Care, Ethics, and Social Enterprise Meet Global Café Culture

Melbourne has become a striking gastronomic metropolis, known for one of the world’s most acclaimed coffee cultures and an artfully aestheticized, hipster-friendly café scene. The city is also known—at least among global sustainability and environmental circles—for its grassroots green politics and community-driven alternative food movement (Lewis 2015: 348), a set of concerns reflected in the look, feel, and ethics of many of its celebrated restaurants and cafés. This chapter seeks to critically examine the phenomenon of Global Brooklyn through an ethical and food activism lens. Discussing a wide range of Melbourne cafés, from socially and ethically aware establishments to those adopting social enterprise models, we reflect on the ways cafés increasingly seek to combine profit with notions of “care.” In doing this, we seek to enhance the political and ethical dimension of the Global Brooklyn heuristic and to speak to the notion of care—planetary, justice, environmental, and community. We are interested in examining what might be the politics at play behind the transnational dissemination of a certain kind of postindustrial, DIY “look” and feel? What sort of shifting and emergent economic models might adhere to cafés that, in many ways, represent themselves as coming out of a more post-materialist culture, as anti-brands of a sort?