Eating Our Way to Authenticity: Polish Food Culture & the Post-Socialist ‘Transformation’

Abstract

Of growing interest to social scientists in recent years is the emergence of food culture, i.e., the consumption and lifestyle behaviours of those who harbour a particular preoccupation with food. In many ways, food culture could be used as an index for late modernity and late capitalism—we can identify in its midst various processes of individuation, abstractions of moral consumption, and attempts at mitigating against various late modern processes. Food culture has also emerged in recent years in Poland as an analogous process to the arrival of late capitalism. In this way, in Poland, as elsewhere, food could be understood as an ontologically compelling medium for metaphysical concerns that the structural used to support—for example, moral, ethical, political, and identity-based concerns. The following paper will make an account for how Polish food bloggers understand authenticity in their food choices and lifestyles, and how this is heavily determined by the Polish ‘post-socialist’ context, which is also a new emergent field of enquiry in Polish food studies. The paper will therefore explore the three themes of authenticity that emerge from the interviews and determine that something is authentic to the bloggers when it is (a) free from lies, (b) true to itself, and/or (c) made by the bloggers (‘DIY’). The paper will consequently argue that the bloggers’ engagement with food, and their broader lifestyle choices, are contingent on these perceived notions of authenticity and, indeed, authenticity is something that they are always trying to secure in their lives, often through food itself. Moreover, these themes of authenticity, and the categories that underpin them, are often closely connected to the post-socialist experience. Abstractions of time, alienation, community, the environment, food production and identity all come to be anxious categories post-1989, and the bloggers often narrate their experiences with food and lifestyles in relation to these concerns. For the Polish food bloggers, therefore, authenticity is a confused and contested category in post-socialism, but also late modernity, and food culture becomes one way of negotiating this.

1. Introduction

An emerging trend that has become increasingly recognisable across late-capitalist societies is the phenomenon of ‘food culture’. This food culture refers to a particular preoccupation with food, often with attendant practices, such as dining, food blogging, lifestyle media or the establishment of food businesses—although the dominant theme is a turn towards food as a way of negotiating one’s life and selfhood. Food culture can be rich with different ideologies—moral, political, identity-based and commensality-inclined—and it should be treated as distinct from ‘foodie culture’, which could be understood as concerning itself more specifically with questions of ‘taste’ and identity.

The emergence of food culture, in fact, can be understood not as something in a series of shifts, but as a space where there are several things happening at the same time, within the broader context of late modernity. Firstly, we see that the structural has dissipated into different logics of individuation (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim 2002; Bauman 2000)—with moral, political and cultural projects (among others) now primarily the responsibility of the individual. The phenomenon of ‘risk society’ (Beck 1992) has forced the subject to double down in order to hedge their bets in an increasingly unstable world. Likewise, the shift from production-led capitalism to consumer-led capitalism, has made product variability key (Roseberry 1996), with new morally charged commodities, including food, appearing in increasingly more abstract iterations (Zukin and Maguire 2004). The logic of consumption therefore comes to the fore as a compelling form of self-actualisation (Bauman 2007). At the same time, with ‘lifestyles’ emerging as a key aspect of identity-formation (Giddens 1991), alternative modes of production, including blogging and cooking have become key to self-making (De Solier 2013). Food appears important to how many people now organise their lives.

These processes of individuation play out against other aspects of late modernity, such as alienation, fragmentation, the burdens of self-reflexivity, technological changes, time-space compression, urbanisation, and environmental degradation. Foodways, shaped by industrial and economic changes in production and consumption, have themselves become fraught with anxiety (Östberg 2003). Food culture sometimes appears as a response and a salve to these problems, in the shape of practices like the Slow Food movement, organic food production, ‘food miles’ projects, freeganism, no-waste, and the cultivation of ‘local produce’ (Lavin 2013). These initiatives are often attempts at mitigating against the real and perceived problems that individuals identify in their day-to-day lives, as well as in food production itself.

These issues of food-as-individuated-late-modern experience are also beginning to emerge in Poland (Derek 2017) although they appear against a backdrop of other changes specific to this region of the world. These changes, often understood in terms of the 1989 ‘transition’/‘transformation’ in the Polish context, are central to a new emergent field of food studies in Poland, which has been steadily growing in strength over the last two decades.

Once maligned, now increasingly respected, Polish food studies has become an exciting new field for scholars with an interest in foodways and attendant phenomena (Hryciuk and Król 2020). In recent years, Polish researchers have produced entire volumes on food identities in the EU context (Boni and Matijevic 2019); on trust, risk and food fears in a post-socialist context (Bachórz and Kopczyńska 2018); taste (Czas Kultury 2013 c. Hryciuk and Król 2020), along with others. These studies place significant focus on the nature of foodways and changing food behaviours, but they also increasingly use food as a tool to investigate other matters, with some Polish scholars making a case for the broader interdisciplinary value of interrogating food and foodways (Boni 2019; Bachórz and Parasecoli 2020).

Nevertheless, the centre of gravity to much of the food studies activity in Poland has been the nature of developments the country has experienced over the last 30 years. This is not surprising, for Poland has undergone tremendous changes since the collapse of Communism in 1989, some of which are only being fully interrogated now. As Straczuk (2016) notes, Polish sociology post-1989 failed to scrutinise the everyday microprocessors of ‘the transformation’—the assumption being that Poles would seamlessly adapt to the new system, with relatively little complaint. These ideological assumptions, 30 years on, are now being interrogated in the context of, not least of all, citizen unrest and the ’illiberal turn’ in Poland and other Eastern European countries.

This teleological understanding of Polish history is scrutinised more broadly by Jehlička and Smith (2007), Bachórz (2018), Kopczyńska (2018), Straczuk (2018) and Boni and Matijevic (2019). They criticise the ‘Western’ framing of Polish foodways—often internalised by Poles themselves—where Poland is only understood within a liberal-democratic, capitalist paradigm. Here Poland’s development is assumed to mirror the evolution of late capitalism elsewhere, yet foodways have undergone changes specific to Poland. However, there is both continuity and change.

