Ambivalent Traditions: Transforming Gender Symbols and Food Practices in the Czech Republic

See discussions, stats, and author profiles for this publication at: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/266463209 Ambivalent Traditions: Transforming Gender Symbols and Food Practices in the Czech Republic ARTICLE · JANUARY 2003 READS 3 1 AUTHOR: Haldis Haukanes University of Bergen 23 PUBLICATIONS 36 CITATIONS SEE PROFILE All in-text references underlined in blue are linked to publications on ResearchGate, Available from: Haldis Haukanes letting you access and read them immediately. Retrieved on: 26 March 2016 Volume 21, Number 1 AMBIVALENT TRADITIONS: TRANSFORMING GENDER SYMBOLS AND FOOD PRACTICES IN THE CZECH REPUBLIC Haldis Haukanes, University of Bergen © 2003 Haldis Haukanes All Rights Reserved The copyright for individual articles in both the print and online version of the Anthropology of East Europe Review is retained by the individual authors. They reserve all rights other than those stated here. Please contact the managing editor for details on contacting these authors. Permission is granted for reproducing these articles for scholarly and classroom use as long as only the cost of reproduction is charged to the students. Commercial reproduction of these articles requires the permission of the authors. Introduction: From shortage to plenty The question, then, is: to what extent and how do people change their daily Studies of consumption are often consumption practices and their everyday diet? focused upon individual identity and particularly To what extent do new ideas influence the way on individuals’ production of selves by the people think about their own food? The changes means of relating to a market of goods and that people make are not only dependent on an services. Focusing on consumption involves not abundance of alternatives or on financial only an examination of individual consumers resources, but must also be seen in relation to vis-à-vis the market, however. It also involves questions of identity involving ideas about the considerations of relations between individuals, modern and the traditional, about the Czech and groups and the nation and, not least, relations the non-Czech. Not least, people’s dietary between family members. Changes in choices must be seen in relation to wider issues consumption patterns, resources and practices of kinship, gender and generation, including the have to be negotiated within families. continuous process of negotiating taste and This paper will deal will family- and individual preferences within each family. gender-related consumption issues, examined Background with regards to changes in dietary regimes in post-communist Czech Republic, where an Since 1990 I have been working on economy of plenty, with many new choices and problems of the post-communist transformation alternatives, has replaced the socialist economy in Czech villages; in my research, daily life of shortage. issues, agriculture and the production of food has been a main focus (Haukanes 1993, 1999).1 Last Scarcity was a key experience of daily year I carried out a more specific research life of actually existing/lived socialism – project on food, consumption and health, in although it varied, in time and degree, between connection with which I conducted in-depth countries. The Czech agricultural sector was interviews with twenty-four women, mostly from among the more efficient in the Comecon Union, the working or lower-middle classes, all of so there was – for most of the socialist period - whom were responsible for the preparation of no real shortage of food among Czech and food for their families. Eleven of the women live Slovak people. But certain types of scarcity in the town of Plzen and the thirteen remaining nevertheless prevailed; southern fruit were scarce live in different small villages in South Bohemia, all year, fresh fruit and vegetables were difficult scattered over an area with a radius of about five to find during winter time and quality meat kilometers2. Before I met the women I seldom found its way to the butcher’s block. interviewed, they had all filled out a form where Such types of food were scarce, and those that they had noted down one week’s “food-work”: were more readily available were still limited by the meals that they had prepared, what they had lack of choice. After the opening of Czech been cooking and for whom. The interviews markets to the global economy, Czech proceeded partly as a deeper probing of the consumers have been faced with a number of information given on the form, and partly as an new products to choose among, and are “organized” conversation on core topics such as confronted continually with dietary ideas from a food and gender, food and national identity, and range of different culinary cultures, through food and pollution. Changes in the diet were media - newspapers, magazines and television- explicitly addressed in all the interviews. shows – as well as through advertising. Volume21, Number 1 My knowledge of today’s consumption sauerkraut – was for many people Sunday food patterns, diet and preferences is most developed in