„Produsele de calitate” și patrimonializarea gustului în România "Quality Products" and Patrimonialization of Taste in Romania Section Anthropology

Abstract

The paper is addressing the social imagery and motivation behind the recent momentum of an alternative market of "quality food" in Romania, mainly expressed by a search for "traditional" and/or "local" products. After a symbolic bulimia incorporating all kinds of Occidental food and thus providing ways of identification with an idealized West, food consumption in Romania slowly turned to autochthonism, especially after the European integration, and mainly via an aggressive publicity naming and crystallizing a growing but diffuse public demand. The paper is describing the kind of imagery this publicity was shaping as well as the motivations claimed by both producers and consumers. It is stated that we assist to a patrimonialization of test, food and gastronomic know-how becoming thus part of the immaterial patrimony of the nation, more and more re-rooted in local or regional specificity – and thus forcing also a political decentralization and reinvention of the local. In their turn, multi-national food consortiums are using more and more "traditional" references in order to root back their "unidentified eatable objects" (Fischler, 1990) in local appetite. Professionalization of this emerging market is still to be expected.