10-on-1

1 Topic :

Food culture in Poland

10 facts about topic: 

1. 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.

2. Food appears important to how many people now organize their lives.

3. Food ways, shaped by industrial and economic changes in production and consumption, have themselves become fraught with anxiety (Östberg 2003). 

4. Food culture sometimes appears as a response and a salve to these problems, in the shape of practices like the Slow Food movement, organic food production, ‘food miles’ projects, freeganism, no-waste, and the cultivation of ‘local produce’ (Lavin 2013).

5. These issues of food-as-individuated-late-modern experience are also beginning to emerge in Poland (Derek 2017) although they appear against a backdrop of other changes specific to this region of the world. 

6. They criticize the ‘Western’ framing of Polish food-ways—often internalized by Poles themselves—where Poland is only understood within a liberal-democratic, capitalist paradigm. Here Poland’s development is assumed to mirror the evolution of late capitalism elsewhere, yet food-ways have undergone changes specific to Poland. However, there is both continuity and change.

7. This identity crisis could even be observed in the ambivalence Poles had to the fats and oils they used.

8. In Poland, dietitians are constantly deliberating over whether olive oil is healthy, whether it can be used at high temperatures, whereas the Italians don’t have these dilemmas, because they just cook everything with that olive oil.

9. The parents and grandparents are important because they are often intimately involved in the food production process and/or know how to make complicated Polish basics from scratch.

10. In Poland, too, the rapid changes of the transformation (Sztabiński and Sztabiński 2014, pp. 8–18) had the effect of decreased social trust (Sztabiński and Sztabiński 2014) so anxieties around general change mirror fears around change in food (and can often feed into each other). 

https://doi.org/10.3390/socsci11020044