Food, and an abundance thereof, was an important part of Polish culture (Jarosz 2016, p. 659). Under communism, however, food production was centralised, with the state theoretically maintaining a monopoly on its access, and queuing for food and food shortages during this time became common. Consumers became attuned to securing goods regardless of need or purpose, and entire informal social networks emerged in order to subsidise shortages (Burrell 2003). With the collapse of communism and the emergence of diversity and choice in the market, ‘consumption of western goods has not only become an important part of many people’s identity and social status, but has also acquired an important symbolic meaning at the level of CEE societies as a whole’ (Jehlička and Smith 2007, p. 9).

Nevertheless, researchers have found that the informal way of securing goods and products remains to this day (Jarosz 2016; Mroczkowska 2019; Straczuk 2018) running alongside these new commodity chains. ‘A growing movement of more or less formalised alternative food-provision communities…bring farmers and city-dwellers together’ (Straczuk 2018, p. 71) in a dovetail between traditional procurement strategies and contemporary middle-class consumption models. Indeed, Pine (2015, p. 25) describes how ‘the grey economy parallels that of the state, dominates many aspects of everyday life, and has its own kind of morality that links it to the family and household, relations of trust, and extended sociality’. Existing smallholder producers, on the other hand, have had a difficult time adjusting to new EU frameworks which Pine (2015, p. 37) argues ‘[stepped] into the gap left by the socialist state’ with strict new agricultural policies that have left many at a disadvantage.

Food fears, on the other hand, have increased (Kopczyńska 2018; Bachórz 2018), and have been shown to mirror a lack of trust in more abstract structural systems (Straczuk 2018), whereas identity and community fears in the context of Europeanisation have likewise been shown to play out through food behaviours (Boni and Matijevic 2019). Identity problems and trust issues are part and parcel of the late modern foodscape, but the writers try to make a case for the specificity of the post-1989 experience.

Poles, for example, do not just fall in line with an idealised understanding of the post-1989 experience. Many actively push back against change, with domestic food production and strategies for mitigating against perceived risk and a lack of trust in the food supply chain, as well as strategies for identifying ‘real food’ (Jehlička and Smith 2007; Mroczkowska 2019; Straczuk 2018; Bachórz 2018). Though they often mirror mitigation strategies in other late modern cultures, they also reflect, for example, existing practices—such as the trading of domestic foods on the black market during socialism, or shared intergenerational knowledge around food production. Therefore, the scholars argue, where there is perceived rupture, there is also considerable continuity.

To this end, the researchers employ post-socialism as a framework to deal with the hybridity of the Polish experience. First used by Melissa Caldwell (2009), here it is understood that ‘global phenomena intersect with local specificity and historical legacy resulting in hybrid, heterogeneous forms framed by the category of post-socialism’ (Bachórz 2018, p. 98). The changes, fears, and anxieties around collapsing structures, alienation and problems with trust are part of the late modern experience, of course, and the writers are conscious of this and engage with these concepts, albeit a little cautiously. There is an attempt here, moreover, to rescue the Pole from a passive reading of their experience, and a hope that the empiricism offered can make for a strong contribution to food studies beyond Poland.

The following study maps out how Poles who build their lives around food culture—in this case via food blogging—identify authenticity in their food choices and in their lives. The assumption here is that (a) thirty years after ‘the transformation’, Poles are developing a food culture not dissimilar to that found among the middle-class in other late modern societies (b) food bloggers have strong, robust narratives around food culture. What participants—and scholars more generally—understand to be authentic varies, and how those concepts are deployed in relation to food also mean different things in different contexts, but here it is assumed that there are two things occurring at the same time. Firstly, there is the late modern subject’s quest for authenticity (or ‘authenticity’) in choices, identity, and lifestyle; the second is the idea that one can locate some kind of ‘authentic essence’ in food, the food production process and food-related lifestyles. The objective of this study is to thematically map out the ways in which participants locate authenticity in their lives and food choices. It will argue that central to Polish food culture and attendant lifestyles, there are three main concepts of authenticity: ‘being free of lies’, ‘being true to oneself’ and ‘doing it yourself’ (‘DIY’). Moreover, it will attempt to frame these understandings of authenticity in both a late modern and post-socialist context.

2. Authenticity

The matter of ‘authenticity’ has become a particular preoccupation for food culture in recent decades, with food-related discourse seeing a remarkable increase in the usage of the term ‘authentic’ over the last 50 years (Carroll and Wheaton 2009, p. 259). Indeed, it is a concept central to modernity discourse more generally, with theorists attempting to locate an ‘authentic’ or ‘authenticating’ essence, or among more existential considerations, identifying ‘what it means to be a human, what it means to be happy and what it means to be oneself’ (Reisinger and Steiner 2006, p. 300). Different conceptual understandings of authenticity are deployed in different academic and lay contexts and ‘there are at least as many definitions of authenticity as there are those who write about it’ (Taylor 2001, p. 8).

‘Authenticity’ vis-a-vis food culture appears in existing academic literature predominantly in relation to contemporary consumption practices. Local food (Sims 2009), strange ingredients, food names or backstories (Kim and Youn 2017; Altıok et al. 2011) as well as ‘place’ (Zukin 2008) can affect an aura of authenticity. ‘Ethnic food’ has its own dynamics, heavily determined by how it is negotiated by members of the ethnic group or external actors (Ternikar 2014); this also determines the authenticating properties in food (Heng-Chang and Jackson 2011). The consumer here emerges as key actor, with food entrepreneurs actively tweaking the idea of ‘ethnic’ authenticity for broad market appeal (Fine and Lu 1995; Molz 2004) and racialised otherness sometimes plays a significant role in determining authenticity (Hirose and Pih 2011). Food itself can operate as an authenticating medium in its own right, as Tierney (2016) argue in their piece about eating chanko stew with sumo wrestlers. Gilmore and Pine (2007), meanwhile, contend that as far as consumer practice is concerned, authenticity has become just as important as price or availability.

