Together, food and media have long been a means by which people communicate, perform their identities, and express their values. This article focuses on how contemporary culinary work is influenced by the new mediascape, a channel of convergence through which we understand, enjoy, and participate in our food worlds. As new media proliferates and access to interactive and creative tools expands, content generation and ownership has transferred from the hands of a small population of professionals into the fast fingers of amateurs and expert producers across the globe—effectively transforming who mediates and how we mediate. Consumers now double as mediamakers; often called co-creators, or prosumers, these new forms of interactive mediation influence labor practices and professional identities across industries. In the food world, this transition has been spurred onward by food TV and chef celebrity changing the expectations we hold for our chefs and their restaurants. By drawing from the everyday experiences of people embedded within these food and media networks and integrating transdisciplinary theory, this article demonstrates a promising approach to understanding our food futures.

This paper focuses on how discourses of food have shaped understandings of what is at stake in the Greek crisis. Drawing from Karl Polanyi's concept of “embeddedness,” I argue that food is central to Greek interpretations of neoliberal policies and processes because of its centrality to Greek culture and identity. Food has also been a site of contested practices of “solidarity” and “charity” by which new social experiments are emerging in the wake of the breakdown of the welfare state. In arguing for food's centrality in the reshaping of Greek sociability, I will suggest that food be thought of not simply as a “topic” for anthropological investigation, but as a master-concept on the level of “kinship,” “ritual,” or “exchange” in any anthropological analysis of contemporary life.