Something Borrowed, Something New': Memory and Oblivion in Food Discourse in Post-Soviet Eastern Europe
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INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL FOR
HISTORY, CULTURE AND MODERNITY
www.history-culture-modernity.org
Published by: Uopen Journals
Copyright: © The Author(s).
Content is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Licence
eISSN: 2213-0624
‘Something Borrowed, Something New’: Memory
and Oblivion in Food Discourse in Post-Soviet
Eastern Europe
Irina Perianova
HCM 6 (1): 1–20
DOI: 10.18352/hcm.530
Abstract
The article highlights the discourse of food as it relates to memory and
oblivion. Though memory is an ability to store and reproduce infor-
mation, frequently individual or even collective reproductions hardly
match reality. As an object of longing in reconstructing and reimagining
the past to fit real or perceived identity, food is one of the mainstays of
nostalgia. Nostalgia is also the reason why an old narrative, when it is
refashioned and imported into a new frame as a new narrative, may be
of doubtful veracity. As our food memories bridge the chasms of time
and space and define not only our eating habits but our identity, the
importance of what and how we remember cannot be overstated. The
object of the article is threefold. On the basis of the culinary myths
of the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, it shows how mem-
ory traps result in a non-isomorphic perception of reality. Secondly, it
describes the transformation of food memories for a diaspora. Finally,
it illustrates certain functions of food, such as protest, which may be
viewed as a challenge to oblivion.
Keywords: Memory, food, identity, chronotope, culinary myth,
socialism, wrapping
HCM 2018, VOL. 6, no. 1
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PERIANOVA
Introduction
Our food memories shape our eating habits and, to a significant extent,
our identities. Such memories reconnect us to a bygone time and
space and trigger off deep-ingrained memories of feelings and emo-
tions, states of minds and the body. In a way, food memories bridge the
chasms of time and space. Childhood foods therefore are great unifiers
because ‘we are eating cultural history and value as well as family
memories’.1
Perhaps the best-known example of the importance of childhood
foods as a means of travel to a bygone time is that of Proust’s ‘made-
leines’. Interestingly, in a recent graphic novel adaptation of Proust’s À
la recherche du temps perdu2 pride of place is given to madeleines in
a two-page spread. In one of its famous scenes, the narrator’s eating a
madeleine cake provokes a rush of memories of his childhood in the vil-
lage of Combray. The visual aspect of memory, which stands out in the
novel, does so even more in its graphic version. Indeed, when we talk
to people about their favourite foods, the conversation almost always
returns to the things they loved as a child. Thus the images of food
match our sense of collective and personal identity. This claim may be
illustrated by the following popular online identity tests of the eating
habits of Russian and Armenian Americans, both of which feature sev-
eral questions related to food.
Are you Russian?
Do you prefer gherkins in brine or pickled gherkins?
Do you eat factory-produced mayonnaise?
Do you make Olivier salad for holidays?
Can you prepare three dishes using buckwheat?
Are you Armenian?
You have philo dough, string cheese or See’s candy in your freezer.
You serve hummus and tabbouleh with your taco chips.
You shovel food on other people’s plates when they aren’t looking.
You think pilaf is one of the four food groups.3
These amusing tests highlight several important issues, such as the
nature of edible chronotopes4 and ‘default foods’, as well as cooking
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SOMETHING BORROWED, SOMETHING NEW
traditions and practices. Besides, they are indicative of their creators’
ethnic background and origin. Obviously, the Armenian-ness test was
created by Americans: Taco chips, unknown in Armenian cuisine and a
staple of Mexican Texan food, mentioned together with Middle Eastern
hummus, are a clear example of re-contextualization. According to
Norman Fairclough:
When processes of globalization affect a particular social entity such as a
nation-state, a relationship is set up between the ‘outside’ and the ‘inside’
of that entity. This includes practices, networks of practices, orders of dis-
course, discourses, genres and/or styles which already exist outside the
entity […]. The relationship between outside and inside can be seen as a
relationship of recontextualization – external entities are recontextualized,
relocated within a new context.5
The interdiscursivity of Armenian food in the American context illus-
trates how old foods make room for new ones, and vice versa. The
childhood foods which are traceable to the ethnic origin are a medium
of bonding and affiliation and show the commonality of memory. To
quote Jack Goody: ‘The continuity of borscht may provide some thread
of living to those passing through the years following the October
Revolution, just as a hamburger clearly states to many an American
that he is home and dry’.6
Food familiarity outlives states. Riga sprats were touted on Channel
One Russia (ORT) commercials as ‘a typical Russian food’ (italics IP)
as late as 20107 – a culinary afterthought and aftertaste of the Soviet
empire which had ceased to exist more than twenty years before that.