Theorists have also attempted to create taxonomies of authenticity in relation to food culture. For Borghini, for example, a dish can be assumed authentic or inauthentic based on a set of characteristics; how it is culturally negotiated; whether the gastronomic experience corresponds to a person’s ‘authentic self’; or for reasons inexplicable (Borghini 2014, pp. 183–84). Carroll and Wheaton argue that something is deemed ‘authentic’ if it corresponds with the essence of a type; the behaviour and choices in the background of the entity reflect sincerity, if it is made ‘the right way’, or there is an acknowledged unique essence embodied by a product or place (Carroll and Wheaton 2009, p. 259). These schemas identify similar trends, though neither is particularly exhaustive.

In Poland, the studies have tended to focus more on how the essence of the food itself is perceived. Bachórz (2014) mapped out online culinary discourse to find that the notion of ‘natural’ and ‘original’ food determine the categories of ‘real’ or ‘unreal’ food; Kopczyńska (2015) found that conceptions of ‘natural food’ are determined by questions of trust, food safety, cleanliness and artificiality; whereas, Bryła (2016) found that ‘natural taste’, product quality and labelling are what determine authenticity in organic food.

3. Methods

Because authenticity is one of those terms that ‘have come to mean so much that they really mean very little while nonetheless signalling importance and power’ (Bendix 1992), no single conceptualisation of authenticity was employed in this study. The respondents were asked what they understood authenticity to be, what they understood an authentic life, or food, to be, and the degree to which this was important to their lives. The intention was to develop an understanding of authenticity that moved beyond food activity, to more existential questions—therefore mapping out the different dimensions of authenticity as they appeared in the lives of the respondents (if they did at all).1

Food bloggers were chosen as a representative group for two reasons. Firstly, food blogging made it possible to analyse several different food profiles at the same time, from those dedicated to ethical matters, to those of more pleasure, taste, nostalgia, or commensality inclinations. The assumption here was that there was enough of a shared habitus (middle-class and urban) across different profiles, which would make them similar enough to compare, yet different enough to strengthen the data. Secondly, food bloggers were assumed to have a certain self-reflexivity around food practices that would lend a particular depth to the results.

Eighty bloggers were contacted, the vast majority of whom were female, reflecting worldwide food blogging proportions of 85–93% (Rodney et al. 2017, p. 688). Of the thirty who responded, ten women followed through. The respondents were aged between 33 and 48, with the median age being 38.5, and all but one were tertiary educated. Crucially, they had all lived in cities, with the median time spent in an urban setting around 38.5 years. In a previous study of over 2000 Polish consumers, Domański et al. found that urban, middle-class consumers were precisely the kind group to show a preference for food-oriented moral consumption (Domański et al. 2015, p. 4).

The methodological practice fell somewhere between a theoretical thematic analysis and an inductive analysis, as described by Braun and Clarke (2006, p. 84). The interviews took place in person or over the phone. They were semi-structured, the intention being to allow respondents to follow their own train of thought, with the interviewer loosely guiding them towards the goals of the study. Though there was a general theoretical entry-point to the study—i.e., an interrogation of the different abstractions of authenticity that appeared in the respondents’ answers—the questions were wide-ranging, so as to offer up as many variations on the theme as possible. To this end, the questions addressed the bloggers’ backgrounds, the reasons behind their decision to commence blogging, childhood and adult food practices, the various dimensions of selfhood, political attitudes to food practices, parallel lifestyle changes and, finally, different questions about what they understood to be authentic food and authentic living. Questions around authenticity (e.g., ‘what is authentic food?’; ‘what makes for an authentic life?’; ‘is authenticity important?’) were left to last. If the interviewer identified issues relevant to authenticity, the respondent was encouraged to further explore this theme, without broaching the matter of authenticity directly.

When it came to the analysis, the scope was narrowed down to three identified conceptualisations of authenticity—‘being free of lies’, ‘being true to oneself’ and ‘doing it yourself’ (‘DIY’). These themes cut across the authenticity questions, in relation to food, lifestyles and existential concerns—the objective being to determine whether there were patterns of speaking around authenticity that were reflected in other aspects of the bloggers’ lived experience. Crucially, it was important to determine whether authenticity was important to the bloggers before coding commenced (it was). When those themes were identified, they were used to screen the rest of the interviews for cognate concepts and categories. For example, if a blogger stated that an authentic life was one when ‘you were true to yourself’, the transcript would be coded accordingly, and a response like ‘eating properly is to do right by me’ would be signalled as relevant. For something to be classified as a dominant theme, at least 8/10 of the bloggers would have to identify this category of authenticity. For example, the theme of ‘DIY was chosen because 9/10 of the respondents said that being able to prepare food at home, where it was made from scratch or prepared by themselves made for authentic food. Other themes of authenticity like healthy food (4/10) or ingredients (5/10) were also mentioned, but they did not reach the 8/10 needed to be classified as relevant.

These themes were likewise organised into sub-themes and a conceptual map of authenticity, as understood by Polish food culture participants, emerged. The intention of the study was to draw out dominant themes and sub-themes, rather than to analyse deep discrepancies between bloggers.

4. Results

4.1. Free of Lies

When questioned about what an authentic life and authentic food is, one of the strongest themes to emerge is the question of being deceived, being duped or being lied to. Something that determines authenticity in the minds of the food bloggers is something niezaklamane, which can be understood as something free from lies or deception. The matter of being duped or being lied to, whether in terms of food content, food production or lifestyle, appears in the majority of the interviews as something that has a significant bearing on whether something is authentic or inauthentic. One determinant of authenticity in the minds of the bloggers, therefore, is an absence of deception or manipulation in the way that they eat and live their lives.

