Paper short abstract:

I’m interested in the « new cultural practices » gravitating around food preparation and consumption in Sofia’s (Bulgaria) urban space. By « new cultural practices » I mean those activities where the boundary between the consumer and the producer, between labour and leisure are fluidized. Those new practices are often « imported », ‘foreign’ and therefore could possess a degree of prestigiousness.

Paper long abstract:

Food has always been considered as a substance possessing magical forces and therefore capable of transforming the one who consumes it. In times of uncertainty, intensified mobility and accelerated temporalities, the composition of what we consume and the act of consumption itself become more and more of a primal importance. The way taste is represented and narrated becomes crucial to the process of redefining the role of food in contemporary societies as preparing, tasting and consuming food within the urban space is revealed as a central ingredient of the construction of social relation.

I’m interested in the « new cultural industries » gravitating around food preparation and consumption in Sofia’s (Bulgaria) urban space. By « new cultural practices » I mean those activities where the boundary between the consumer and the producer, between labour and leisure are fluidized. Those new practices are often « imported », ‘foreign’ and therefore could possess a degree of prestigiousness.

My research is focalized around the new forms of festivity and people gatherings around food consumption and preparation in contemporary urban Bulgaria. I'm particularly interested in the different ways urban space is appropriated through practices of food consumption or food sharing and how notions of sustainability, ethics and morality are knitted around food. Those practices happen at the border between private and public events and are often represented as a response to the capitalism and are even staged as its critique (of the abundance, of the industrialisation process, anonymisation…). However, their relation with new capitalism is more complex and integrating some sort of critique acts as an added value to the experience.