The fact that Riga is now the capital of Latvia, an independent state,
seemed to be irrelevant. Identity-related culinary issues abound in other
parts of Europe as well. For instance, the question ‘who does banitsa
belong to?’ may provoke diverse answers on the Balkans, depending
on where people live. Banitsa (phyllo pastry with different fillings,
the most popular one being white feta cheese) is known in different
countries under different names: burek, tyropita, bugatsa, etc (Fig. 1).
Though it has many variations, it is part of the cultural heritage of the
people who live in Serbia, Slovenia, Croatia, Albania and Bulgaria.
By the same token, Salman Rushdie’s neologism ‘chutnification’
in Midnight Children8 is an apt description of food as an encapsulator
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PERIANOVA
Figure 1 Banitsa, burek, bugatsa.
of historical memory for those who had lived through the Partition
of India in 1947. Furthermore, food is of utmost importance for dif-
ferent diasporas as a means of bonding, affiliation and continuity. As
shared by Peter Pomerantsev: ‘When my grandparents, who emigrated
to Brighton Beach in 1980, sent photos of themselves to friends back
in Kiev it was always in front of a table full of food’.9 The names of
Brighton Beach restaurants in New York are notably, and nostalgically,
Russian: Tatiana, Primorski, At Mother-in-Law’s, etc.10
In Barthes’ words, food signifies ‘materially a pattern of immaterial
realities’.11 The historicity of food is transformed into a situation, and
the thread of memory, real or fictitious, creates a stereotypical frame
of reference for an individual, as illustrated by the following observa-
tion: ‘In the sixties my father suddenly “discovered” he was Irish and
started talking about corned beef and cabbage as soul food’.12 Note the
keywords discovered and suddenly, which show the son’s attitude to
the newly found Irishness of his father. The quotation shows how food
may change the individual’s frame of reference, and determine a new
approach to lifestyle through brand new favourite meals, even in case
of unproven claims.
And, of course, food is intertwined with nostalgia. In the twentieth
century ‘nostalgia’, a term coined from the Greek nostos (‘return home’)
and algia (‘longing’) became a metaphor for the ambivalent immigrant,
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SOMETHING BORROWED, SOMETHING NEW
the inassimilable immigrant, or even the anti-assimilationist immigrant.
Today’s nostalgic, according to Svetlana Boym, is ‘a displaced person
who mediates between the local and the universal’.13 In her characteri-
zation of nostalgia as a condition in which a person moves between the
poles of local/individual and universal/collective, Boym suggests a polar-
ization between place of residence and place of origin.14 Looking back
in time for many is not only nostalgic but evokes the image of utopia, of
a lost world of childhood, of food as status and power and of food as a
dream. Barthes goes as far as to state that ‘when a person drinks red wine
that person is actually drinking, he is actually not drinking red wine at
all but the idea of red wine’.15 He adds that ‘memory, real or false, thus
creates desire which is sublimated and placed into a specific situation’.16
The wave of Eastern European (n)ostalgia spawned dozens of web-
sites offering thousands of former East German, Bulgarian and Soviet
products, as well as media narratives conjuring up images of these
products for consumers. Ostalgia resulted in a return of some formerly
popular items in East Germany, including gherkins from the Spree for-
est and sausages from Thuringia, as well as Rot-Weiss toothpaste, as
brilliantly featured in the film Good Bye Lenin directed by Wolfgang
Becker. In the film, after the reunification of Germany a young man
hunts for the familiar East German packaging and jars in order to save
his sick mother from the pain of disillusionment and insecurity upon
her awakening from coma.
By the same token, it is nostalgia, or rather ‘sostalgia’ (nostalgia for
the Soviet past), that accounts for the popularity of Gastronome №1 in the
Moscow department store GUM. This successor of the famous Russian
grocery appeared in 2008 as an Aladdin’s cave of groceries of Soviet
repute, and a tribute to a way of life which would not stay in the past.
These items are not just Russian but Armenian and Byelorussian; in fact,
they represent the entire Soviet culinary empire. The time travel themes
reproduced in the department store take the shopper back to international
Soviet cuisine, and also to the real or vicarious memory of childhood
meals of Riga sprats, buckwheat porridge and tapaka chicken. Indeed,
tapaka chicken turned into a nostalgic image of the former Soviet Union.
Sostalgia became more than just a longing for the familiarity and comfort
of home; it came to evoke a sense of lost ties with a nation (a glorious
nation, now in ruins) of a national identity, and of meandering between
the past and the future. But how far can such a memory be trusted?
