Introduction
The colloquial phrase “you are what you eat” suggests the agency and transformative capacity of food that anthropologists – from Levi-Strauss to Mary Douglas – have long been acutely aware of. As an essential aspect of all human life, food provides an intriguing focal point for the rituals of exchange, commensality and production that surround it. Despite the categorical scarcity of food in socialist and early post-socialist Poland, these rituals and relations were ever present.
Through this project, I would like to propose that the production, procurement and consumption of food in socialist and post-socialist Poland can be used as optics elucidating why the Russian socialist occupation was ultimately unsuccessful. Before I can make this case, I will briefly outline how communism was unsuccessful in Poland, and how food should be considered an actor in its failure.
Poland became governed by a socialist party in 1947, two years after the end of the second World War and the Yalta agreement that Poland would operate within Stalin’s sphere of influence. While socialist and communist parties had existed in Poland before then, their presence was always peripheral and made marginal by the dominant ideology of the Roman Catholic Church, a Christian sect typically aligned with West. In fact, despite attempting it at a later date, Stalin is known to have said “fitting communism onto Poland is like putting a saddle on a cow” (Kniffel 2005: 14). Indeed, between the deeply embedded Catholic religiosity and predominance of peasant agriculture, Stalin had his work cut out for him in trying to paint Poland red. When Nikita Khrushchev replaced Stalin, it didn’t take long for the Police populace to take advantage of his comparatively lax rule and protest against their living and working conditions. 1956 saw a large-scale strike in Poznan with laborers demanding “bread and freedom”, overtly linking their political dissatisfaction with their hunger. Such strikes and demonstrations punctuated Poland’s timeline before culminating as Solidarnosc, the solidarity movement in 1980. Lead by Lech Walesa, Solidarnosc represented a national concentrated effort to shirk foreign occupation and reestablish Poland as a sovereign state with Westward looking ideals.
Map of Poland
The Solidarity Movement, 1980
As briefly alluded to above, one of the central points of aggregation for Polish citizens under socialism was hunger. Food was scarce and through official channels was only accessible in rationed amounts. Throughout this web-essay I will be examining how the centralized state control over food was challenged at every point of its production and consumption in what might be considered micro-rebellions. This resistance bridges the human and non-human realms when the agency of food is acknowledged through Actor Network Theory. Actor Network Theory, as championed by Bruno Latour, dissolves object/subject and human/non-human dichotomies by analyzing actions as products of mutually affecting actors connected by a relational network (Latour 2002). This allows the complex and dialogical relationships between things and people to be considered as valid components of social occurrences. Thus using such a framework paints food and food technologies as actors in the resistance against socialism in Poland.
The following pages will focus on three areas in which food was used to subvert socialism and consequently create a Poland in resistance. First, I will examine the role of the peasantry in providing what collective farms failed to, and how their deep cultural roots precluded their elimination despite pressure to collectivize. Next, I will unpack how official channels of procuring food in urban spaces were sidestepped and reinvented through extra-legal practices that shifted the locus of control from the state to informal social networks. Finally, I will consider how Western foods in the late-socialist and post-socialist period were coveted and cherished for their enchanting capacity, which came from both their material qualities and symbolic association with the capitalist world. In conjunction, these three areas trace the duration of the socialist occupation of Poland and indicate the inevitability of its fall.