Memory and Oblivion in Food Discourse in Post-Soviet Eastern Europe

INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL FOR HISTORY, CULTURE AND MODERNITY www.history-culture-modernity.org Published by: Uopen Journals Copyright: © The Author(s). Content is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Licence eISSN: 2213-0624 ‘Something Borrowed, Something New’: Memory and Oblivion in Food Discourse in Post-Soviet Eastern Europe Irina Perianova HCM 6 (1): 1–20 DOI: 10.18352/hcm.530 Abstract The article highlights the discourse of food as it relates to memory and oblivion. Though memory is an ability to store and reproduce infor- mation, frequently individual or even collective reproductions hardly match reality. As an object of longing in reconstructing and reimagining the past to fit real or perceived identity, food is one of the mainstays of nostalgia. Nostalgia is also the reason why an old narrative, when it is refashioned and imported into a new frame as a new narrative, may be of doubtful veracity. As our food memories bridge the chasms of time and space and define not only our eating habits but our identity, the importance of what and how we remember cannot be overstated. The object of the article is threefold. On the basis of the culinary myths of the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, it shows how memory traps result in a non-isomorphic perception of reality. Secondly, it describes the transformation of food memories for a diaspora. Finally, it illustrates certain functions of food, such as protest, which may be viewed as a challenge to oblivion. Keywords: Memory, food, identity, chronotope, culinary myth, socialism, wrapping HCM 2018, VOL. 6, no. 1 1 © IRINA PERIANOVA, 2018 | DOI: 10.18352/hcm.530 Downloaded from Brill.com09/27/2021 06:22:55PM This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license. via free access PERIANOVA Introduction Our food memories shape our eating habits and, to a significant extent, our identities. Such memories reconnect us to a bygone time and space and trigger off deep-ingrained memories of feelings and emo- tions, states of minds and the body. In a way, food memories bridge the chasms of time and space. Childhood foods therefore are great unifiers because ‘we are eating cultural history and value as well as family memories’.1 Perhaps the best-known example of the importance of childhood foods as a means of travel to a bygone time is that of Proust’s ‘madeleines’. Interestingly, in a recent graphic novel adaptation of Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu2 pride of place is given to madeleines in a two-page spread. In one of its famous scenes, the narrator’s eating a madeleine cake provokes a rush of memories of his childhood in the vil- lage of Combray. The visual aspect of memory, which stands out in the novel, does so even more in its graphic version. Indeed, when we talk to people about their favourite foods, the conversation almost always returns to the things they loved as a child. Thus the images of food match our sense of collective and personal identity. This claim may be illustrated by the following popular online identity tests of the eating habits of Russian and Armenian Americans, both of which feature several questions related to food. Are you Russian? Do you prefer gherkins in brine or pickled gherkins? Do you eat factory-produced mayonnaise? Do you make Olivier salad for holidays? Can you prepare three dishes using buckwheat? Are you Armenian? You have philo dough, string cheese or See’s candy in your freezer. You serve hummus and tabbouleh with your taco chips. You shovel food on other people’s plates when they aren’t looking. You think pilaf is one of the four food groups.3 These amusing tests highlight several important issues, such as the nature of edible chronotopes4 and ‘default foods’, as well as cooking HCM 2018, VOL. 6, no. 1 2 Downloaded from Brill.com09/27/2021 06:22:55PM via free access SOMETHING BORROWED, SOMETHING NEW traditions and practices. Besides, they are indicative of their creators’ ethnic background and origin. Obviously, the Armenian-ness test was created by Americans: Taco chips, unknown in Armenian cuisine and a staple of Mexican Texan food, mentioned together with Middle Eastern hummus, are a clear example of re-contextualization. According to Norman Fairclough: When processes of globalization affect a particular social entity such as a nation-state, a relationship is set up between the ‘outside’ and the ‘inside’ of that entity. This includes practices, networks of practices, orders of discourse, discourses, genres and/or styles which already exist outside the entity […]. The relationship between outside and inside can be seen as a relationship of recontextualization – external entities are recontextualized, relocated within a new context.5 The interdiscursivity of