The terms that make up this theme are many. In the interviews, the following terms appear in relation to both food and life in general: sincere/honest, insincere/false, lies/dishonesty, artificial/false, reliability/integrity and honesty/genuineness, fraud/deceit/disingenuousness, manipulated, duped, delusion/misapprehension and superficial.

These terms generally relate to three different phenomena: the nature of food, food production and contemporary living. All three domains emerge as spaces fraught with falsehoods and deceptions, something that the respondents attempt to mitigate against in their choices. Interestingly, although the bloggers are asked about both authenticity and inauthenticity, many choose to define authenticity here in the negative—for example, as something ‘free from deception’, ‘not false’, or ‘not insincere’—rather than in the positive. As far as this first theme is concerned, authenticity is therefore defined by what it is not.

The nature of food, naturally, emerges as a key point of focus for the bloggers when wrangling with questions of deception and falsehood. In their responses, the nature of food and how much control they have over what they consume is a particular preoccupation. Having control over what they or their family eat gives them a sense of calm, whereas not being able to identify what is in the make-up of the produce becomes a problem. Ingredients here can be false, and food provenance hidden, with ready-to-eat foods in supermarkets particularly maligned. For some, being able to identify what part of an animal they are consuming (or how that animal was fed), or what exactly is on their plate, is important. In the case of one blogger, authentic food ‘was being able to taste exactly’ what she was eating.

This idea of deception and falsehood becomes more pronounced when interviewees speak of food that is processed or contains preservatives. The majority of bloggers agree that food that contains preservatives or has been processed in some way is artificial and is therefore inauthentic. Junk food, such as chips or Coca Cola, are treated as ‘obvious’ examples, but even the low-cost supermarket chain Biedronka appears in the interviews as a stand-in concept for food that has been interfered with. These examples are often contrasted with examples of ‘healthy’ food, food that ‘serves you’ or meals ‘my grandmother made’—even bread that can be purchased from a small, but well-established, local bakery becomes an immediate marker opposing the artificiality in food (‘when you encounter the taste of real bread again, you can see the difference’).

Indeed, bloggers tend to classify food that masquerades as something else as an example of inauthentic food. Food with tweaked colouring or flavour enhancers, food made from fake substances (‘meat made from wheat’, ‘butter made from vegetable oils’, ‘sausage with bamboo in it’) and particularly food with little nutritional value are considered fake. Significantly, when listing examples, respondents show particular frustration with a perceived adulteration of common Polish staples, such as bread, sausage, butter, cream and chicken soup. One blogger even went as far as to lament:

It’s a little sad, that in a country like Poland, where bread plays such a significant role in our diet…bread becomes the least authentic foodstuff.

—HM

The packaging is deliberately trying to imitate that of cream. One time I picked up a container which looked identical to cream packaging. After I tried it, I thought, ‘what even is this?’ I started reading, and I realised there were various emulsifiers inside. That for me is not real food, because everyone can eat what they want, sure, but at least they shouldn’t eat something masquerading as something else.

—PB

The feeling of being duped, manipulated, or lied to pertains just as much to the food production process, which respondents consider to be convoluted and ambiguous. The processes involved, whether in the origins of the foodstuff, or in its marketing, as well as the level of trust in the people involved, cause anxiety in the respondents. Animal husbandry, for example, is painted by some as a cruel deceit (‘How is it possible that we know nothing about it?’).

Knowing, therefore, what is involved in the process of producing the food from beginning to end is important for the bloggers and hidden elements are deemed inauthentic.

I wanted my restaurant to be authentic, for everything to be made from scratch. That’s why there was an open kitchen, so that people could see what was happening, what we were throwing on the pan, so they knew we weren’t just picking stuff up off the ground—everything was visible.

—KFA

Crucial to this is knowing who is involved in the food production, something the bloggers claim is increasingly difficult to achieve. For the bloggers, trust in the production process was often determined by the relationships between the producer and the consumer, with some saying they preferred to shop at local producers because for these people ‘integrity and honesty’ were important. As one blogger argues, the very fact that these people need to maintain a reputation (‘they recognise me, they know that I like radishes’) ensures the quality of the produce. For another, such producers and restaurateurs are even thought to be more authentic just because they were visible.

In many ways, these themes of being duped or tricked are narrated historically, with the respondents commenting on the changes in Poland in relation to their food choices. Interviewees variously describe the post-1989 period as a time when there was a ‘fascination’ with Western food and ‘we gorged ourselves’ on pizza, kebabs, and sushi or ‘were drawn in by all the food in nice packaging’. This period is often contrasted with a ‘truer’ period during Communism, or a new-found awareness or savviness that emerged after this initial inundation of culinary attractions. More significantly, how they eat now is often contrasted with this initial post-transformation period, often in ways that show a consciousness in their choices that they believe other people still lack.

In fact, many bloggers describe post-1989 life in general as beset with falsehoods and superficiality (‘our perception is all messed up’). When asked what made for an authentic life, respondents repeatedly referenced this theme (among others): when ‘you know that you are not pretending’/an authentic life ‘is sincere and free of lies’/‘free of posing’. Yet the world they live in often appears in their interviews to be the opposite of this.

I have the feeling that we live very superficially, that we often live in ignorance, manipulated… Consumption and wealth have obscured the values that are important and that ensure we lead a happy life.

—VI

This life that they paint is both full of new freedoms (‘I can travel wherever I want’/‘I can try food from all over the world’), but a bittersweet narrative tends to emerge. Though they do admit that their lives are better overall, the bloggers seem to feel that the pace of living is faster and social relations are becoming more superficial and that a digital world driven by social media is particularly responsible.

