Happy (Greek) New Year!

This article first appeared on the Borough Market website as the final in a 3 part series exploring a few festivals celebrated in December, other than Christmas, and the foods associated with them. I interviewed trader Marianna Kolokotroni, who grew up in Athens, to get some local insight on the festivities.

This holiday season Marianna Kolokotroni is planning to find a boat for her shop Oliveology at Borough Market. In Greece it is traditional to decorate a boat rather than a Christmas tree “because Greeks were sailors and surrounded by sea.”

Unable to get back to Greece for Christmas, she tries to keep the Greek traditions alive at the shop, which “in a way is my home now”. In fact, one of the reasons she started Oliveology was because she had decided to stay in the UK after studying and she was keen to retain “a link between home and my roots with Greece and Greek produce.” She promotes traditional recipes on her blog and tells customers how things used to be made.

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Food is symbolic

Food is symbolic. I encountered this idea early on in my studies in food anthropology. It is often presented as one of reasons why food is useful as a ‘lens’ through which to explore wider social, cultural, political and economic issues. But what does this really mean?

It took me a while to gain more than a superficial understanding. As I write this it becomes clear why that might have been. I had never been encouraged to think beyond the macro level. The idea that food is symbolic remained an abstract concept, referring to food in general and applied broadly.

A few months into my studies I had a eureka moment. I read two papers in which the authors honed in on a single foodstuff of particular importance to the society they were studying. Their focus on a specific food in a particular context made it much clearer to me why food is symbolic and how this can be a useful way of exploring other issues.

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