Armenian food in the American context illustrates how old foods make room for new ones, and vice versa. The childhood foods which are traceable to the ethnic origin are a medium of bonding and affiliation and show the commonality of memory. To quote Jack Goody: ‘The continuity of borscht may provide some thread of living to those passing through the years following the October Revolution, just as a hamburger clearly states to many an American that he is home and dry’.6 Food familiarity outlives states. Riga sprats were touted on Channel One Russia (ORT) commercials as ‘a typical Russian food’ (italics IP) as late as 20107 – a culinary afterthought and aftertaste of the Soviet empire which had ceased to exist more than twenty years before that. The fact that Riga is now the capital of Latvia, an independent state, seemed to be irrelevant. Identity-related culinary issues abound in other parts of Europe as well. For instance, the question ‘who does banitsa belong to?’ may provoke diverse answers on the Balkans, depending on where people live. Banitsa (phyllo pastry with different fillings, the most popular one being white feta cheese) is known in different countries under different names: burek, tyropita, bugatsa, etc (Fig. 1). Though it has many variations, it is part of the cultural heritage of the people who live in Serbia, Slovenia, Croatia, Albania and Bulgaria. By the same token, Salman Rushdie’s neologism ‘chutnification’ in Midnight Children8 is an apt description of food as an encapsulator HCM 2018, VOL. 6, no. 1 Downloaded from Brill.com09/27/20213 06:22:55PM via free access PERIANOVA Figure 1 Banitsa, burek, bugatsa. of historical memory for those who had lived through the Partition of India in 1947. Furthermore, food is of utmost importance for different diasporas as a means of bonding, affiliation and continuity. As shared by Peter Pomerantsev: ‘When my grandparents, who emigrated to Brighton Beach in 1980, sent photos of themselves to friends back in Kiev it was always in front of a table full of food’.9 The names of Brighton Beach restaurants in New York are notably, and nostalgically, Russian: Tatiana, Primorski, At Mother-in-Law’s, etc.10 In Barthes’ words, food signifies ‘materially a pattern of immaterial realities’.11 The historicity of food is transformed into a situation, and the thread of memory, real or fictitious, creates a stereotypical frame of reference for an individual, as illustrated by the following observa- tion: ‘In the sixties my father suddenly “discovered” he was Irish and started talking about corned beef and cabbage as soul food’.12 Note the keywords discovered and suddenly, which show the son’s attitude to the newly found Irishness of his father. The quotation shows how food may change the individual’s frame of reference, and determine a new approach to lifestyle through brand new favourite meals, even in case of unproven claims. And, of course, food is intertwined with nostalgia. In the twentieth century ‘nostalgia’, a term coined from the Greek nostos (‘return home’) and algia (‘longing’) became a metaphor for the ambivalent immigrant, HCM 2018, VOL. 6, no. 1 4 Downloaded from Brill.com09/27/2021 06:22:55PM via free access SOMETHING BORROWED, SOMETHING NEW the inassimilable immigrant, or even the anti-assimilationist immigrant. Today’s nostalgic, according to Svetlana Boym, is ‘a displaced person who mediates between the local and the universal’.13 In her characteri- zation of nostalgia as a condition in which a person moves between the poles of local/individual and universal/collective, Boym suggests a polar- ization between place of residence and place of origin.14 Looking back in time for many is not only nostalgic but evokes the image of utopia, of a lost world of childhood, of food as status and power and of food as a dream. Barthes goes as far as to state that ‘when a person drinks red wine that person is actually drinking, he is actually not drinking red wine at all but the idea of red wine’.15 He adds that ‘memory, real or false, thus creates desire which is sublimated and placed into a specific situation’.16 The wave of Eastern European (n)ostalgia spawned dozens of web- sites offering thousands of former East German, Bulgarian and Soviet products, as well as media narratives conjuring up images of these products for consumers. Ostalgia resulted in a return of some formerly popular items in East Germany, including gherkins from the Spree for- est and sausages from Thuringia, as well as Rot-Weiss toothpaste, as brilliantly featured in the film Good Bye Lenin directed by Wolfgang Becker. In the film, after the reunification of Germany a young man hunts for the familiar East German packaging and jars in order to save his sick mother from the pain of disillusionment and insecurity upon her awakening from coma.

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