Goulash and Governance: The Politics of Foodways in Socialist Hungary : Culinary Transformation and Everyday Life (1948–1989)

Fülemile, Ágnes (2025) Goulash and Governance: The Politics of Foodways in Socialist Hungary : Culinary Transformation and Everyday Life (1948–1989). In: Living eating habits, revitalized foodways and the concepts of tradition and food heritage. ELTE HTK Néprajztudományi Intézet; Néprajzi Múzeum, Budapest, pp. 35-76. ISBN 9789634165200; 9789635670840

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Abstract

This study examines the changes in the lifestyle and eating habits of Hungarian society during the radical social transformations of the era of socialism, placing the process within its socio-historical context. In the centrally planned economy, the key aspects of food supply, trade, and catering were inseparable from the intentions of domestic and foreign policy, sociopolitical considerations, propaganda, and the techniques of exercising power. After the harsh decade of the 1950s, the consolidation period, although with limitations, promoted a welfare-consumerist model that naturally influenced not only the complete institutionalised framework of nutrition – leading to an unprecedented homogenisation of culinary culture – but also affected the cultural environment of individual, family, and small-community decisions, tastes, and habits. Within this force field, the main directions of interpreting culinary traditions are as follows: What happens to the homegrown, regional traditions brought from rural life? What is the fate and role of national cuisine that is considered Hungarian? How does the regime treat the professionals operating in the supply chain? What happens to the tradition of ‘good bourgeois cuisine’ beyond can it survive within the framework of ‘actually existing socialism’, and if so, what does it even mean – has it had an impact on the broader masses? Are there traces of international cuisine, and, if so, how do they manifest themselves? What does the food placed on the table signify? What aspirations, identity markers, attachments, resilience, memory preservation, and nostalgia, might lie behind the individual choices of where, under what circumstances, and what, we eat? The study explores these questions, analysing how food became a site of ideological negotiation, cultural adaptation, and personal meaning in socialist Hungary.

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