Food & Everyday Life in the Postsocialist World

by Caldwell, Melissa L.

• ISBN13: 9780253221391
• ISBN10: 0253221390
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2009-09-28
• Publisher: Indiana Univ Pr

Summary

Across the Soviet Union and eastern Europe during the socialist period, food emerged as a symbol of both the successes and failures of socialist ideals of progress, equality, and modernity. By the late 1980s, the arrival of McDonald's behind the Iron Curtain epitomized the changes that swept across the socialist world. Not quite two decades later, the effects of these arrivals were evident in the spread of foreign food corporations and their integration into local communities. This book explores the role played by food-as commodity, symbol, and sustenance-in the transformation of life in Russia and eastern Europe since the end of socialism. Changes in food production systems, consumption patterns, food safety, and ideas about health, well-being, nationalism, and history provide useful perspectives on the meaning of the postsocialist transition for those who lived through it.

Author Biography

Melissa L. Caldwell is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is author of Not by Bread Alone: Social Support in the New Russia and editor (with James L. Watson) of The Cultural Politics of Food and Eating.

Table of Contents

Foreword	p. ix
Acknowledgments	p. xiii
Introduction	p. 1
Food and Everyday Life after State Socialism
From Canned Food to Canny Consumers	p. 29
Cultural Competence in the Age of Mechanical Production
The Tale of the Toxic Paprika	p. 57
The Hungarian Taste of Euro-Globalization
Self-Made Women	p. 78
Informal Dairy Markets in Europeanizing Lithuania
Tempest in a Coffee Pot	p. 101
Brewing Incivility in Russia's Public Sphere
The Geopolitics of Taste	p. 130
The "Euro" and "Soviet" Sausage Industries in Lithuania
A Celebration of Masterstvo	p. 154
Professional Cooking, Culinary Art, and Cultural Production in Russia
The Social and Gendered Lives of Vodka in Rural Siberia	p. 188
Afterword. Turnips and Mangos	p. 206
Power and the Edible State in Eastern Europe
List of Contributors	p. 223
Index	p. 227
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