former times. Their status has changed from in relation to the countryside. Interviewing urban Sunday food to everyday food, but they are women has given me a limited but interesting, nevertheless thought of as national classics - body of comparative material. One important klasika (see also Ulehlová-Tilschová difference between the rural and the urban relates 1945:557ff). to the production of foodstuffs and the extensive Dumplings – between national pride and subsistence farming practiced in Czech villages3. unhealthy old -fashionedness Subsistence farming, which provides a seasonal abundance of various products, demands a Food is an important symbol of group greater expenditure of time spent on food-work identity and an important marker of boundaries; from villagers than from town people4. When it can signify youth culture or class identity comparing meal structures and patterns of (Bourdieu 1984), or it can be a metaphor for a consumption, however, there are no clear particular nation and a signifier of ethnic indications that urban and rural women cook community (see for example Bell and Valentine very differently. The difference is not so much 1997). In the Czech kitchen, dumplings appear to between the rural and the urban as between have a special status. During my first stay in the generations: the younger women – both in South Bohemian countryside (1990/91) I villages and in towns – are more likely to be encountered many people who had never met a inclined to substitute traditional cooking with foreigner before, at least not one from Norway. lighter and more “modern” dishes. This indicates The first questions I received were likely to be a change in consumption patterns which is also the following: Do you like our food? Have you explicitly identified by many of my informants; tasted dumplings? Do you have dumplings in and which I have observed in practice in some of Norway too? - thereby indicating that dumplings the village homes that I have visited and are typically Czech; they represent something observed during the last decade. special that is not found in all other countries. Dumplings have a special symbolic status in Below I shall examine these changes themselves, but they are also special because of and the challenges they bring to families and the fact that they are part of dishes thought of as individuals through focusing on a key example, Czech classics. Wheat flour dumplings namely the dumpling, and its changing symbolic (houskové knedlíky) belong to what most people and nutritional place in the Czech kitchen during consider to be the national Czech food - Vepro- the last decade. Before I move on to the knedlo-zelo , i.e. pork with sauerkraut and dumplings, let me say a few words about dumplings5. Dumplings served with gravy and changes in consumption practices during well-cooked meat, be it beef, pork, game or – communism as I know it from the South mostly in villages – rabbit, represent another Bohemian countryside. combination which is typical of the Czech Scarcity and lack of choice in shops did cuisine. not mean that the diet did not change in this Meat and dumpling based dishes are not period. When talking to older/middle-aged only associated with the traditional and Czech, people about the diet of their youth, they give a they are also associated with a certain kind of picture that is quite different from the meat- masculinity involving notions of male strength. centred and rather heavy diet I met when I first Men, and in particular manual labourers, are came to South Bohemia in 1990 (meat served for believed to need lots of meat, and in particular to lunch almost everyday, including a bouillon- love meat prepared traditionally and served with based soup as a starter, and often a piece of meat dumplings. “Men need meat;” “They want meat or some sausages for supper as well). The pre- with sauce and dumplings;” “men like a proper war and early post-war diet was, for “ordinary piece of meat – if there’s no meat there’s no people” at least, a much simpler one. According lunch;” “men are demanding when it comes to to older villagers I have talked to, meat as a main food, they want meat with dumplings and dish was in many families served only on nothing else. These are typical comments on Sundays, and the everyday lunch often consisted food and gender that I’ve heard from Czech of potato- or milk-based dishes or a soup only. women as they discuss their male relatives’ food What is thought of as traditional Czech food preferences, and which I met during the today - dishes such as dumplings served with interviews too. On the other hand “women like meat and gravy, or pork with dumplings and Volume21, Number 1 salads and pasta;” “women like sweets;” or even The traditional mid-day meal is the – “women are more modest, they eat what is on main meal of the day in Czech homes and is of the table and don’t have special demands.”6 the kind that in modern vocabulary could be called slow-food, particularly when it comes to In the homes of the women I sauces and soups made “from scratch.” When interviewed, the division of labor was traditional.

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