Saving Food in Bulgaria: Practicing Food Sovereignty in Everyday Life
Datum
2022-10-04
Autor:innen
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Verlag
University of Oregon
Zusammenfassung
Home-based food preservation in Bulgaria is widespread and these foods link material, biological and cultural survival, formal and informal economies, social networks, cultivated and wild-harvested foods. As such, they demonstrate how ordinary people engaging in mundane social practices, like saving food for the winter, are creating resilience and meaning in their lives in the context of broader economic and political forces, which lay largely beyond their control. These practices are intimately connected with the socialist past in Bulgaria and have continued to be adaptive in the post-socialist context. Their continual re-enactment and reproduction challenge unilinear conceptualizations of development in a globally integrated market economy. This dissertation was based on multi-sited ethnographic research conducted in Bulgaria and remotely between June 2018-October 2021. Cellars in Bulgaria revealed a constellation of practices that entangle binaries often conceptualized as oppositional, for example: formal and informal economies, traditions and innovations, cultivated and wild plants and animals, local and global influences and ingredients, industrial and agroecological production. These common Bulgarian food preservation practices evidenced a politics emerging from the everyday in both implicit and explicit forms and are a useful complement to scholarship related to Alternative Food Networks and food sovereignty. The prevalence of these practices creates a large, diffuse community of people practicing “quiet” food sovereignty through the consistent re-enactment of their everyday foodways, such as saving food for winter. Preserve makers in Bulgaria demonstrate the power of practicing food sovereignty in everyday life.
Beschreibung
Schlagwörter
Bulgaria, Everyday Life, Food Sovereignty, Foodways, Practice Theory, Preservation