How to Make a Russian Salad: Food, Art and Patriotism on the Russian Internet
How to Make a Russian Salad: Food, Art and Patriotism on the Russian Internet JAMES RANN University of Birmingham Abstract: People often now ask what our food means. But what happens when our food liter- ally spells something out? A form of popular creativity often treated with derision – namely, salads in which ingredients form pictures or words – is here read as an instructive example of the production and reproduction of patriotic ideology on the Russian internet. After a brief consideration of connections between salads and discourses of nation and class, this article considers pictorial salads in the context of postmodernism in art, architecture and politics. I propose that the way in which images of these salads are shared and discussed is typical not only of the antagonistic, politicised space of the Russophone internet, but also of the online “prosumption” of images in general, which, I ultimately suggest, does not empower and liber- ate, but rather replicates the constrictive scopic regime of Socialist Realism. Keywords: prosumption, postmodernism, foodways, Russia, image sharing, Internet 2.0, ide- ology, patriotism o one would now dispute that what is important about food is not just how it tastes, but N also what it means. Not only are restaurants, recipes and diets an increasingly promi- nent part of the media landscape we inhabit, but, after about half a century of trying, scholars have finally established that food is a worthy and uncontroversial object of inquiry since, as an element of culture, it can be understood as ‘a system of communication, a body of images, a protocol of usages, situations and behavior’, and that it ‘constitutes an information; it signi- fies’ (Barthes 2008: 29; cf.
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