Paper short abstract:

I examine dinner menus, food tours, festivals and other food events to explore how food entrepreneurs articulate a New Transylvanian Cuisine to tourist audiences, by drawing from nostalgic views on the past, aimed to connect Southern Transylvania to a global economy of sustainability.

Paper long abstract:

In the past years rural Southern Transylvania has been the site of a revivalist movement centred on the reconstruction and heritagisation of ethnic (Saxon) foodscape. The process is mobilised by a complex and cosmopolitan network of social actors engaged in small-scale food production, gastronomy, ecotourism and environmental conservation, fueled by a sense of exonostalgia (Berliner 2014) for an ‘unspoilt’ Arcadia, irreversibly lost in Western Europe.

In the context of this movement I examine dinner menus, food tours, festivals and other food events addressed to tourist audiences to explore how the ‘taste of Transylvania’ is being articulated. By drawing from representations of a past ecology and gastronomy, the food entrepreneurs stage a New Transylvanian Cuisine, aimed to connect Southern Transylvania to a global economy of sustainability, where frugality, remoteness and dispossession can be converted into added-value and symbolic prestige (see Weiss 2022, Meneley 2021, Bordi 2008). The analysis explores how value and taste are materialised into artisanal food commodities and experiences, particularly in a "cuisine of economy" framework (Weiss 2022), in which low-status foods migrate into the prestige-infused categories of fine-dining cuisine or culinary heritage. These engagements transform the local foodscape into a transnational moral and political arena, in which the heritagisation of the edible past is mobilised as an exclusivist ecological fix to Anthropocenic anxieties.