Dining in a globalized Gozo

Abstract

Gozo, the smaller and more rural of Malta’s two major islands, is supported by a tourist-centered economy and prides itself on a unique food culture that has evolved over an often difficult past, in which numerous civilizations have come and left their culinary mark. Its population still maintains these traditions, while it also becomes more closely wedded to the more recent global tradition of multinational chain stores and restaurant corporations shared by vast swaths of the continents. Over the summer of 2011, I attempted to study how Gozitans have become assimilated into this mass culture, in doing so necessarily Gozo-fying some of it in the process, and how this has affected the more established practices on the island. I chose to examine the relationship between the island’s single McDonald’s, which I felt best symbolized the new mass culture, and a café across the street, a small eatery of the type that could exist everywhere, but is intensely bound to that locality through its specifics. As my research progressed, many of the “lines” that I assumed would be obvious became blurred and I realized that I had in a way overestimated the symbolic gesture that individuals feel when going to either of these places. Of course, the ramifications in the concrete world of spending one’s money at either place cannot be denied, but these are not clearly present during the act. It would be fatuous to claim that some things should definitely exist in some places and that the intrusion of something seen as foreign somehow devalues them. Nevertheless, the way we spend our money determines, much more than voting or any other political act, the type of society we want to live in and the values we want to pass on. It would be senseless to shamelessly decry the presence of something without clearly understanding why it is there, but a clear understanding of what that something supports is vital to allowing an enlightened public to live their lives freely and deliberately.