skills outside of the market and mass tourism (only to be appropriated by them at a later stage), inhabiting a romantic space of food-making seemingly unspoiled by the profit motive. The grandmother was frozen in time, rigid and uncompromising, and as such she inhabited History, a past time now absent and disremembered. In this sense, she had a larger cultural if not historical role to play, passing a cooking heritage from generation to generation. The advertisement at the time I took this class described nonna:

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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

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4 Cultures of Platform Capitalism

to say anything the host would translate). It was the host’s granddaughter who curated this Experience, including the organizational and aesthetic parts, through the use of the Airbnb’s digital platform. And while the granddaughter after hundreds if not thousands of cooking classes would, of course, have the skills to run the experience on her own or with the help of a friend without exhausting an old grandmother (that is, similarly to Katya, without the grandma), the removal of the grandma would signal the death, or at least the fundamental downgrading, of the Experience. If the grandma is removed from the story, the experience loses its soul, it stops being a passing down of tradition and becomes an ordinary cooking class. For that reason, to address consumer demand the grandma multiplies as if cloned. Since it is virtually impossible for the same grandma to work 24/7 for several weeks in the row, the host employed other nonnas from the village, detaching the symbol from an actual person to a multiplicity of generic nonnas:

Over three years, we’ve hosted more than 5,000 travelers in our kitchen. And soon other grandmas in our small village decided to be part of this crazy project! Nonna Angela, Nonna Gio, Nonna Lalla, Nonna Marghe, Nonna Renzia are waiting for you, amore!14

The “Italian grandma” is here implicated in a higher level of abstraction as a disembodied, all-purpose symbol, a relic whose material properties (an old-looking, Italian woman with the capacity to cook) are put to work in the global economy of signs. Digital platforms turn the sign-vale of this relic into a global commodity that can be accessed from anywhere in the world. As with the generic babushka, the Italian nonna expresses an interchangeable yet scarce materiality, for example, it is hard to find access to Italian grandmother-looking persons and put them to work if you are not based in Italy or have some Italian roots. To go back to the material-discourse nexus, discussed in Chapter 2, the physical/material, for example, “Italian grandmother”, similarly to the materiality of the moon rock, afords a particular ground for narratives and curatorial anchoring points. These anchoring points are vital for the process of commodifying a service, in our case cooking, and raising the value of the experience amidst global competition.

As mentioned in Chapter 3, one of the disciplinary mechanisms of the platform economy is the review system. After completing the cooking Experience, the customer is led to review and rate the expertise, authenticity, and innovativeness of its host, such as the “thoughtful personalization” and “super storytelling”.15 Some of the questions the customers are invited to respond to are the following:

How would you describe your host? They seemed like an expert They had some basic knowledge They didn’t have much knowledge

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What made them seem like an expert?   
Choose all that apply   
They had a very deep understanding of their topic   
They shared personal stories that conveyed their passion   
They had a rare level of insight or perspective   
They had world-class background or qualifications   
How would you describe the experience?   
It felt special and unique   
I could’ve found the same thing somewhere else   
I could’ve easily done this myself   
What made it feel unique?   
Choose all that apply   
I wouldn’t have been able to do this on my own   
I felt like I could actively participate   
I felt immersed in a special culture or community   
It was a once-in-a-lifetime experience16

The Airbnb questionnaire emphasizes expertise, storytelling, and uniqueness, which, as we saw in Chapter 2, are key for art curating while concepts such as “immersion” and “participation” have been correlative with the contemporary art world at least since the 1990s. The employment of art-like concepts in review questionnaires disciplines the host to further artify their work to satisfy customer demand; the host has to take care of aesthetic considerations for proving their expertise. This expertise is certified by “personal stories that conveyed their passion”, a “very deep understanding of their topic”, and a “rare level of insight or perspective”—qualities that the figure of the “Italian grandma” abundantly embodies. In Airbnb, and generally in the platform economy, such promises of expertise, storytelling, and uniqueness are carried via a knowledgeable vessel—the host, the restaurant, the chef, the grandma, or any other service provider—who is expected to have a deeper insight of the subject matter and has a willingness to share it. Echoing the curating economy’s motto discussed in Chapter 2, the Airbnb guidelines, for instance, encourage the hosts to “Earn money leading people on activities you love”.17 In countless other expertise Experiences, storytelling and uniqueness are interwoven with authenticity, as the “Italian grandma” is just one of a myriad of other authentic tokens in platform economies that can be put to work. In the Experience section in Paris, we can “Learn to bake traditional croissants”, “Learn to make French lemon pie”, or “Learn to make macarons with a chef”—food practices that rely on a deeper insight into Frenchness. The international star Marie Kondo, the Japanese guru of decluttering, brands her minimalist KONMARI method for tidying up homes via the token of Japaneseness.18 Similar to Marie Kondo, the Italian grandma does not merely cook pasta but is a conduit of the past and a transporter of history.19 While in such instances the notion of “tradition” takes a more linear direction presumably moving unspoiled from the past to the present, in upscale food practices, as we shall see in the next section, tradition is recontextualized, reimagined, and reinterpreted.