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Memory and (In)Authenticity. Myths of Yesteryear
One of the most important Soviet postulates was that of international-
ism. According to A. Genis and P. Weil, the authors of a popular and
humorously nostalgic book about Russian cooking in exile, in the
Soviet Union the idea of internationalism had materialized only in the
culinary sphere.17 It would seem that just as the Russian people were
described as ‘the elder brother of the other ethnicities (or nations) in
the former USSR’, Russian cuisine turned into the elder sibling of all
the other Soviet cuisines.18 Even simple explanations of ethnic dishes
echoed Russian dishes. ‘Dolma’, for example, is defined as ‘a kind of
golubtsi with vine leaves instead of cabbage leaves’. To tackle the bul-
warks of memory, real or imaginary, it is necessary to describe the culi-
nary myths of the USSR, mostly as they feature in the much acclaimed
Soviet culinary icon: The Book of Tasty and Healthy Food.19
The following analysis targets a duality typical of the culinary prac-
tices in the Soviet Union, just as it was peculiar to other aspects of
Soviet life. The generations who grew up in the USSR had to face two
diverging realities: an invented official reality and the very different
reality of their everyday lives. Post-socialist nostalgia may be described
as a longing to attain a sense of pride in the glorious socialist past, an
urge to reformat a belonging to a collective identity.20 Jonathan Bach,
for example, linked the newly recombined objects in post-transitional
East Germany to commodification and defined them as phenomenolog-
ically nostalgic.21 Consequently, though the function of the memory is
to store and reproduce information, it often serves as a distorted mirror
which magnifies a symbol rather than the genuine thing, while ignoring
many unpleasant aspects of the past.
Myth 1: (in)authenticity.
Dutch cheese, Latvian cheese, Swiss cheese and other pseudo-geograph-
ical denominations turned into Soviet brand names. Culinary appropria-
tion of well-known international brands also resulted in Soviet cham-
pagne, Armenian madeira and cognac. At the same time, it has been
repeatedly noted that the popular Olivier salad made up of diced veg-
etables with mayonnaise, whose variations are known in other places as
Russian salad, in Soviet days was nothing like its ancestor. The original
invention of a French chef had contained caviar, beef tongue and game,
amongst other ingredients and would now be considered inauthentic.
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Myth 2: equality.
A dish or a product could only find its way to the Soviet table if it
was declared popular and beloved by the masses. ‘A product for the
masses’ is a discursive manifestation of equality, which on paper had
always been a fundamental principle of socialism. Equality was the key
concept: equality of space and time, logocentricity instead of sequen-
tiality, everything on the table at the same time. Equality had several
dimensions: equality for women (liberation from household chores),
social equality for workers and peasants, equality for different ‘socialist
nations’, even equality for food products – equally diced and smothered
in mayonnaise.
The Olivier salad (Fig. 2) is perhaps the best illustration of the equal-
ity principle. It was nourriture de passage for all former Soviet citizens,
holiday food par excellence. With its ‘equal’ vegetables and meat diced
in a similar way, this iconic dish symbolized equality: ‘a dish of univer-
sal equality and brotherhood which did not recognize […] any conven-
tions or boundaries imposed by social class or property’.22 The thick
mayo had the function of turning these multi-coloured products into a
homogeneous and uniform mass, both literally and symbolically.
In reality, there were levels of equality in the USSR, different shops
and different products for ordinary people and for those who had a place
among the powers that be. For the nomenklatura, the people affiliated
with Politburo members, all products were of better quality, includ-
ing chocolates, as reported, for example, by Anya von Bremsen who
attended a nursery school for children of the Soviet elite.23 Incidentally,
even shops for higher-ups are known to have had rankings of their own,
Figure 2 Olivier salad.
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for those lower in the hierarchy and for Politburo members and their
affiliates.24
Myth 3: scarcity versus abundance.
The mantra of food abundance and food superiority reigned supreme: ‘In
terms of abundance and wealth of fish and fish products no other coun-
try can match the Soviet Union’.25 The statement is indicative of what
one could come across in cookery books. The reality was very differ-
ent, even linguistically, given that the verb used was not купить (‘buy’)
but достать (‘obtain despite obstacles’). People turned into hunters who
waited in endless queues to ‘obtain’ staples, such as meat or cheese. The
rhyme, well-known to all-Soviets, ran: В одни руки не больше штуки!
(Not more than one for one!). It presented quite a contrast with the fol-
lowing mouth-watering description: ‘Alongside different varieties of
sausages and ham, meat counters boast delicatessen on beautiful plat-
ters decorated with herbs and fringed with garnishes. Such meat products
account for altogether about 20 different items ranging from cold sucking
pig, veal roll, roast beef and entrecote to boiled tongue’.26
While the items above may have existed in special shops for the party
officials, this description read like a fairy tale to those who went to local
groceries (‘gastronoms’). Yet the very existence of such shops bred the
desire to join the ranks of the chosen few. For ordinary people even the
most innocent products were mythologized, and that is the reason why
such common fruit, such as bananas and tangerines, turned into holiday
foods: they could only be bought on the eve of red-letter days after queu-
ing for hours. New Year, for example, had come to be associated with the
smell of tangerines. Bananas were also once-a-year treats. Reportedly,
even Stalin loved bananas and care was taken that he always had a supply
of the fruit. A nostalgic love of the tropical fruit still endures for many,
especially of the older generation. To quote Marina Lewycka’s Two
Caravans: ‘Andriy […] being Ukrainian is greatly beloved of bananas’.27
Ironically, the funny comment is made by an African, a Malawian. Even
though the story unfolds after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the deeply
encoded subliminal myth of an elite aura of bananas appears to have sur-
vived the collapse of the social order.
