On traveling and eating, and gastronomical non-places
Marc Augé was right, sadly the battle is lost. The future beyond Starbucks and McDonalds is endless copies of banal places. Like the empty pancakes they serve.
Disclaimer: This post is rather long, so take your time.
It is not a post about gentrification, because I am witnessing a phenomenon that has nothing to do with an enrichment - albeit just monetary - of our cities.
This is a tale of poverty: empoverishing a local gastronomic culture means diminishing culture. This is also a tale of late, evil capitalism, whereby we collectively believe in the lie that resources are infinite - even cultural ones.
The picture above was taken one sunny summer morning in the old town of Lisbon. It is the picture of a small but steadily growing queue, specifically awaiting their turn in the scorching sun.
They are awaiting a free table at Amelia, which is a quite successful local business that offers the same things as any Starbucks and has a dozen identical outlets everywhere.
Amelia and their other clones, endlessly similar to each other, could be located in any city in the world. It happens these are located in Lisbon and I had this sample at hand, so bear with me.
Beware: these phenomena are not exquisitely Portuguese: this maladie has spread everywhere there are people, tourism, or (especially) a combination of both.
Drop a pin in every European city, and you will find the same concepts, repeated endlessly.
In Lisbon, for example, besides Amelia and Nicolau and Basilio (each clone of the other in the same company), we also have the rather indistinguishable The Folk’s, Copenhagen Coffee, Food Bio, Simpli Coffee and Kitchen, Fauna & Flora, Liberty Café, Dear Breakfast, Seventh Brunch…I could go on.
I have more: this past week alone, on and around the quite central and popular Rua da Madalena in Lisbon in around 250 metres radius I counted a newly opened Paleio Café, serving breakfast-like food all day like the ones named above, Orquidea Café also serving breakfast all day, another Dear Breakfast…, another The Folk’s, a Basilio who is a cousin of above-mentioned Amelia, another Food Store, also breakfast all day, ONinho serving brunch….and surely I have missed some other because they are just soo many.
Again, I could go on and on and on.
It’s like in The Matrix (the movie), they are all copies of Agent Smith.
Look at the picture below.
Could you guess which of the places as mentioned earlier it was taken?
No, right?
Well, neither do I and I physically consumed this plate, in 2018 or 2019.
It’s only thanks to a small note on my phone that tells me a cue, that I can recognize where this was taken.
Thank you, geolocation.
Non-places for pancakes, lattes and avocado toasts
Late philosopher Marc Augé, who died this summer, coined the term for generic places such as bus depots, train stations, and airports which, however elaborate and grandiose, do not confer a feeling of place.
I find these food outlets perfectly encasing themselves in the category of non-places.
There is an experiential and gastronomic angle to this issue that I want to explore with you too.
These food outlets, these non-places, all belong to the same paradigm, appealing to younger Millennials, Gen Z and even more to younger generations.
The food is recognizable and comforting, with pink and green colouring, soft textures combined with crunchy ones (granola, brioche).
Often, prevalence of white as color in all the at hues, or pastel. Simple lettering (sans serif type).
All white, all plain. All “comfortably numb”. Simple and simplistic.
Prevalence of sweet flavour, and salty.
Banished from these “concepts”: non-instagrammable food, “alien” food or too exotic one, and absolutely and of course, the bitter, sour and acidic tastes.
In many cases these non-foods are flanked by a specific food (cinnamon buns) in a tentative to replicate the trope of “Nordic food space bakery whatever”, and their presence in a place like Portugal - that, incidentally, would have cinnamon pastries of their own (and of ancient origin, nonetheless) if only that was fashionable - is yet another proof that these are non-places serving uprooted food or non-food at all.
What are these plates to me?
The complete and obscene death of taste, personality, seasonality, and gastronomy.
In a famous interview with the founder of the Slow Food Movement, Augé spoke about McDonald’s and taste, or better, non-taste and years later we can say: he was right, and we are losing the battle.
The foods prepared and served in these pancake-non-places are profoundly non-cultural.
They aggressively deny and flatten specificities, they work against cultural and gastronomical preservation much more intensely and much more effectively than McDonalds and Starbucks.
Because they do so waving a flag of “healthy” (food), “sustainable” (coffee) and “friendly” (service).
