Globalization and diminishing local tastes: The case of Spice Bazaar

Food industry, together with the agricultural production is getting more dominated by globalization effects. As the companies get dominant within the sector, they raise many problems for those whose income is based on harvesting with traditional methods that are ineffective compared to the mass production methods. Local foods are getting standardized throughout the world and most of the exotic tastes are either lost, facing depletion, or standardized so that they are not exotic anymore. Spice Bazaar in İstanbul has been one of the central places to attract tourists with the exotic tastes. The bazaar used to offer various local food from different groups of products including olive, fish, coffee and it was characterized with spices. Bazaar is recently facing a major problem which is characterized by the standardization. In order to offer "proper" products to their clients, the dealers in Bazaar left the small businesses which produce at relatively higher prices in their unique way compared to the big companies which use standardized mass production that allow them to produce at lower prices. The dealers also changed the type, sector, and overall structure of their shops. This thesis deals with the question why such a transformation happened. Three possible explanations of this question were detected in literature. The transformation could be an outcome of the global trends towards liberalized trade and globalized world, the effect of Turkish political economy, which in fact go in line with the global trends or changing consumer preferences as the expected standardization from the demand side. In order to trace the answers to those questions, this research made use of qualitative data, more specifically semi-structured interviews with two groups of actors: the current shop owners within the Spice Bazaar and the current and former suppliers (producers) of those shops.