The social and symbolic meanings of recipes in negotiating East German identity

ABSTRACT

This paper explores the social and symbolic meanings of recipes in the creation of community imagined online. Linking scholarship on the social relevance of recipes with research on food memories, identity, as well as research on memory in the digital age, I examine how internet users remember the German Democratic Republic (GDR) through recipes they post and discuss online on the two most popular German-based recipe sharing websites. My findings show that sharing and commenting on recipes is a form of collective identity labor through which Internet users create, negotiate and maintain symbolic boundaries between East and West Germany. Specifically, I identify key dynamics of how recipes – as vehicles of identity labor – perform collective GDR identity: negotiations about authenticity and collective affirmations of GDR identity which both serve as symbolic demarcations within a Western-centered reunified Germany.

KEYWORDS:

• Cookery writing
• memory
• identity labor
• post-GDR
• post-socialism

Acknowledgments

I want to express deep thanks to the anonymous reviewers for helpful comments and suggestions that helped clarify my argument in this article. Special thanks to Barbara Katz Rothman, Anne Nassauer, and Nicolas Legewie for helpful comments and discussions on various stages of this project.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Melanie Lorek

Melanie Lorek is Assistant Professor of Sociology and Human Relations at CUNY School of Professional Studies. Her work focuses on how East Germans and the reunified Germany remember the GDR and centers on the topic of East German identity after German reunification.