To me, they look like IT’s balloons. Luring simple souls and murdering their taste in a gutter.
If Augé defines international fine dining as trans-cultural, where the paradigms of fine dining are declined in regional and even local specificities, these types of foods are both non-foods, as well as a threat to what gastronomical food is.
There is a whole generation coming up, born from Gen X and Millennial parents, whose gastronomic horizon is shrinking.
Their options are infinite, but in reality, it is all the fucking same.
Truth is, these non-places present themselves as alternatives (vegan-friendly, local, whatever) but in reality, they are the representation of a systemic conformism, which is typical of a generation that hasn’t grown out of the insecurities of the teen years.
So what?
If what everyone looks for is the same, the market will grow in that direction. Salmon roll sushi, pink beetroot pancakes, avocado toast with poached eggs, flat whites, and bubble tea.
All, and more.
But all the same.
Everything is everywhere, not only all at once but also ALL THE TIME.
“The spider-sense of the first-world gourmet has become accustomed to seeing franchises multiply in restaurants, normalizing the exchange of traditional eating houses for a magma of multinationals. But there is another latent phenomenon in our urban space that is even more worrying: that of restaurants that, without being franchises, seem like one”, says Laksmi Aguirre on El Diario. I took the liberty to translate from Spanish.
Going back to the example I gave at the beginning, there are endless places in Lisbon that just happen to look the same, even if they are (in their own words), original concepts, but end up looking like franchises.
Non-franchises of the same idea at this time existing in Lisbon: Marquise da Mobler, Monka Bakery, Shaka Coffee, Tact, Wellwell, Neighborhood, Hello Kristof, Buna, Jac, Heim, Stanislav, Manifest, Hygge, Dedes, The Mill, Zenith, Seagull Method, Thank you Mama, Bowls bar, Cotidiano, Janis, Wish, Ela Canela, Comoba, Le brunch by dri, Maria Limao, Augusto, and so on and on and on…
They all look the same. Again.
More: they all look the same to any Amsterdam, Paris, Istanbul, wherever place that serves non-food.
It is said that in ancient times, a squirrel could go from the Volga to the Atlantic without touching the ground, here we can say that nowadays a customer can go from Russia to Portugal by just eating the same non-food, thinking however they are eating well, and local.
And healthy, vega/veg (or protein-rich), and whatnot.
These non-places aggressively positioned themselves AGAINST Starbucks and McDonald’s, raising their prices exponentially to serve the same non-food.
They are the NEW comfort food, recognizable food, and homely food.
Sweet, salty, pink, tepid, foamy, creamy, crunchy.
Waffles, pancakes, syrups, avocado, brioche, granola, chai latte or whatever latte.
Breakfast all day as a paradigm.
The infantilisation of taste is the dismal result.
For a series of generations that are increasingly uninterested in the rest of gastronomy. You know, the one that has slimy, squishy, bitter, sour, acidic.
For these customers, such non-places are worth queuing in the sun after a 3-hour flight.
Even if the non-food they serve is the same one could have eaten at the equally pinkish, greenish, and greenwashed place around the corner.
Aguirre adds: “I don't think there is a lack of hospitality training but rather gastronomic training in the client. And to do this you must first have interest and eat well and, above all, with meaning, whether it is a goal for those who travel or go out to dinner in their city.”
Aguirre uses" “to travel”, not to be tourists.
For wordsmiths like us, words matter.
The culprit, of course, is (mass) tourism
Tourism as we know it today, is a direct result of the warped reality we live in, where a few wealthy ones were inspired to aspire to travel not as a means of enlightenment, but rather as a way of showing off, and in the end, consuming.
Consumerism, driven by twisted late capitalism, is consuming us and our environments with gas emissions, pollution, and throwaway items.
Foodism is also killing our cities, which irks me the most.
El Pais recently published a very alarming article that I liked a lot, albeit it horrified me at the same time.
“There is a hijacking of the food landscape. The cities are first touristified, they are decorated. Then, they gentrify by expelling their neighbours and, finally, they become gourmet. The foodie is a predator of other people's identity” warns in the article José Berasaluce, coordinator of the gastronomic master's degree at the University of Cádiz, Masterñam (translation is mine).