Myth 4: science and industry versus art and craft.
The excellence and diversity of industrially produced products was
also one of the mantras of socialism in Russia: ‘The population should
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acquire […] a habit to consume instant food, powdered breakfasts,
semi-finished products, tinned foods – in fact, the entire range and
wealth of diverse ready-made and pre-cooked factory-produced arti-
cles. These […] products improve our health […] This is why they
are a key factor in liberating the woman from household chores for
more productive and creative work’.28 As apparent from this passage,
cooking was not regarded as creative work. Creativity in any form
was considered unpredictable and did not fit the equality principle.
Another interesting myth, which the same passage echoes, is that of
industrially produced foods being healthy. By today’s health stand-
ards tinned foods and instant foods are definitely not considered as a
healthy option.
After the transition, the culinary myths of the Soviet Union experi-
enced a transformation. In the mid-twentieth century, art was consid-
ered as too unpredictable, too difficult to slot into the mass and equality
framework. Memory plays havoc with this myth, so that now the food
of the Soviet yesteryear comes across as healthy and artsy. It is interest-
ing to trace the transformation of the supremacy of science and industry
over the art and craft myth. Somehow, what was extolled as science
in the fifties and sixties has now come to be regarded as art, and thus
industry is reincarnated as art and craft. Margarine and other trans- and
animal fats widely used in the fifties and sixties were then regarded
as much healthier than vegetable fats but will hardly be described as
healthy by dieticians today.
The greatest transformation is experienced by the myth of abun-
dance versus the reality of scarcity, with its ‘heroic’ aura of hunting and
gathering. The use of the word dostal (‘managed to get’) rather than
‘bought’ has now become a distant memory. (N)ostalgic shops now
store products which used to be on offer only in outlets for the nomen-
klatura, thus projecting an inauthentic retro-elitist image. Though con-
sumers are often reminded of special Politburo shops and the latent
and blatant inequality in the access to different foods, believing it is a
personal choice.
The most poignant nostalgia, however, is evoked by the alleged
unparalleled quality of the food of yesteryear. It emerged as a new post-
transitional myth in Russia as well as in other Eastern European coun-
tries and is replicated in familiar brands and packaging. A revival of the
Soviet brand comes with the slogan ‘Soviet means excellent!’ (Russian:
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Советское значит отличное!). At the glitzy GUM department store
in Moscow, in the vast retro-Soviet supermarket filled with dozens of
products in their ‘original’ packaging, the advertisements focus on ‘the
taste of our childhood’. The authenticity of the new (old) products is, of
course, in the eyes of the beholder.
By and large, this social behaviour reflects the ‘wishful thinking’
aspect of identity formation and aligns identity with space and its
objects: ‘Who we are is inextricably linked to where we are, have been
or are going’.29 As aptly put by S. Oushakine, ‘retrofitting’ the Soviet
experience signifies an inclination for an invented Soviet past: ‘As a
result, nostalgia for things Soviet is usually construed as a deliber-
ate or implicit denial of the present. But it also is often perceived as
a revisionist project of rewriting history, as a post-communist censor-
ship of sorts aimed at making the complex and troubling past more
user-friendly by reinscribing its reformatted version in the context of
today’s entertainment’.30 Thus the familiar icons represent secondary,
reinvented objects, a kind of simulacra, i.e. copies without an origi-
nal. The attribution to these objects takes on a semiotic function in the
present-day socio-cultural system.
Food and Diaspora
Through food people set out to change their identity in order to bond
with their new group, or make a statement affirming their ‘old’ identity.
Weil and Genis assert that culinary traditions provide inextricable links
to the old country for American immigrants from the Soviet Union.
Although the value of other things may change, hot dog will never be a
replacement for garlic sausage.31 Hence, food has a very direct link to
acculturation and multiple identity.
Food eaten in the old country for many seems the tastiest. This is a
memory trick which applies to both time and space. For the new gener-
ations, food, or rather the idea of childhood foods spans the time, over-
coming a temporal disjuncture. Memory serves as a means of travel
through generations. For the diaspora communities inhabiting different
space(s) the perception of time is split. Whereas it runs naturally in
their new home, in their mind’s eye time in the old country stands still.
