The article tells the story of the rise and fall of the organic store Yggdrasill in Iceland. That story features humble founders, caring customers, dedicated staff, as well as anonymous investment funds, and it describes the conversion of organics from a niche market to mainstream consumption. Through an ethnographic account of everyday life at the organic store, the article analyzes how intimacy within the modern food chain is established through emotional practices. Staff and customers share feelings of reciprocity, not only towards organic producers, but also towards each other through acts of selling and buying organic products, forming intimate attachment and creating trust to counter the fears and anonymity of the modern food chain. Drawing on theories of affect and emotional practices and combining ethnography with narrative analysis, the article explores the role of emotions and how the doing of emotions makes organic food consumption meaningful within the industrial food system.
In recent years, the Icelandic dairy product skyr has been transformed from an everyday staple to a national food heritage. Skyr is high in protein and low in fat, and its nutritional value accounts for its international success. However, the domestic and international marketing of skyr glide effortlessly from medieval literature to modern healthy living in promoting skyr as a unique, wholesome, and authentic product: heritage food and Iceland's “secret to healthy living.” In this article, we explore how skyr has been recontextualized as heritage through the cultural staging of skyr-making and through branding efforts. It was not until skyr had become a standardized export commodity that people began to fear that action was needed to protect the traditional way of skyr-making. Picking up on the trend of “heritagization,” pioneered by Slow Food (which added skyr to its “Ark of Taste”) and by small farmers catering to tourists, industrial skyr producers have come around to narrating the cultural history of skyr, employing heritage branding to carve out a unique place within the global dairy-scape. We untangle the messy relationships between the local and the global in such heritage efforts by examining how global trends and markets influence people at local levels, impacting the way they think about and act on their own cultural forms, and how the local level, in turn, impacts global flows under the sign of heritage.
In recent years, references to “old-fashioned pantries” and “classic root cellars” have regularly popped up in real estate ads across Sweden as a potential selling point for people seeking new homes. The use of the words “classic” and “old-fashioned” indicates a shift in the thinking about traditional food storage spaces. In this article, we explore the recontextualization and emotionalization of traditional food storage spaces in Swedish society. We base our analysis on an open-ended questionnaire on food storage, preservation, and household preparedness directed to Swedish households. We investigate how our respondents have recounted and shaped embodied memories in the act of writing about past food storage: the different spaces, times, people, practices, emotions, and objects. Viewing these acts of remembering and writing about past food storage as emotional practices has led to an understanding of how emotional experience in the past is reinterpreted in the present. Seeing these acts as emotional practices illustrates the relational nature of emotions, where longing for past food storage spaces is one way to reflexively deal with contemporary issues by managing everyday life. Finally, we argue that reflexive nostalgia helps to create and interpret emotions – making past and present food storage meaningful.
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