Talk as work: Economic sociability in Northern Italian heritage food production

•This article offers the concept of economic sociability to analyze talk as simultaneously social practice and economic activity.•It focuses on interactions at farmers markets between vendors and customers in northern Italy.•The article shows the various verbal means through which small-scale food producers add value to their hand-made products.•It provides a model for analyzing the interaction of people and goods within commodity chain processes.

This article analyzes talk occurring within direct marketing contexts (farmers markets) as a form of economic sociability: interaction among people and goods within production, circulation, and exchange processes that constructs relationships and creates meaning and value simultaneously. It builds on and contributes to scholarly conversations about the role and value of language within political economies, such as language commodification, branding and marketing, and language and materiality. It focuses on transcripts drawn from recordings made during ethnographic and linguistic anthropological fieldwork with heritage food producers carried out in the northern Italian town and province of Bergamo to show how talk among producers and their customers is both a social act and an economic practice.