However, there are multiple approaches to food memories:
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[…] not all immigrants are the same. Some come here to become
Canadians; others came to Canada to build their own small and bet-
ter Slovakia. Before long, the first ones become indistinguishable from
Canadians. The other group of immigrants is so busy living in their small
pseudo-Slovakia they hardly have time to get acquainted with Canada.
They are busy teaching their children Slovak, cooking halusky (tradi-
tional Slovak gnocchi), rehearsing Slovak songs and dances and […]
other gatherings.32
The second category of immigrants left their old home only in a physi-
cal sense. As Petro points out they relax in Slovakia where they are
invited to McDonalds in the evening and call it a day with a nightcap of
Scotch whisky. At ‘home’ in Canadian pseudo-Slovakia they finish the
trip with plum brandy ‘from their homeland’. Such attitudes are, with-
out doubt, typical of people of other nationalities as well.
Individuals may regress by reidentifying with their origins, hav-
ing found the alienation and malaise in maintaining a new identity too
much of a strain.33 The supply of Bulgarian cheese, bean soup, liuten-
itsa paste and banitsa on North American sites catering to Bulgarian
consumers, such as Malincho.com, proves this. The default foods for
Serbs are kaimak, aivar and burek. Russian and Polish shops provide
their own solutions to the issue of hybrid identity. As holiday foods,
such everyday default foods are a must, even though they have little
prestige in the old country. A case in point is the Russian Olivier salad,
which has been downgraded in Russia where it is now often consid-
ered as boring, everyday food.34 Yet it is still of paramount importance
for Russian diaspora feasts, because no other dish symbolizes so heart-
wrenchingly the memory of a country that has ceased to exist.
Some immigrants may opt for the new food immediately, thus mak-
ing a statement of allegiance to their new homeland:
Larissa embraces the bountiful blandness of Wonder Bread and Oscar
Meyer bologna in their new home, but for the young Anya it is as if food
has lost its meaning, without the context of her ‘real’ home – where food
meant so much more than just sustenance – and family to share it with:
‘depleted of political pathos, hospitality, that heroic aura of scarcity, food
didn’t seem much of anything anymore’.35
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Anya’s mother liked Western food as a protest against the Soviet politi-
cal system, but for Anya American food had no links with what food had
stood for in the old country except as a means of sustenance. Bonding
was more important than politics for Anya who was a teenager when
she immigrated to the USA.
Sometimes, geographically incongruous food items are re-contextu-
alized as in the following example, where Japanese sushi is served ‘like
pelmeni’ along with Russian food in a restaurant in so-called ‘Little
Russia’:
The men wore power suits and shiny shirts, the women sparkly dresses
and stiletto, all fitting the image of success current when they arrived in
the early 1990s. Cosmos [a Brighton Beach restaurant] was kitted out in
a style from the same period – all chrome and dark blues and blacks. […]
The tables were laid out with piles of grilled fish, caviar, meat, vats of
Russian salad. Sushi was on the menu too, but served in mountains like
pelmeni.36
Sushi and pelmeni, buckwheat kasha with parmeggiano or feta cheese,
pizza and banitsa – all those and many other untraditional combinations
should be regarded as hybrid tributes to the new, and as reverence for
the old.
Food as Oblivion and Protest
In Poland munching an innocent apple was recently perceived as a sign
of protest against Russian sanctions proscribing the imports of EU prod-
ucts, including Polish apples, to Russia. Examples of the use of food
as protest abound. They show that the discourse of food is interwoven
with many social and political issues whose dimensions relate to a cer-
tain point in time and space. Perhaps one of the most haunting descrip-
tions of the links between food, politics and the tricks played by mem-
ory is featured in Cooking History, a documentary by the Slovakian
director Peter Kerekes, which was awarded a special jury prize at a
documentary film festival in Toronto in May 2009. The film looks at
major European conflicts of the twentieth century from the perspec-
tive of some oft-ignored but crucial figures in warfare: military chefs.
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Figure 3 Dalmatian ham from Split.
These include Branko Trbovic, who cooked, tasted and tested food for
Josip Broz ‘Tito’, former leader of Yugoslavia. Trbovic explains how
different cultures’ foods were used aggressively to promote nationalist
agendas at meetings ostensibly convened to discuss Yugoslavian unity.
Croatian leader Franjo Tudjman served Dalmatian ham with olives
(Fig. 3) and Croatian pot roast, whereas Slobodan Milosevic offered
up a stereotypical Serb menu, a counter-meal of sour curds, Zlatibor
cheese and Serbian polenta. On the other hand, the menu in Sarajevo,
the capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina, included phyllo pastries, okra
soup and baby goat.
