Digestive Politics in Russia: Feeling the Sensorium beyond the Palate

Abstract

Accounts of the cultural aspects of food consumption have conventionally privileged acts of production and consumption rather than acts of disposal. In the case of eating, attention has been given to ingestion as the moment when cultural values are consumed and expressed, so that choice and taste preferences are presented as part of the act of consuming. As a result, the sensory dimensions of taste are located at the palate: flavor, aroma, texture, appearance, and sound. Yet processes of digestion move foods through and out of the bodies of consumers, thereby producing different sensory responses and cultural interpretations of those sensory responses. This article examines the sensory experiences of digestion through a discussion of how Russian consumers interpret digestive processes as means of engaging in and responding to larger cultural phenomena. Ultimately, by arguing for a politics of the gut, I show how cultural trends are deeply embedded in the most intimate bodily spaces of Russian consumers and what reorienting a study of taste to spaces beyond the palate might offer for rethinking issues such as consumer choice, autonomy, and responsibility.

Notes

Csordas defines (138) “somatic modes of attention” as the “culturally elaborated ways of attending to and with one's body in surroundings that include the embodied presence of others.”

See Mann et al. (221–223) for a detailed overview and critique of this privileging of the palate in the anthropology of the senses, with particular attention to studies of taste.

These discussions are based on ethnographic materials gathered during fieldwork in Moscow, Tver, and other sites in western Russia over the past two decades.

Neringa Klumbytė describes similar practices in Lithuania, as Lithuanian consumers and producers promoted “national” products that were intended to contain “national” qualities, even when the precise “nation” at stake was contested (Klumbytė).

In the early 1990s, however, before the advent of this striking “food nationalism,” socialist-era food themes were also used to convey the problems of the Soviet era and the benefits of foreign capitalism for a new post-Soviet Russia. See examples of this in the discussion of socialist kitsch by Sabonis-Chafee.

Tura is one fascinating example of a Soviet-era parenting manual that instructed parents on such seemingly mundane matters as how far a window should be opened in order to provide the precise amount of fresh air needed or which colors should be used in a child's toys in order to encourage intellectual development. See Haney for an account of how Hungarian social workers deployed civic hygiene standards to enforce particular parenting practices that were geared at raising socialist citizens.

In his ethnographic research on the Moscow Culinary Association, the nonprofit professional culinary and food services organization that sponsors the Museum of Public Catering, Stas Shectman has documented how this organization has explicitly presented itself as a protector of Russian culinary and national culture.

In her critical account of terroir, Amy Trubek documents how the “taste of place” typically starts at the moment of ingestion at the palate.

Smith also documents how ideas of “delicate” and “rough” foods played into these conceptions of national digestive systems, as French food was valued as too delicate and refined in taste and presentation and thus would be problematic because it would be too difficult to eat in moderation (67–69). Instead, sentiments of Russian superiority were evident in demands for “a certain rough quality of Russian food” (Smith 69).