The way the bloggers conceive of deception, falsehoods and manipulation therefore finds some continuity between their understanding of food and how they live more generally. In both intimate and abstract ways, the respondents must wrangle with the problems of lies and misrecognition, deeming phenomena free of this more authentic. Therefore, not only is authentic food free from convoluted production processes and chemical interference, an authentic life, in their understanding, is one which is free of poseurs and manipulation. In both cases, knowing what something is, or who somebody is, is of marked significance.

4.2. Being True to Yourself

Whereas the theme regarding deception and falsehood as determining factors in authenticity touch equally on food and life, the second theme around authenticity—that something must be true to itself—is more literally apparent in the questions around authentic living. However, the theme also informs other aspects of the discussions with the interviewees, including how they eat or how they feel about current food practices.

When asked what they understood to be an authentic life, the respondents mostly said that it is a life where one is ‘true to themselves’. An authentic life is, among other things, one which is: sincere, in accordance with one’s beliefs, values and expectations, where you are in harmony with yourself and connected to your inner self or being. To live a true, authentic life is to avoid doing anything that would go against oneself, which would contradict who you are or be at odds with who one is. Instead, authentic living is about being able to look yourself in the mirror, ensuring you follow your own path, in a way that follows from your own convictions.

The food bloggers, for the most part, mostly understand this theme in relation to questions of selfhood. To be true to oneself is to be consistent (‘cohesive, more believable’) and to remain unwaveringly true to one’s convictions. For some, ‘being true to oneself’ (and therefore authentic), is about taking personal responsibility and caring for others. For others, it is about nurturing a robust sense of self, free of unnecessary complexes. Moral, ethical, and political behaviour is of particular importance here, with the respondents expressing concern for the consequences of their consumption practices for the environment and animal welfare.

A dominant narrative in the interviewees’ responses, however, is the idea that there is an inner calling, or inner voice that one must remain true to.

This is why I feel like an authentic life is something more. It’s my ability to look inwards, to see how I feel in my body, to see how I feel emotionally and it’s about how I can make conscious choices, whether that be choosing what I eat, or deciding how I start the day.

—VI

Listening to the body is one way to do this—‘the body must be served’—but feeling a connection to place or the environment is also key to the bloggers understanding of ‘being true to themselves’. Being more in tune with the environment is not only ethically important but key to realigning oneself with authentic living (‘real life is a life where you are true to yourself, true to nature’). In the case of one blogger, eating authentically was to only eat food from the Polish climate zone, ‘like [her] grandmother did’, because the human body was unable to adapt to ‘different flora’; other cuisines, in some cases, were understood to have a more filial (and therefore authentic) connection.

The Italians and the French [don’t cut themselves off from their roots]. Their cuisine is in accordance with the world they see outside, with the seasons, with the animals they rear, with the beautiful climate they have.

—KD

Indeed, locality surfaces as a key category in ‘remaining true to oneself’, with respondents often describing place as something they have an ‘internal connection’ with. Polish food is sometimes, in their understanding, truer because it is ‘naturally in all of us’, whereas for one blogger ‘the food we cook tells us where we come from’. In fact, in the case of a couple of bloggers, when asked about which foreign cuisines they liked best, the answer came to be a substantial preamble about place and culture before the topic of food finally emerged. Therefore, the interest and connection with place can strongly inform their interest in the cuisine, if not precede it entirely.

In fact, the food blogging projects the respondents have embarked on can often be read as attempts to approximate authenticity. Both the practice of blogging and the food practices the respondents are involved in seem to be used instrumentally here. Though the women began blogging for different reasons—for something to do when raising children, as a space to share recipes, or as a more creative exercise properly representing themselves, or not being misrepresented, are important.

Food is similarly understood to bring the bloggers closer to authenticity. In the case of one blogger, leaving a career in marketing meant she could now focus on ‘what made her happy’ (which made for a more authentic life), for others it was a way to keep themselves in line with their moral convictions. For another, the shift towards a food-based lifestyle took on more existential tones and an entire life overhaul followed.

My journey started from the diet. In one sense, it was for health reasons, but I was also at this point in my life…I had the feeling that I had lost myself, and that I was no longer the person I used to be—I didn’t like myself. I didn’t understand how I had let it get to the point that I couldn’t even recognise myself. That was the beginning of the need for a change. [You] asked me whether [my food choices] brought me closer to a more authentic life. Absolutely…the person I used to be—I didn’t like myself. I didn’t understand how I had let it get to the point that I couldn’t even recognise myself. That was the beginning of the need for a change. [You] asked me whether [my food choices] brought me closer to a more authentic life. Absolutely…the change in diet brought on a number of other changes in my life, completely unconnected to food.

—VI

Once again, the theme of ‘being true to oneself’ is framed and/or informed by the changes of the last few decades. For most of the bloggers, the transformation in some ways interferes with ‘being true to oneself’ (‘unfortunately [we cannot achieve this authenticity] because nowadays our lives are much faster and we have this tendency to pick and choose’/‘real life is being true to yourself, true to nature, but we have disrupted this’/‘we have a completely messed up sense of perception, we are always running around, we are so disconnected, we don’t have this internal connection with ourselves, with where we live…our planet’). Although there is a celebration of new ways of self-actualisation, like through travel and trying new cuisines, pushing back against these perceived interferences is also a way for the bloggers to achieve authenticity.

One of the strongest themes to emerge here is the tension between a new-found cosmopolitanism and a return to Polish roots. Several of the bloggers spoke about the post-1989 period as a heady, exciting period, but it was often contrasted with a return to something more true to form. Very literal examples pertaining to food are littered throughout the blogs, for example, for at least three bloggers, seafood appears as a signifier for a superfluous cosmopolitanism (‘I love Polish food, on my blog there is no seafood or sushi’/‘food should bring you joy…you will not find prawns or lobster…my thing is simple, quick food and that is the essence of my blog’). However, these food-related identity issues are often interwoven with bigger, lifestyle-related matters.