In these cases, food acted as a stand-in for flags, suggesting the deep
significance people attach to their national cuisines and cultures, even
when the foods do not appear markedly different to outside observ-
ers. Another interesting point made in the film was the allegedly differ-
ent food of the Serbs and the Croats. A former Yugoslav army cook, a
Croatian, says that even the names of the dishes were different, making
a note of some slight differences in the pronunciation, say, of roast liver,
not noticeable to the audience, which amounted to a denial of common
history and common memory.
Similarly, the current conflict between Russia and Ukraine has made
culinary waves. While the controversy around the beetroot soup, com-
monly known as borsht (Fig. 4), goes back a long time,37 the history
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Figure 4 Beetroot soup (Borsht).
of other dishes is now also subject to jealous scrutiny. Thus, duck with
apples is described by various culinary forum participants as either
Russian or Ukrainian, depending on their nationality. A typical argu-
ment, for instance, would claim that ‘as Ukraine has a much longer his-
tory than Russia, so of course, duck with apples is a Ukrainian dish’.38
Since the beginning of the Russian-Ukrainian conflict, Russian shops
outside Russia had to deal with customers’ refusal to buy Ukrainian
goods. In a Russian Beriozka shop in Sofia a woman who wanted kvass
(a traditional fermented beverage commonly made from rye bread, pop-
ular both in Russia and in Ukraine), refused to buy Ukrainian kvass
claiming: ‘I don’t buy anything Ukrainian’.39 Kvass, of course, is pro-
duced using the same method in many Slavic and Baltic countries, not
just in Russia. The Ukrainian foods salo, gorilka and galushki according
to some Russian ‘patriots’ turn people into banderovtsi.40 The description
of Ukrainian staples with an emphasis on salo (lard), even something as
unlikely and humorous as a chocolate-coated salo, and of Ukrainians as
saloedi (‘lard eaters’), represents a negative identity statement.
After the introduction of EU sanctions against Russia, a Russian
cartoon humorously advertised one hundred per cent Russian lobsters,
‘because they are all granted Russian nationality before being cooked!’
On a less humorous note, after Russian sanctions on EU goods in
response to the Western sanctions on Russian goods, the Internet was
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deluged with appeals to ignore Western foods: Нет! Западное не ем!
(‘I don’t eat any food that comes from the West!’).
Any mention of distorted memory triggers off numerous spiteful
comments, denials, accusations of falsification, name-calling. Historical
memes, which sometimes can be traced back to World War II, and
which often may be described by the French phrase nostalgie de la
boue are especially popular and come across as moral imperatives as in
the following forum postings on Runet: А я никогда деликатесы и не
жрал. Они для моральных уродов.Деды картофан с луком жрали,
а мы чем хуже (‘Gourmet foods are degenerate shit. I couldn’t be less
interested. Our grandparents were happy to eat potatoes and onions’.)
Indeed, Peter Pomerantsev is not far off the mark when he claims that
‘the Soviet Union was so successful in eradicating the old traditions of
Russian culture that there’s very little to pass on to the next generation
apart from culinary sentimentality’.41
Although by definition food is supposed to cater to nice things, culi-
nary disagreements seem to be as good a reason as any for an inter-
national conflict. In Luhansk in Ukraine, the summer of 2014 saw the
closure of the McDonald’s restaurants by Russian separatists. There
were threats to blow up the premises if the restaurants went on operat-
ing without permission. Moscow followed suit by lashing out at the
McDonald’s chain in Russia as a signal that the West was not welcome
there. Ostensibly, the Russian McDonald’s are being closed down for
health reasons. But analysts are sceptical because Russia is known to
have a tendency to ban foreign products, particularly food, for political
reasons. In the Donetsk Republic in 2016 Coca Cola and McDonalds
were likewise declared ‘enemies’, and their own locally produced drink,
similar to Cola, was on offer instead.42 Politics in cuisine is still a real
buzz. In restaurants in Gelendzhik in the Crimea the aggravated relations
with Western countries and Ukraine resulted in renaming some dishes
with such labels as ‘warm Obama with Merkel’s liver’, ‘Poroshenko’s
frittata with Merkel and Obama’, ‘Yatseniuk on an American cushion’
and ‘Sarkozy in a French bun’, to name just a few.43 However, there is
room for optimism due to appeals to common culinary memory rather
than oblivion. After a new armed conflict broke out in March 2016 in
the disputed Nagorny Karabach enclave between the Azerbaijanis and
the Armenians, an appeal slogan immediately began making the rounds
online: ‘Azeris and Armenians! Make dolma not war’.
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Food as Wrapping – Conclusion
Identity-building through food is an ongoing concern. Yet, caveat emp-
tor: the buyer beware! What is offered as iconic sweets, tinned fish, a
salad or any other memory-laden food, no matter what its historical
origin might have been, more often than not contains very different
additives from the original, authentic version. Though the image and
the brand may be the same and ring familiar bells, in such items there is
an abundance of new ingredients, should one bother to read: palm oil,
modified starch, a selection of E-numbers. The symbolic essence of the
food, its intangible value is intact but the content is very different. What
the shoppers buy is the nostalgic past, with its equality and its alleg-
edly healthy products, a reaffirmation of the greatness of a lost world.
