This paper deals with internal household strategies for regaining control over quality, safety and the meaning of food, as applied by people in Poland. Using material gathered by interviewing representatives of two generations, the paper analyses the bottom-up, scattered and intra-family solutions woven into the structure of everyday life. Although alternative food networks and food activism are emerging nowadays as an important area of criticism towards contemporary food production and supply, the paper goes back to the choices made within the mainstream food system. Although the interviewees could be classified as middle-class and for this reason are expected to eagerly adapt to new lifestyle patterns, the research material allows one to focus not only on the novelty in people's culinary choices, but above all-on the continuity. Forms of domestic cooking and buying provisions for the household-as embodied skills based on physical work and time available-are interpreted in the light of contemporary food distrust. The similarities between late modern and traditional mechanisms of maintaining trust are analysed, showing how different layers overlap, shaping a mix of traditional and modern forms.

This dispatch outlines some of the immediate consequences and long-term challenges posed by the Ukraine war on food security and production systems in Eastern Europe. We draw particular attention to the food aid and provisioning realities around many million (and increasing) numbers of Ukrainian refugees, and the current lack of systemic, government-coordinated responses to the humanitarian crisis. Further, we outline the distinct forms of agriculture characterizing Eastern Europe, notably, the short supply chains and farming networks that are socially and environmentally unique and valuable, and are a result of the persistence of smaller, family-led farms. However, these farms and farmers are facing increasingly difficult times as a result of inflation, rising fuel prices, rationing, climate stress, export bans, and now large numbers of refugees arriving to some already very poor rural areas. We highlight the need for these multiple stresses to be discussed together, for their consequences on food production in the short and long term, especially as the effects of the war extend beyond the region. These stresses include, in the immediate, a lack (and a lack of reliability on) of state aid and infrastructures for refugee hosts and food aid organizations and, in the longer term, persisting EU-policy and market pushes toward intensification that will greatly challenge the smallholder system in Eastern Europe.

This article examines the future-oriented use of the culinary past in Poland’s food discourse through a qualitative analysis of popular food media (printed magazines and TV). We analyze how interpretations of food and culinary practices from the past are connected to contemporary debates. We contend that media representations of the culinary past co-create projects of Polish modernization in which diverse voices vie for hegemony by embracing different forms of engagement with the West and by imagining the future shape of the community. We distinguish between a pragmatic and a foodie type of culinary capital and focus on how they differently and at times paradoxically frame cultural memory and tradition. We observe the dynamics of collective memory and oblivion, and assess how interpretations of specific periods in Poland’s past are negotiated in the present through representations of material culture and practices revolving around food, generating not only contrasting evaluations of the past but also diverging economies of the future. Finally, we explore tradition as a set of present-day values, attitudes, and practices that are connected with the past, but respond to current concerns and visions of the future.

The aim of this article is to analyse the political aspects of food and their significance as an object of study. The first author of the article has studied Polish society as an insider, while the other author had previously conducted research in other countries and three years ago started exploring Poland and Polish gastronomy, finding himself in the role of outsider. Both scholars have been recently working together. The power relations between the societies and the academic worlds from which they come from turned out to be crucial to the research dynamics and became one of the paper’s key interests. Three main topics provide the structure of the collaborative paper: 1) the question of the authors’ positionality; 2) food as a phenomenon that is intrinsically political, and the legitimacy issues related to its study within academia and to scholars’ engagement outside it; and 3) the power and inequality dimensions of food research. The authors agree that inextricable connection of food and politics has not only an academic or theoretical dimension, but impacts the realities of people’s lives.

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