Because I think that it is something natural. I can just talk about myself. I love to travel and I travel a lot, but after each journey I dream about, say, boiling an egg and eating bread with quark cheese. It is natural and normal in our climate. think we have become somewhat satiated with the tastes of the world and are now becoming more appreciative of our own cuisine, which we are no longer ashamed of. We used to have hang ups about our cuisine, which we associated with the pork cutlet, we thought that it wasn’t good enough, and that Italian or French cuisine was good, but not the Polish one. Now, however, we appreciate such dishes, we are reaching back to our roots.

—KFA

There’s a lot of talk nowadays about how we were drawn in, that there was this period where pork cutlet was unpopular, we were ashamed of what was our tradition, we wanted to be so worldly. Now we are more solid, we have gone skiing to Austria so many times…we have eaten everything. Now we can easily say that our ‘hunter’s stew’ is great, that our pork cutlet…is fantastic’.

—KD

The terms ‘shame’ and ‘complexes’ around Polishness and Polish food appear a number of times in the interviews, seemingly framed in terms of questions of change (or lack thereof). This Polish identity crisis, in the minds of a number of bloggers, seems to emerge after 1989, with Poles unable to locate themselves, or their cuisine, in the contemporary context, and cultures and cuisines (Ukrainian, Italian, French and Scandinavian) untouched, or unmoved, by the rupture in continuity are deemed superior (‘We have this tendency to need to prove that we are better, or at least good. Other countries don’t feel the need to prove themselves. When I’m in Italy, which I love, everything is home-made, the spaghetti is tossed onto the plate, and that’s it’). For one blogger, this identity crisis could even be observed in the ambivalence Poles had to the fats and oils they used.

I love [French cuisine] for its honesty, not giving into fads…regardless of what is fashionable, every French cook will say you can never have enough butter or salt. When you look at Polish cooking, we have a problem with what to fry our food with, what fat to use. In Poland we have amazing oils, but we use butter or olive oil…and that’s great, but now we’re starting to return to cold pressed oils…which Poland used to be famous for. We have these fields of linseed, rapeseed, nigella seed, poppy seed—slowly these oils are starting to appear in Polish cooking again. But the Italians have always kept to olive oil. In Poland, dieticians are constantly deliberating over whether olive oil is healthy, whether it can be used at high temperatures, whereas the Italians don’t have these dilemmas, because they just cook everything with that olive oil. In Ukraine, everyone uses something called sunflower butter…and the French use only butter. [In Poland] we play around with clarified butter, whereas [the French] put a block of butter in everything. I love that honesty in Italian and French cooking, that indifference to fads…they are not ashamed of their food.

—KFS

The period of transformation, therefore, was a time to (re)negotiate personal, national and culinary identities, as well as to explore different forms of self-actualisation, though ultimately, the bloggers for the most part see the return to a more traditional/established path as more true to form. ‘Being true to oneself’, can therefore be seen as weaving in and out of different aspects of the respondents’ lives. If being true to oneself is to be authentic, then maintaining a connection with place, maintaining a cohesive identity, and aligning oneself with the natural rhythms of life are all actions that can help a person live a more authentic life—food appears as one such vehicle for maintaining authenticity. It is also, in its own right, a dominant medium through which selfhood is enacted (‘this is my path’).

4.3. ‘DIY’

When asked outright what they understood to be authentic food, almost all of the respondents said that it was food that they could make themselves. Authentic food was to respondents ‘made at home’, ‘prepared by oneself’ and/or ‘made from scratch’; prepared ‘with one’s own time and effort’, where ‘one chooses what they put in it’ ‘from anything at hand’. Though the majority of respondents said that participating in the practice was what made food more authentic, this was mostly about what this helped facilitate, rather than the practice itself. The conceptual paradigm is therefore referred to here as ‘DIY’ (‘do it yourself’), rather than DIY, so as to distance it from the discourse around more literal artisanal practices.

‘DIY’ appears as authentic and authenticating for a number of reasons: it is an embodied act that in itself is pleasant or creative (‘we make something new’), an activity to become engrossed in (‘it’s my passion’), a distraction from the day-to-day life (‘it’s a way to escape’); as well as a form of self-expression. It is likewise a way to control various aspects of the respondents’ lives: from the nature of the food they eat (‘we know what’s inside’); to health (‘I can control my diet’); a duty of care over loved ones (‘I know exactly what my family is eating’); as well as the environment (‘we should make everything from scratch’). Yet ‘DIY’ mostly surfaces in relation to other important concerns that it helps facilitate, such as continuity, community and relationships. In this way, ‘DIY’ is both authentic as an act, as well as being ‘authenticating’ in its capacity to provide fulfilment of other needs and desires.

‘DIY’, for example, helps facilitate tradition, familial memories, and nostalgia—in this way securing continuity. However, the reverse is also true: because legitimacy in food production comes from the past. Replicating family recipes (e.g., how to make preserves for winter), sharing knowledge (e.g., about the health benefits of particular ingredients), cooking together or feeding others are just some of the ways the bloggers connect with the past (or ‘past’). A strong sense of nostalgia ‘for how things used to be done’ (especially around Easter and Christmas) likewise permeates the majority of the interviews. In these accounts, the parents and grandparents are important because they are often intimately involved in the food production process and/or know how to make complicated Polish basics from scratch.

When I wanted blueberry pancakes, I had to go to the forest with Grandpa and pick those berries myself. This was such an unintended lesson. When I was learning how to pick wild mushrooms, nobody showed me any edible mushroom guide/atlas. We just went to the forest and Grandpa would say ‘you can eat these mushrooms and these ones are no good’…I absorbed this information naturally, but at the time this knowledge seemed useless to me. Only when I grew up, I realised how many things I knew thanks to my upbringing, my childhood experiences and the information transferred/messages from family home.