Hence, despite the revival of Soviet foods, consumers basically look at
familiar images but consume a different content, i.e. eating changeling
foods, such as sweets, which are full of palm oil, glucose and different
E-numbers for flavour. Only the iconic wrapping looks the same.
It may be asserted that a quest for authenticity creates a culture of
convenience with its typical standardization of offers where the real
thing is substituted for make-believe agents. In our context, the origi-
nal turns into a pseudo-authentic replica where only the wrapping is a
good likeness. The concept of the pseudo-authentic replica was devel-
oped by J. Hendry who studied politeness in Japan and defined cer-
tain aspects of Japanese politeness, such as hiding and indirectness as
‘wrapping’.44 Likewise, what the imaginary food entails is symboliza-
tion and embellishment. Two different worlds, the past and the present,
have come together, but they continue to stay apart. It is only the wrap-
ping that matters because people buy symbols, not reality. The distinc-
tion between real and pseudo remains intact. Authenticity becomes a
construct. Although the packaging may be an exact replica of the origi-
nal, what is inside is not. The original product no longer exists, and the
new item becomes a simulacrum, a pseudo-authentic food of the past,
produced according to new standards and jurisdictions. The chasm of
time has not been bridged. Yet, we stick with the make-believe prod-
uct which for us is still full of magic, due to the tricks of memory.
Therefore, food comes to represent a new discursive currency as a way
to signal a desirable or non-desirable identity. As Benwell and Stokoe
argue, ‘We consume according to who we are or what we want to be’.45
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Consequently, the discourse of a reimagined and recoded past is in line
with certain invented aspects of history which fit the identity of an indi-
vidual or a group.
Notes
1 Margaret Visser, The Rituals of Dinner: The Origins, Evolution,
Eccentricities, and Meaning of Table Manner (New York, 1991) 10.
2 Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time: Swann’s Way. A Graphic Novel.
Adapted and illustrated by Stéphane Heuet (New York, London, 2015).
3 See, for example, www-personal.umich.edu/~kpearce/armtrueblue.htm,
accessed 1 April 2016.
4 The term chronotope is the centerpiece of Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of
meaning in literature as a cognitive element that refers to ‘the intrinsic
connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships’. See Mikhail Bakhtin,
‘Forms of time and of the chronotope in the novel’. In The Dialogic
Imagination. (Austin, Texas, 1981)) 84. Currently the concept is applied to
other areas of study.
5 Norman Fairclough, Language and Globalization (London, New York,
2006) 34.
6 Jack Goody, Cooking, Cuisine and Class. A Study in Comparative Sociology
(Cambridge, 1982) 152.
7 More details in Irina Perianova. The Polyphony of Food. Food through the
Prism of Maslow’s Pyramid (Newcastle upon Tyne, 2012) 97.
8 Salman Rushdie, Midnight Children (London, 1989).
9 Peter Pomerantsev, ‘Living it up in Brighton Beach’, London Review of
Books Vol. 34, No. 17 (2012) 34–5.
10 Many examples of this kind are provided in Irina Perianova, The Polyphony
of Food. Food through the Prism of Maslow’s Pyramid (Newcastle upon
Tyne: UK, 2012).
11 Roland Barthes, ‘Contemporary Food Consumption’, in Food and Culture.
A Reader. Carol Counihan and Penny Van Esterik (eds) (New York, 2008,
2nd ed.) 33.
12 Michael Agar, Language Shock. Understanding the Culture of
Communication (New York, 2002) 220.
13 Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York, 2001) 15.
14 Ibid.
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15 Roland Barthes, ‘Contemporary Food Consumption’, 33.
16 Ibid.
17 Peter Weil and Alexander Genis, Петр Вайль и Александр Генис. Русская
кухня в изгнании. (Moscow, 1998) 55.
18 For a detailed analysis of this phenomenon see Irina Perianova, The
Polyphony of Food, 164–167; Irina Perianova, ‘Culinary Myths of
the Soviet Union’, in Irma Ratiani (ed.), Totalitarianism and Literary
Discourse. 20th Century Experience (Newcastle upon Tyne, 2011) 160–76.
19 The Book of Tasty and Healthy Food: Книга о вкусной и здоровой пище,
Olga Molchanova et al. (eds.) (Пищепромиздат: Moscow, 1952) 80. The
publication was a Soviet culinary bible par excellence though in fact it was
patterned after the cookery book A Gift to Young Housewives by Elena
Molokhovets, published as early as 1861. The Book of Tasty and Healthy
Food was first published in 1939 with a foreword by Anastas Mikoyan,
the then Commissar of Food Industry. The best-known canonical edition,
that of 1952, contained many quotations from Stalin’s works which were
subsequently deleted. Between 1952 and 1999, the revised editions of
the book accounted for an impressive print run of 8 million copies. All
translations of the quotes have been made by me.