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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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Restaurant menus now included foods from the villages, such as blackeyed beans or wild greens; ofal, such as beef tongue, oxtail or beef cheeks; foraged foods such as saltwort or sea urchins; traditional dishes such as spinach and rice stew (σπανακόρυζο), oven baked chickpeas (ρεβυθάδα), braised meat with greens and avgolemono sauce (φρικασέ αυγολέμονο) or pastitsio (παστίτσιο) […]. Even trahanas, an ingredient made of fermented milk and wheat, something “never worthy of being served at a dinner party,” as Nagia, an older Athenian told me, was now featured at upscale restaurants.

(2019: 13)

This “gastro-cosmopolitanism”, as Runa Das Chaudhuri names this tendency, reclaims “heritage in a cosmopolitan mode”, packaging the presumably authentic in middle-class artified aesthetics and a neo-ethnic identity (2019: 2). Yiannis Mylonas argues that from a policy perspective this gastronomic tendency is part of a “creativity cult” in Greece promoted by neoliberal actors for defining notions of success in the public space (2020: 102). The peripheral dimension of Greece is also important because as soon as restaurants and cooks attempt to elevate the local and the authentic to the status of high cuisine they have to “look up” to international aesthetics. That way, the local taverna indicates a naval gazing and inward-looking cultural moment that should be repurposed so as to showcase the food revolution’s ideals of cosmopolitanism and sophistication.

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Let us look at the media atmospheres around a restaurant from the Thessaloniki scene that is indicative of all the above, THRiA a self-described restaurant of “Gourmet flavors inspired by the Mediterranean and Greece cuisine” (italics added).24 The word “inspired” in the self-description implies a move away from the grandmother’s “close-minded” authenticity to claim a post-authenticity that relies on the creative interpretations of a new popular agent—the chef. For the context of a less touristy developed European town like Thessaloniki, with no significant links to financial capital and thus to really elite dining, THRiA is a representative upscale restaurant25 and a typical site of the gastronomical imaginary in a peripheral scene with a strong food identity. We can notice the ideals of purity, sophistication, cosmopolitanism, and thinness that THRiA inhabits in this scene in an expert review about the Thessaloniki food scene published in LiFO, a popular Greek lifestyle free press, and shared on THRiA’s Facebook account:26

THRiA from the beginning had something diferent to say. Something more gastronomical, more creative, more gourmet […] If, say, Michelin came to town for awards, they would definitely stop by here to try a crispy puf pastry with black sesame, mint feta, and nettle foam. The decor, the open kitchen work like a television—behind the glass you get carried away watching a hyper-spectacle of young, stylish persons working via a balletic coordination the choreography of the latest kitchen techniques, civilized and clean cut, without screaming, without beating themselves up, a feeling that makes you think that “New York and the Thessaloniki Waterfront are the same”. European and cinematic.

(Psihouli, 2018)

Here the local/authentic undergoes an uplifting by signifiers like “New York”, “Europe”, “Michelin”, and “cinematic” pointing to a creative high-end cosmopolitanism; the expert ingredient language of crispy puf pastry with black sesame, mint feta, and nettle foam points toward deep gastronomical knowledge and sophistication. The cooks appear as young-and-stylishballerinas and therefore their slim and trained bodies invoke “thinness”, which is another central ideal in Finn’s classification. As Mylonas puts it, “the restaurant appears as an experiencescape in which the cooks—besides preparing delicious, creative, and chic dishes—also perform elegant and sanitized choreographic spectacles of craftsmanship and civility” (2020: 104). The expert review designates the restaurant as a civilized spectacle, a forwardlooking enterprise which aesthetically moves the city forward toward Western civilization, a sort of “total work of art”, to use Matthew Wilson Smith’s understanding of Wagner’s famous Gesamtkunstwerk in the age of cyberspace (2007).

Key to spreading this artfulness in the age of platforms are posts in the social media accounts of restaurants and chefs, especially involving photographs and descriptions of dishes. I argue that this coupling between photographic representations and the descriptions of dishes in social media is essential for establishing the idea that the dish is ultimately an artwork, that is not only conventionally tasty, but a rarity crafted by the chef’s inspiration that is almost too opaque to be understood by the masses. The visual representations come typically from a vertical position recalling the two-dimensionality of the canvas while the descriptions perform the curatorial role of skillfully interpreting otherwise obscure works of art (see Figure 5.1).

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THRiA, as thousands if not million other restaurants around the world, share in their social media accounts visual representations portraying dishes as inspiring artworks. There is an emphasis on the geometry of the space and the plate’s design, the shape of the ingredients, the color tones and the expressiveness of the chef that is represented in the “impulsive” strokes of sauces and dips on top of the dish, as if in an abstract expressionist painting. The mobile phone ofers a dispersed accessibility for photographing dishes and social media platforms make the distribution of these images simple, not only for the restaurants themselves but also for restaurant goers. The “Instagrammable dish”, if we are to call it that, is a recognizable style to the point that AI apps and services are built to mimic it.27

The descriptions are equally artified, drawing on curatorial language that brings wider social and cultural associations to food (though they can also be possibly produced in artificial intelligence (AI) via ChatGPT and other language processing platforms). Let us look at THRiA’s descriptions on its Facebook page:

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