Commodified Nostalgia: When Heritage Becomes Product

We’ve been living through a boom market in heritage for many years. Nonna fonts on sauce labels, “since 19–” stamped on everything, reclaimed barn wood in dining rooms 20 miles from the nearest actual barn. On TikTok, cottagecore and tradwife reels sell  an invented past: aprons and sourdough, but frictionless, free of the labor, the mess, and the class history. The past is curated like a playlist. What once named a living lineage now functions as a mood board.

This is commodified nostalgia. It’s memory stripped for parts and reassembled as a vibe. A chain burrito wrapped in “abuelita” rhetoric, a “Prohibition recipe” whiskey invented in 2017, “grandma-style” pizza as SEO. The effect is anesthetic, not aesthetic:  Real heritage is particular—names, places, and technique spoken in dialect. Commodified nostalgia is general with its interchangeable motifs in sepia script, a fictional farmhouse humming behind the brand.

Philosophically, this is instrumental reason in period costume. The past is deployed as a means to differentiate a SKU, to grab a marginal gain in attention. And because the device paradigm—Albert Borgmann’s term for technologies that deliver a commodity while hiding the machinery and practices that once made it—rewards results without relations, we’re offered heritage as an outcome—flavor notes and packaging for instance—while the relations that once constituted that heritage—time, apprenticeship, seasons, and social memory—are simulated or erased altogether. You get the product without the practice.

Notice how place is handled. In the global “non-places” of airports and apps, “Napoli,” “Oaxaca,” “Lowcountry,” become floating signifiers, decals you can peel and stick. Locavorism and regional cookery once fought that drift by insisting on the stubbornness of the local—its soil, weather, speech, etc. Commodified nostalgia keeps the signage and removes the resistance.

So how do we keep memory from becoming merchandise? Here are five proposals if you’re in the heritage business.

1. Name the particulars. Heritage is about proper nouns: Aunt Lidia, 1978, the Sangiovese that grew behind the shed, the butcher who taught you to bone a leg. Write names and dates on the recipe card. Tell the origin story at the table. Generalities are easy to launder; specifics bite back.
2. Keep some difficulty in the prep work. No need for masochism—just some friction that makes a practice real. Whip the zabaglione by hand once. Stone the cherries. Render the fat. Time and labor are part of the flavor; remove them and you flatten the memory into mere sign.
3. Cook with the living, not only from the dead. Heritage is a relay, not a reliquary. Invite elders (kin or chosen) into the kitchen; pay community teachers; trade techniques across generations. A “heritage” you cannot learn from someone is a story you bought, not a practice you joined.
4. Tie taste to place with receipts. If you say “Tuscan,” cook what late-summer Tuscan markets actually yield; if you say “Sephardic,” credit the cookbook, the neighborhood, the friend who taught you. Source like a historian. The goal isn’t purity—it’s accountability.
5. Let the table be the archive. Record the stories in the meal: print a one-paragraph note on the menu card; include a photo on the back; dedicate the first toast to the person or place you’re borrowing from. Memory flourishes when it’s performed, not packaged.

This is not an argument against fun, branding, or riffs. It’s a call to distinguish evocation from extraction. Evocation says: let’s summon a past by re-activating its relations—its tempos, its tools, its ways of paying attention. Extraction says: let’s harvest some aesthetics, file off the context, and scale it. One renews a commons; the other strip-mines it for a trend.

Commodified nostalgia will keep selling because it’s delicious to imagine that we can order meaning with two taps on the screen. But meaning is stubborn. It lives in the link between hands, places, and times, and it resists shortcuts. Make dinner where the link is palpable. Then let the merchandise follow, if it must—not the other way around.