20 Sergei Oushakine, ‘We are nostalgic but we are not crazy. Retrofitting the
past in Russia’, in The Russian Review 66/3 (2007) 451–82.
21 Jonathan Bach, ‘The Taste Remains. Consumption, (N)ostalgia and the
Production of East Germany’, in Public Culture 14/3 (2002) 545–56.
22 Anna Kushkova, ‘В центре стола: зенит и закат салата „Оливье” ’, in
НЛО No. 76/4 (2005): http://magazines.russ.ru/nlo/2005/76/ku23.html,
accessed 20 May 2016.
23 Anya Bremzen, Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking. A Memoir of Food
and Longing (New York, 2013).
24 For a detailed description of these practices see e.g. Mihail Voslensky,
Номенклатура. Господствующий класс Советского Союза (Moscow,
1991); Anya Bremzen, Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking.
25 Book of Tasty and Healthy Food, 146.
26 Ibid, 146.
27 Marina Lewycka, Two Caravans (London, 2008) 199.
28 Book of Tasty and Healthy Food, 116.
29 R. Barnes, quoted in Bethan Benwell and Elizabeth Stokoe, Discourse and
Identity (Edinburgh, 2006) 210.
30 Sergei Oushakine, ‘We are nostalgic but we are not crazy’, 452.
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31 Peter Weil and Alexander Genis, Русская кухня в изгнании, 52.
32 The example of Peter Petro’s work is taken from the Literary Anthology
in Vesna Lopičić (ed.), Migrating Memories: Central Europe in Canada
Vol. 1 (Brno, 2010) 380.
33 George De Vos and Marcelo Suarez-Orozco, Status Inequality: The Self
in Culture (Newbury Park CA, 1990); Irina Perianova, The Polyphony of
Food, 104–11.
34 Anna Kushkova, ‘В центре стола: зенит и закат салата “Оливье”’,
in НЛО 76/4 (2005): http://magazines.russ.ru/nlo/2005/76/ku23.html,
accessed 20 May 2016.
35 See Ellah Allfrey’s review of Bremzen’s Mastering the Art of Soviet
Cooking: ‘From Kolbasa to Borscht, “Soviet Cooking” tells a personal
history’, https://www.wfyi.org/news/articles/from-kolbasa-to-borscht-
soviet-cooking-tells-a-personal-history, accessed 28 October 2018.
36 Pomerantsev, ‘Living it up in Brighton Beach’, 34.
37 See Perianova, The Polyphony of Food, 88–9.
38 https://www.edimdoma.ru/, accessed 20 April 2015.
39 Personal communication in Sofia. March 2016, Beriozka.
40 Svetlana Zhabotinskaya, Жаботинская С.А. Язык как оружие в войне
мировоззрений МАЙДАН-АНТИМАЙДАН: словарь-тезаурус
лексических инноваций. Украина, декабрь 2013 – декабрь 2014 (Kiev,
2014): http://uaclip.at.ua/zhabotinskaja-jazyk_kak_oruzhie.pdf, accessed
27 March 2016.
41 Pomerantsev, ‘Living it Up in Brighton Beach’, 34.
42 Незаконная ЛНР запретила в Луганской области гамбургеры и кока-
колy https://news.pn/en/public/104137, https://news.pn/en/public/104137,
accessed 14 February 2016.
43 http://hronika.info/obwestvo/71122-kakov-politiki-na-vkus-v-gelendzhike-
znayut.html, accessed 14 May 2016.
44 Joy Hendry, Wrapping Culture: Politeness, Presentations and Power in
Japan and Other Societies (Oxford, 1995).
45 Benwell and Stokoe, Discourse and Identity, 167.
About the Author
Irina Perianova has a PhD from Moscow Linguistic University. She
has taught intercultural communication and business English at the
University of National and World Economy in Sofia, Bulgaria for over
HCM 2018, VOL. 6, no. 1 19
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30 years. Her research bridges cultural and linguistic anthropology,
discourse analysis, sociolinguistics, pragmatics, intercultural commu-
nication and culinary linguistics. She has published extensively in dif-
ferent languages and took part in numerous international conferences
dedicated to these fields, often as a keynote speaker. She is a recipient
of several international research grants and awards, including a bur-
sary from ESSE (European Society for the Study of English) and ICCS
(International Council for Canadian Studies). Irina Perianova has con-
tributed to many national and international projects dedicated to educa-
tion and is a member of several editorial and executive boards.
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