Food Porn or Food Erotica….? Sistah Vegan in Europe Part I

Breeze Harper eating her Vegan Wurst Sandwich from Heart of Joy, coming back from Salzburg, Austria on the train.

I have to admit that I am not a fan of the use of ‘porn’ in describing food. But, that is just me. I prefer the word ‘erotica’ instead so….

Today I will be kicking off my Sistah Vegan in Europe series with “Food Erotica” as a way to share my experiences in Europe. Today I share with you Salzburg, Austria.

I am hyperaware of the commodities I saw that obscure the resources and people exploited to make these items possible. For example, so many cocoa products with no indication of how the cocoa was sourced, showered store case displays in Salzburg. I am quite confident that this means that a majority of the cocoa was sourced from child slave labor in West Africa, but the “happy” images of “Holiday cheer” (i.e. hundreds of chocolates Santa Claus items, Xmas trees, ornaments, etc) are strategically used to sell ‘nostalgia’ and ‘pleasure.’ Who wants to see pictures of actual enslaved African Children making ‘our’ holiday cheer and tourist attractions possible!? What a drab! But of course, I know it is a tourist town and myth is what makes a town a successful tourist town. Hence, I can’t be surprised by this and won’t say more…

Oh, and I did end up finding 2 organic cafes with vegan food options. The first was Bio-Burger . I ate a housemade vegan burger and potato chips. The last picture is a vegan apple cake that I ate at Heart of Joy. As a main meal I ended up eating a vegan wurst sandwich (first picture above).

And lastly, saw 4 other black folk there in the entire tourist packed town, but that is not surprising. I did see representations of “blackness” in the city, via a place called Afro Coffee. Apparently Black people are really cool to look at while drinking coffee and eating food from Africa– especially images of Black folk with ‘retro’ fashions from the 1960s with very large afros. Seriously, check it out! I want to know the meaning behind this and would love to do an ethnography of the cafe. But come on, how can you have an Afro Cafe and there ain’t any black people there as patrons! ha ha (well, there weren’t any there at the moment I passed by, so who knows!?). Anyway, seems to be food “from Africa” that was sold there and I really did dig the images of afro wearing Black folk that decorated the place.

Here are the photos of food I took at various shoppes and cafes.