In this study, I focus on the consumption of food as an experience and attempt to identify its relationship with social interaction and social eating. I study acts of food and drink consumption and the role of space and objects in them.
On a first level, I identify characteristics of food and its consumption, and afterwards I focus on the consumption as it occurs in Miss Foula’s tsipouradiko.
It is a tsipouradiko in my neighborhood (Analipsi, Volos, Greece, Europe, planet Earth etc.) where my housemates and friends work, and occasionally I, myself. I have chosen the specific tsipouradiko because it is a space with which I have frequent contact since I wanted the research to have an experiential character. I keep a diary of my days at the tsipouradiko during its operation in the autumn and winter of 2018-2019 CE (as a customer, friend of the employees and occasional employee myself). I identify some phenomena and aspects of the tsipouradiko in relation to spatial arrangements, the customers’ habits and the way that they use the space comparing them with other examples.
The examples that will be mentioned in the research are examples from personal experiences and the pictures accompanying them are photographs from friends and from my personal collection. Each example represents its type as far as its characteristics are concerned but there is always the possibility for exceptions, different spatial arrangements or acts of consumption.
The purpose is to identify spatial conditions that define how we eat, that occur from improvisations of the consumers and how these do or do not contribute to social eating.
