Designing the Future of Polish Food (original) (raw)

Eating Our Way to Authenticity: Polish Food Culture the Post-Socialist ‘Transformation’

Social Sciences

Of growing interest to social scientists in recent years is the emergence of food culture, i.e., the consumption and lifestyle behaviours of those who harbour a particular preoccupation with food. In many ways, food culture could be used as an index for late modernity and late capitalism—we can identify in its midst various processes of individuation, abstractions of moral consumption, and attempts at mitigating against various late modern processes. Food culture has also emerged in recent years in Poland as an analogous process to the arrival of late capitalism. In this way, in Poland, as elsewhere, food could be understood as an ontologically compelling medium for metaphysical concerns that the structural used to support—for example, moral, ethical, political, and identity-based concerns. The following paper will make an account for how Polish food bloggers understand authenticity in their food choices and lifestyles, and how this is heavily determined by the Polish ‘post-socialis...

Eating Our Way to Authenticity: Polish food culture & the post-communist ‘transformation’

Social Sciences, 2022

Of growing interest to social scientists in recent years is the emergence of food culture, i.e., the consumption and lifestyle behaviours of those who harbour a particular preoccupation with food. In many ways, food culture could be used as an index for late modernity and late capitalism—we can identify in its midst various processes of individuation, abstractions of moral consumption, and attempts at mitigating against various late modern processes. Food culture has also emerged in recent years in Poland as an analogous process to the arrival of late capitalism. In this way, in Poland, as elsewhere, food could be understood as an ontologically compelling medium for metaphysical concerns that the structural used to support—for example, moral, ethical, political, and identity-based concerns. The following paper will make an account for how Polish food bloggers understand authenticity in their food choices and lifestyles, and how this is heavily determined by the Polish ‘post-socialist’ context, which is also a new emergent field of enquiry in Polish food studies. The paper will therefore explore the three themes of authenticity that emerge from the interviews and determine that something is authentic to the bloggers when it is (a) free from lies, (b) true to itself, and/or (c) made by the bloggers (“DIY”). The paper will consequently argue that the bloggers’ engagement with food, and their broader lifestyle choices, are contingent on these perceived notions of authenticity and, indeed, authenticity is something that they are always trying to secure in their lives, often through food itself. Moreover, these themes of authenticity, and the categories that underpin them, are often closely connected to the post-socialist experience. Abstractions of time, alienation, community, the environment, food production and identity all come to be anxious categories post-1989, and the bloggers often narrate their experiences with food and lifestyles in relation to these concerns. For the Polish food bloggers, therefore, authenticity is a confused and contested category in post-socialism, but also late modernity, and food culture becomes one way of negotiating this.

Bread, Meat, and Water and the Taste of Globalization: New Trends in Food Consumption and Production in Poland

2021

Over the past century, culinary fashions, eating principles, dishes, and habits have changed in the culture of flavor consumption. Although this chapter deals with Polish eating practices, it bears noting that some of the changing practices analyzed here concern not only the Polish corner of Europe. Across the world, a transformation of tastes and culinary habits is ceaselessly underway, resulting from the development of technology, industrial innovations, the processes of social change (including mobility on a global scale), the intensive development of consumption, and the processes of globalization. In Poland, since the beginning of the system transformation in the 1990s, a significant number of changes in eating habits, culinary practices, ormore generally-in taste have been systematically introduced. Prior to analyzing the changes, it is crucial to explain the specificity of consumer culture in Poland within the background of tradition, and the factors that have dramatically influenced the Polish culinary lifestyle. This chapter is based on an analysis and interpretation of Polish cookbooks from the period of the Polish People's Republic (PRL), as well as new culinary magazines. As secondary sources, to support my observations, I use data analysis and statistics from the Central Statistical Office of Poland (GUS), the Public Opinion Research Center (CBOS), and research conducted by the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences (IFIS PAN) since 2010. 1 Additional sources include research reports concerning eating habits from the PRL and the post-1989 era, along with popular culinary magazines, internet sites on culinary practices, advertising and advice columns, leaflets, postcards, and food festival

Cooking with Refugees and Migrants. Staging Authenticity and Traditionality for Warsaw’s Culinary Tourists

2021

During the migration crisis of 2015, a commonly shared belief about the integrating role of food resulted in the emergence of several culinary initiatives directed at refugees and migrants in Warsaw. I show that these culinary initiatives form a space for the creation of ostensibly opposing processes. On the one hand, they empower refugees and migrants by embracing the culinary cultures of their home countries; on the other, they facilitate the creation of simplified and folkloristic images of them. During culinary workshops, the role of migrants and refugees is to recreate traditional dishes, using “authentic” recipes. At the same time, they are restricted by the organizers’ ethical foodways and the demands of Warsaw’s culinary tourists, such as vegetarianism, to which migrants and refugees skilfully adapt. These processes result from a neoliberal logic, whereby refugees’ and migrants’ experiences and their ethnicity become commodities in the NGO market. This article draws on ethno...

Stories around food, politics and change in Poland and the Czech Republic

Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 2007

This study of the politics of food production/consumption in Poland and the Czech Republic brings together food and post-socialist studies. The food stories explored in the paper, relating to packaging, restaurant dining, self-provisioning and the emergence of an organic food sector open up the politics of everyday life in these significant cases. We show that there are diverse responses to 'transition' that are resistant or alternative to dominant narratives of linear progression towards western 'normality'. This finding is of wider significance at a time when debates about globalization and sustainability are promoting searches for alternative economic forms and practices.

The Book About Delicious and Healthy Food: Shaping the Cuisines of the USSR and Poland

Communism, as defined as an ideology, is a socio-economic system, that existed, in some practice from, 1848-1991, ending with the fall of the Soviet Union. The goal of this system is an equal ownership of production among the masses and the abolishment of wealth, class and above all else, the state. As it was practiced as a governing body, it encompassed all facets of life beyond the ownership of production, bleeding into family life, gender issues and for the purpose of this paper, cuisine. This paper serves to investigate two main research veins. First, to define ‘Soviet’ cuisine and how the propaganda cookbook, the Book about Delicious and Healthy Food played an integral role in this definition, and second to examine the long reaching effects in Poland of Mikoyan’s policies, in order to fulfill the ideals set by this cookbook and others like it.

"It's just a constant exchange of containers": Distribution of home-made food as an element of Polish family lifestyles

Etnografia Polska, 2018

This paper deals with intergenerational home-made food transfers inside Polish urban families. It is based on the material gathered by interviewing representatives of two generations. Not only economic, but also emotional and symbolic function of food distribution are presented. The circulation of food containers which travel between parents’ and children’s households is interpreted as systemic, according to the logic of gift. Three components of the system – giving, receiving and reciprocating – are analysed in order to reveal the tensions hidden in the food exchange. The relation between stability and dynamics in contemporary Polish families is also described. Both reproduction of the social order and the intergenerational change are embodied in the system of food exchange analysed in the paper. Key words: domestic cooking, intergenerational transmission, home-made food, mobility of objects, the gift, reciprocity