Western Gastronomy, Inherited Commons and Market Logic: Cooking up a Crisis[La gastronomie occidentale entre patrimoines communs et logique marchande : vers une crise ?]

This chapter focuses on the market sector and, mainly, on the relation between its intrinsic logic and the use of commons. It deals with the French gastronomic model as the basis of the dominant model of market gastronomy all over the Western world. Market gastronomy works by using creativity and inherited knowledge commons. Cuisine and gastronomy consume scarce resources whose production and transport comes at a price. Inputs are transformed through productive processes that combine labour and equipment. In the post-French revolution Western world, the development of market relations in the gastronomic field came about with the emergence of the bourgeoisie as the dominant class and capitalism as the way of framing socio-economic relationships. The historical path of elitist gastronomy depends less and less on incentives coming from intrinsic reasons and more and more on extrinsic reason such as the need to maintain or increase the profitability of invested capital.