—KFS

‘DIY’ also helps create the space and circumstances, and the emotional conditions, to build and maintain relationships. Sharing and feeding others becomes a way of conveying affection and nurturing loved ones (‘I give something of myself’; ‘I cannot imagine just cooking for myself’) and allows the bloggers to spend time with their families and their friends. In fact, cooking is also a way for the interviewees to punch through the abstractions of time. Many speak of the difficulty ‘nowadays’ of sitting down for a meal during the week, so cooking on the weekend becomes a way to pull both friends and family together.

It has been deeply ingrained in me, that meals are prepared together. I used to accompany my mother in making dumplings or dough—I would watch her doing this. I liked to be around food, cut, peel or mix things, despite the fact that I was a reluctant eater. A lot of important moments are connected to food/eating.

—KFA

Once again, the changes Poland has undergone over the last thirty years have some bearing on the category of ‘DIY’. The changes in foodways, lifestyles and the structural are either explicitly or implicitly present in the discussions with the bloggers.

‘DIY’ in a couple of cases is seen as an extension of positive change (‘we are experiencing new tastes, that we then want to recreate at home’; ’cutting ourselves off from making communist cuisine was a way to cut ourselves off from that horrible poverty’), but in many cases, conversations around ‘DIY’ cast a negative pall on the transformation period.

For one, ‘DIY’ is often romanticised as being truer because it came before the changes to foodways in Poland, like, the opening up of the market, multinational supermarkets, EU regulations and fast food.

At the beginning of the 90s, my parents thought there was no point in going to a restaurant, because they won’t make food better there than at home, because they won’t know what kind of ingredients they are using. At home, it was obvious that we could buy stuff in the country, from people you knew, or to go to the local market where you can see everything and touch it, and from which you will be able to prepare something substantial, which will be good for us, healthy and the way we like it.

—CD

Moreover, pre-transformation ‘DIY’ often appears as something as more environmentally sound (‘our grandmothers were zero waste’), based on an innate, intergenerational wisdom (‘we don’t have the certainty our grandparents had’) with superior customs and traditions; or as a response to structural problems like new abstractions of time.

We live much faster, we need food that is ready, that can be eaten out. It wasn’t always like that, that there were readymade sandwiches in the shop…it’s a phenomenon that shows that people don’t want to cook, they want to eat quickly, so as not to lose time, because they work more and the lifestyle is different. You have to drive everywhere. It takes more time.

—EKO

Many of the ‘DIY’ activities mentioned are therefore deployed in order to mitigate against perceived post-transformation problems. ‘DIY’ can help with the mystery, and inauthenticity, of long food supply chains (‘in my restaurant, we had an open kitchen so that everybody could see exactly what was happening’; ‘slow food is a way to show that you can cook with simple ingredients, without having to use shortcuts with processed foods’), of changes in the provenance (‘when we make stuff ourselves, we think about where the food comes from, because maybe we don’t want to buy sour cream with emulsifiers from Spain’).

Traditional ‘DIY’ knowledge can help with the choice anxiety that comes with consumer capitalism (‘we are constantly expected to make decisions: do we want a purple carrot, or a red one, or an avocado or a mango?’), and new environmental problems (‘seeing as we’re all wondering how to look after the planet, making use of leftovers—creating as little rubbish as possible—it’s probably a good idea to cook everything from start to finish’).

New temporalities are also part and parcel of the changes, including new work pressures (‘for me [cooking] became an escape [from my corporate job]’) and ‘DIY’ for some of the interviewees is a way to punch through the abstractions of time (‘so that in this constant rush, we have a moment to stop, to consolidate our relationship with others, to sit at the table together, to eat together’).

‘DIY’ is therefore authentic for two reasons: it is an embodied act that in itself is pleasant or creative, or an activity to become engrossed in; and it helps facilitate other things the bloggers find important. As a practice, it is more authentic because it also ensures continuity (or what Giddens would call ‘ontological security’ (1991)), and community and it gives the bloggers the opportunity to control other problematic realms in the authenticity sphere, such as long food production chains, mystery ingredients, alienation from place and community and the abstractions of time. In this sense it can be authentic, as well as authenticating.

5. Discussion

Even if they fail to explicitly identify this, the respondents’ understanding of authenticity is informed by post-socialist and late modern processes. What they understand to be authentic, or inauthentic—both in their appraisal of foodways and the way they live their lives—is heavily informed by the changes in risk-assessment, trust, identity, problems of place and the structural and knowledge production that researchers have identified as key to the Polish experience. These changes, both in the respondents’ own framing, and in a broader theoretical sense, can be understood as being caused by foodways changes, but also changes in many other aspects of their lives. The categories they identify as being relevant to authenticity are therefore those that the researchers have flagged as being problematic or, at least, important.

It is, therefore, impossible to separate the conceptualisation of ‘authenticity’ among the bloggers from the broader historical context in Poland.

We see a preoccupation firstly with knowing what something is (or is not). The respondents categorise authenticity as being something that can be parsed into constituent elements. Food that is artificial, that has unknown provenance, that is made by unknown actors, with shady environmental/animal husbandry practices lurking in the background, is understood to be inauthentic. This is often framed by the respondents as a historical process (‘there was a fascination with Western food’ and ‘we gorged ourselves’ on pizza or ‘we were drawn in by all the new colourful food in nice packaging’) and the authenticity they identify can be found somewhere in the past (‘our grandmothers knew what they were doing’). Contemporary living (‘I have the feeling that we live very superficially, that we often live in ignorance, manipulated’) and contemporary foodways, in their understanding, interfere with this form of authenticity.

