ABSTRACT
The chapter explores the role of food as a material boundary of class. It looks at the symbolic shift of a Romanian minced meat dish called mici from a typically affordable, working-class street food to a novel feature in the foodie taste portfolio. As Bucharest foodies set out on a flâneur-like exploration of Bucharest’s foodscape, searching for mici-eating multi-sensory experiences in peripheral venues, they become actors in the class politics of consumption and urban space. The chapter is based on an ethnographic research of these flâneur explorations in a currently iconic open-air market in a working-class district of Bucharest and an analysis of the online representations of this symbolic appropriation.
