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Abstract
If the Soviet Union perpetuated an economy of scarcity, the European Union maintains an economy of purity: in Soviet Latvia a lack of raw materials restricted production, while in the EU, hygiene regulations restrict processing and sale of homemade foods. In both periods, producers and consumers have cultivated informal social networks that challenge relations to structures of power, equating illegally obtained food products with an ethical stance. Positioning local informal networks as illegal obscures persistent inequalities in access to markets for the smallest home producers, and stigmatizes local practices and social networks as backwards without addressing the causes.
Acknowledgments
A previous version of this paper was presented at the European Association for Social Anthropology meetings in Nanterre in 2012, where it benefitted from comments from organizer Cristina Grasseni and discussant Heather Paxson. I am grateful to Diana Mincyte, Ulrike Plath, Hadley Renkin, Karen Hébert, Laura Sayre, and two anonymous reviewers for comments on earlier drafts.
Notes
1. While I use Slow Food’s slogan “Good, Clean, Fair” to structure the paper, I do not intend this as a commentary on the Slow Food movement.
2. This article reflects the situation at the time of writing in October 2012. A few positive changes had taken place by the time of going to press in June 2015, including a new hybrid form of “direct buying circles” initiated by consumers who wish to uphold direct relationships with producers yet also try to find ways to legalize these systems. Līga and Jānis have also since legalized their bakery. Unfortunately, I am not able to cover these changes in depth in this article.
3. All names have been changed and all translations are my own. This and all statements by Valērija and Līga in this section: interview, Lejupes farm, 17 August 2011.
4. Their disappointment may be even greater to learn that these same antique wooden bread troughs are now sold on the Internet as “found vintage dough bowls” by the Pottery Barn chain store in the United States, complete with a video instructing users how to arrange seasonal produce, eucalyptus sprigs, and votive candles.
5. Consumer interview, Rīga, 25 October 2011.
6. My use of the term “traditional” here does not imply authenticity in the sense of unchanging, age-old practices, as these recipes have changed over time, and the Soviet version itself could be contested by some as “invented.” See Aistara (Citation2014a) for more on the construction of authenticity in renewed culinary traditions in Latvia.
7. This is the same term as blat in Russian, cited in articles below.
8. As pointed out by an anonymous reviewer, pilfering was not always seen as a just practice by everyone in Soviet times, but was rather the subject of great negotiation.
9. Interview with baker, organic bakery, 19 October 2005.
10. Interview with baker, organic bakery, 19 October 2005.
11. Interview with anonymous consumer, city newspaper office, 2 November 2012.
12. Interview with anonymous consumer, city newspaper office, 2 November 2012.
13. Interview with anonymous consumer, city newspaper office, 2 November 2012.
14. The gray economy includes transactions where registered businesses do not follow all regulations, whereas the black economy includes non-registered businesses.
15. Interview with Līga, 4 November 2012.
16. Under Soviet regulations, people were allowed to keep one pig in their home plots, but tried to get around that. Interview in Rīga, 2 November 2012.
17. Similar to hygiene regulations, EU seed laws have a limiting effect on the types of seeds that can be sold by small producers on the market.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Guntra A. Aistara
Guntra Aistara holds a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan’s School of Natural Resources and Environment. She is an environmental anthropologist, whose research interests include organic agriculture movements, agrobiodiversity and seed sovereignty, the political ecology of small farmers’ struggles over the control of land and seeds in the face of free trade agreements, and socio-ecological resilience of local food systems. She is Assistant Professor in the Department of Environmental Sciences and Policy at the Central European University in Budapest, and is currently an Agrarian Studies fellow at Yale University from 2014 to 2015.