In the article (translation is mine again), they refer to Prof. Joshua Sbicca, professor of Sociology at Colorado State University, who in his article Food, gentrification and Urban Transformations detects how “there are poor neighbourhoods and working class that have mutated to become objects of coveted desire for those seeking cosmopolitan destinations where they can live rich cultural and gastronomic experiences in which the traditional cuisine of the neighbourhood has disappeared. This is the case of Eixample and Ciutat Vella in Barcelona, areas of New Orleans and Marrakech, the Ruzafa neighbourhood in Valencia or the centre of Seville, places where products such as avocado, bao bread and hummus are as present as they are standardized. The traditional is not there nor is it expected, but when it is there it is so exotic, such an object of desire, that it is used to make it more expensive. The result is that you have a very bad and very expensive dish.”
When a tourist couple was approached by the journalist while eating a piece of fried fish and two bottles of beer at a high table, they say that they were delighted with their chance discovery of the Mercado: "It is a wonder. We are foodies, we look for the traditional, but it costs more and more because of the tourists,” says one of them, without (remarks El País) noticing the paradoxical contradiction.
Seriously. Mass tourism, combined with fossil fuel overdrive, will kill our civilization.
There was a brief, fleeting moment in 2020 when we all collectively believed we could change things up.
It was, now we see, an illusion.
“We remember the slogan that said "We won't go back to normal because normal was the problem", it was good copy, intelligent, and well done. It did not work. We haven't just returned to normal: we have surpassed it, we have accelerated it, as if to forget about those two years, as if to punish ourselves for even having thought about slowing down. We imagined a world of sustainability and what we find is the opposite of that wish. The summer that has just ended was marked by mass tourism in Europe (and in Italy and the Mediterranean in particular), the liberalization of terraces on city pavements has given rise to a foodification that is eating up public space in cities” Rivista Studio painfully writes - and I translated from Italian.
In an ideal world, tourists would remain in tourist zones: this is what was happening till not far ago. During my time in Rome, it was unheard of that tourists would be led to local places en masse.
A traveller and a tourist are extremely different concepts, and due to the general lack of means, most of the people on the move nowadays are migrants or tourists.
And let me tell you, I respect much more those who move because of a need (intellectual, or vital) than one who simply displaces to places for a weekend fueled by cheap flights because this is what is in fashion now.
And I believe firmly: that tourists SHOULD stick to their tourist zones.
There are plenty of places to cater for tourists, without completely obliterating the few, remaining spaces where authenticity remains. More: as we discussed, there are plenty of new and upcoming places specifically designed for tourists.
A tourist is a bit like a sheep: they need guidance because they lack other means (linguistic, communicative, intellectual) to understand a place.
Without this guidance, they would stick to the non-places, that are designed for them.
Other resources on this same topic:
Foodification talks about the transformation and the evolution of our cities seen through the lens of gourmet gentrification and was born from the meeting artistic between Paolo Tex Tessarin and Marco Perucca.
History to eat. The foodification of the historic centre of Florence: this paper introduces the concept of foodification to the wider debate on the issues related to the touristification of cities. The idea at the base of the concept is that many cities in Europe and beyond are undergoing a transformation of their historic centre into a food-dominant retail space, in which the city's business landscape is converging towards specialized functions centred prevalently around food.
Great article, I totally agree with you! The problem is so deep, it not only comes from the pandemic, in SouthernEeurope and in Portugal in particular, mass tourism was the governments' solution to the 2008 economic crisis, which has resulted in all you say, like the horrendous toy sardine shops. I was sad to see al the traditional mercearias disappear from rua do Arsenal in Lisbon, to be replaced with these shops or the cafes you talk about. Also, the instagrammisation of our lives and in particular of the eating aspect of them has made our collective idea of eating a cloned experience, so we unconsciously go for the “pretty thing” , whether we share it or not, that will make us feel validation and approval. Another thing that happened as a result of social media is that nobody considers themselves a tourist anymore, but a traveller, living their very unique informed experience, as clearly exemplified by the couple in Barcelona, so none of us takes responsibility for this kind of behaviour.
It does sound like Melbourne... plus we have flowers on our plates, revamped recycled repurposed environments and furniture, more food intolerances than people, and we allegedly drink coffee out of cut avocado. Yeah you should visit!