Introduction: The cultural politics of food and eating in Poland and beyond

Hryciuk, Renata E.; Król, Katarzyna E.

doi:10.23858/ethp.2020.41.2494

Cited by 1 publication

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“…Once maligned, now increasingly respected, Polish food studies has become an exciting new field for scholars with an interest in foodways and attendant phenomena (Hryciuk and Król 2020). In recent years, Polish researchers have produced entire volumes on food identities in the EU context (Boni and Matijevic 2019); on trust, risk and food fears in a post-socialist context (Bachórz and Kopczy ńska 2018); taste (Czas Kultury 2013 c. Hryciuk and Król 2020), along with others.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Olszanka

2022

Social Sciences

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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.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Olszanka

2022

Social Sciences

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

Introduction: The cultural politics of food and eating in Poland and beyond

Cited by 1 publication

References 3 publications

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

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

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