Beck et al. (1994) argue that this is the problem of late modernity in general—the individual is forced to constantly revise and adjust what they think they know. This affects their sense of self, trust in the structural and the more intimate aspects of their lives, for example, relationships and connection to place and food (‘I do not know what I believe in anymore, I just stuff my body full of green stuff and hope for the best’). In Poland, too, the rapid changes of the transformation (Sztabiński and Sztabiński 2014, pp. 8–18) had the effect of decreased social trust (Sztabiński and Sztabiński 2014) so anxieties around general change mirror fears around change in food (and can often feed into each other). Issues of trust-related ambivalence and anxiety therefore appear to create inauthenticity and the respondents seem to want to correct this themselves.

These tenets are, of course, present in food cultures in late modern societies more generally, and questions of risk, trust and knowledge-production are issues people are wrangling with everywhere (Bachórz and Kopczyńska 2018, p. 7). Some food cultures are even deliberately deployed to deal with these problems. For example, local food systems (LFS) movements come to be strategies to ‘rework power and knowledge relationships in food supply systems that become distorted by increasing distance’ (Feagan 2007, p. 25; c. Feagan 2007, p. 35), with the effect being that ‘trust’ can emerge in a framework that allows for more embeddedness (Feagan 2007, p. 28) in food systems and social relations. Movements like organicism, on the other hand, can help offer ‘a solid, natural, moral ground’ (Matless 1998, p. 281) whereas vegetarianism (Levenstein 1993, p. 182) and other ethical and moral forms of consumption have been found to function as strong anxiety-management strategies (ibid. p. 188). These ‘strategies of confidence’ (Sellerberg 1991, p. 196) appear across different forms of food culture in late modern societies.

A cognate theme is that of alienation—with many of the bloggers reporting that they feel disconnected from their community, relationships, nature, place, tradition and even themselves. Alienation is, of course, understood to be another key tenet of (late) modernity—and is often problematised in relation to authenticity (Rae 2010). The late modern subject is alienated from tradition and community (Giddens 1990, p. 79), their labour, as well as the environment and themselves (Leopold 2020). In the respondents’ narratives, these categories emerge as particularly fraught with inauthenticity.

Alienation is also a broader problem for contemporary foodways. Whereas, traditionally, ‘personal proximity between producer and consumer constitutes the basis of trust in the production process and the quality of food…[and] traditional agriculture, constrained by the territory and linked to the natural cycles of seasons, carries a sense of participation and identification with nature’ (Monte 2002, p. 15), in late modernity/late capitalism, these relationships are severed or abstracted. This leads to what Fischler calls ‘gastro-anomie’ (1990 as cited in Monte 2002, p. 13)—a play on Durkheim’s theory of alienation, ‘anomie’ (Durkheim 2002), where food becomes a potent and confused category.

Indeed, we see food culture respond to the problem of alienation in numerous ways.

As Tam argues, the Slow Food movement appears to be the inverse of the negative qualities of alienation, rearranging our relationship to time and space (or place). ‘It seeks to situate the individual within a network of local relationships, family ties, economic dependencies and relations of patronage and friendship’ (Tam 2008, p. 215), where consumers and producers have inherent responsibilities towards each other. Local, seasonal, and organic food markets, on the other hand, are popular because they ‘disrupt the homogeneity of 24-h shopping time by producing a sense of temporal specificity’, while at the same time re-embedding the food provisioning in local (and imagined) landscapes (Ashley et al. 2004, p. 112). More generally, maybe the act of returning things to the body via food, is one more way of dealing with alienation and food culture is a way to facilitate this.

The last theme that can be located in a broader late modern context is that of an ‘authentic’ selfhood. Identity and selfhood emerge in the research interviews as a project to be tended to, with blogging and food culture clearly a way to do this. This project; however, is confused and obstructed, when ‘there is not enough time for introspection’ because ‘[we’re] in too much of a hurry’, and ‘everybody’s disconnected from [their] roots’.

Food is generally becoming more important to identity-making in Poland among the middle-classes (Bilewicz and Śpiewak 2015, p. 157), but this is a reflection of a bigger, global trend. A preoccupation with one’s selfhood and identity is particular to late modernity (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim 2002; Bauman 2000) anyway and the authenticity theme of ‘being true to yourself’ is a well-known trope in late modern discourse (Goldstein and Rayner 1994, p. 368). Food culture fits into this—as an example, De Solier argues that the material nature of food consumption and production among foodies neatly dovetails with the self-making project of late modernity (De Solier 2013).

However, food has always been a powerful medium for organising selfhood. Fischler (1988) argues that the natural anxiety of being an omnivore, whereby we can theoretically eat anything, forces us to double down with the choices we make, making strict delineations, and ultimately creating our own cultural identities through food. If food is so ontologically powerful, it becomes a compelling (and possibly more authentic) way to build identity in late modernity, especially when the ontological security of the individual is threatened by change. Interestingly, when focusing on ‘change’ in the post-socialist paradigm, the researchers fail to properly account for the power that food has in building selfhood and identity, and how that may be a powerful way to overcome periods of uncertainty. At a time when the logics of consumption are powerful and self-determination is more important, food may be a convenient way to build individual selfhood.

This paper therefore shows that the question of authenticity is central to the lives of the food bloggers and, in some cases, they are in fact attempting to secure authenticity through their food choices. The DIY section, for example, shows the food bloggers take direct authenticating action in realms of their lives that they find fraught with inauthenticity, such as the food production process and selfhood, and even their relationships to community, continuity and the environment. The processes and concerns in the background of these authenticity categories, such as low trust and alienation and identity-creation, are already anxious themes in late modernity, and in the interviews they appear to have a direct bearing on authenticity.

The problems the bloggers have with trust, selfhood and alienation may be rooted in the hybridity of the post-socialist context the bloggers find themselves in (Jehlička and Smith 2007; Caldwell 2009; Bachórz and Kopczyńska 2018)—or even the trauma of the rupture in the social order (Bachórz and Kopczyńska 2018), but they nevertheless emerge here as fully late modern subjects, grappling for authenticity among the ‘bads’ (Orlando 2018, p. 157) of late modernity.