Authors

Tamar Babuadze¹;  ¹ Indigo, Georgia

Discussion

It is what I've been documenting all through the Georgian anti-government protests and while I thought I already had a 'culmination' of the topic during the Easter night demonstration against the anti-Foreign Agents Law in Spring, 2024, the true culmination came during the night of 30th of November, 2024. 

>All of a sudden, when everybody's mind was fully concentrated on those people who were peacefully resisting the special forces of police, very brutal and aggressive, when those of us who could not physically be at the protest epicenter, but who could only watch live videos of the peak moment of the night, in one of the videos we saw the moment of ' amazing pause', the most outstanding intervention: two young Japanese men kneeling down next to the travelling gas-stove, litting it and putting the big metal pot on it. the hand-written sentence on the paper read: Warm Vegan Curry. I keep this video with a comment from facebook by the user who said: 'and how peaceful and steady they are my God, they brought this peaceful firmness to us in the moment of chaos."

The same dawn featured another food moment when two Ukrainians - a couple - brought out a picnic table on the Rustaveli avenue and set the table - had some simple food for the demonstrators in those short minutes of pause, when the police special forces were not attacking them with water cannons, pepper sprays, or with beats, when they were not chased and beaten. 

Food through the protest moments, during the protest and resistance happenings can become the language of protest itself, it can absorb the whole idea of the protest; the whole energy of protesting bodies. It can also broaden its own agency to such extent that it (food) also accommodates other meanings, like spreading the message of the resistance; like caring about fellow protesters through sharing; creating, defining or deepening affective moments and impulsiveness of the protesters' actions. In other words, 'food moments' during the protests can even better emphasize the driving force of the protest. Food can embody it. 

How food also becomes political, how it can stretch even further the protest actions and emotional and reasonable realm of the process is what drives me in this research. All the different moments from the past months of protests that have food serving / food offering / food preparing / food flavor / food names in it are gathered here and analyzed, scrutinized to see the interconnection of foodscape and ideascape and some others too.