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Food and Foodways Explorations in the History and Culture of Human Nourishment

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Digestive Politics in Russia: Feeling the Sensorium beyond the Palate

Melissa L. Caldwell

To cite this article: Melissa L. Caldwell (2014) Digestive Politics in Russia: Feeling the Sensorium beyond the Palate, Food and Foodways, 22:1-2, 112-135, DOI: 10.1080/07409710.2014.892740

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/07409710.2014.892740

Published online: 30 May 2014.

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Food and Foodways, 22:112–135, 2014 Copyright © Taylor & Francis Group, LLC ISSN: 0740-9710 print / 1542-3484 online DOI: 10.1080/07409710.2014.892740

Digestive Politics in Russia: Feeling the Sensorium beyond the Palate

MELISSA L. CALDWELL Department of Anthropology, University of California, Santa Cruz,

Santa Cruz, California, USA

Accounts of the cultural aspects of food consumption have conven- tionally 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. Ul- timately, 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

This essay has emerged from a series of conversations and presentations over the years, and I owe thanks to many people whose feedback has shaped this final product. I am grateful to Melanie DuPuis, Julie Guthman, Michael Herzfeld, Dan Linger, and Carolyn Martin- Shaw for helping me work through very rough ideas and even rougher early drafts. A more developed version was presented to the anthropology department at Texas A&M, and I deeply appreciate the comments and suggestions I received from my colleagues and their students there. I especially thank Cynthia Werner for the invitation to share my work. Yuson Jung and Nico Sesnier have been terrific colleagues who have thoughtfully (and firmly) pushed me to develop this into a more polished and developed analysis, and I greatly appreciate their guidance. And finally, I want to thank the two anonymous Food and Foodways reviewers for their suggestions, and especially Rachel Black for her editorial wisdom and assistance.

Address correspondence to Melissa L. Caldwell, Department of Anthropology, 353 Social Sciences 1, 1156 High Street, University of California, Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz, CA 95064. E-mail: [email protected]

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beyond the palate might offer for rethinking issues such as con- sumer choice, autonomy, and responsibility.

Several summers ago, my husband and I enjoyed a late-summer trip to Russia. The visit was both professional and personal, as I planned to combine follow-up research on my summer gardens project with an opportunity to introduce my husband to friends I had made during that research. Because of the simultaneously social and professional nature of our trip, many of our visits with friends and colleagues focused on the pleasures of the palate. Visits to friends’ homes or dachas (i.e. summer cottages) were often spent enjoying lengthy conversations and delicious meals prepared from garden- fresh produce. In several instances, friends who were excited about the emerging restaurant scene in their small cities treated us to dinner so that we could experience and share the latest trends in Russian culinary culture. In practically every case, the pleasures of our visits revolved around good food and good company.

Amid those enjoyable visits, one encounter stood out. An otherwise enjoyable afternoon party at a friend’s dacha, filled with garden-fresh tomato and cucumber salads, a seemingly bottomless bowl of fresh berries, bottles of good wine, and plates of cakes and ice creams, ended with most of the guests suffering from severe gastric troubles. Because my husband and I were Americans who had been efficiently indoctrinated into a healthy suspicion of mayonnaise left out in hot weather, we were certain that the symptoms had resulted from the salads that had been served and left out in the 100◦+ Fahrenheit heat. Our Russian friends, however, had a different perspective on the matter. Each individual was convinced that the cause of the problems was the ice cream that had been served for dessert. Our hostess had purchased an assortment of small cartons of sorbets and ice creams of various fruit flavors that had been divided for sharing. There was no one flavor that every person had tried, but each person who had become ill had sampled some of the same flavors. After many back-and-forth phone calls over the next several days, our friends compared notes to determine who had sampled which flavors and who was experiencing which symptoms, often in graphic detail.

Eventually, our friends came to the shared conclusion that the culprits were several cartons of cheaper and foreign-made ice creams and sorbets. As our friends explained, both individually and collectively, it had been risky for our hostess to purchase the foreign items, but the high-quality domestic ice creams that Russians were accustomed to buying were no longer as available as they had been in the past. Instead, consumers like our hostess were forced to buy cheaper and undoubtedly lower-quality ice creams that had replaced Russian brands. Curiously, despite the fact that while we had been eating the ice creams, our friends had commented enthusiastically on

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how flavorful and good they were, once they decided that the ice creams were to blame, their comments focused solely on their poor quality and dangerousness.

Even more noteworthy was that our friends’ observations about taste, quality, and safety were framed as critical commentaries on changes in Rus- sia’s political economy. Our friends refused to assign personal responsibility to either the hostess who had purchased the ice creams or the guests who had eaten then. As they explained, it was not the fault of our hostess for purchasing substandard ice creams, nor was it the fault of the guests for not recognizing the poor quality of the ice creams and eating them anyway. In fact, our friends suggested that it was understandable, even acceptable, that we had all enjoyed the ice creams. The important point was that we were all victims of Russia’s new capitalist economy, which had limited our options and forced us to consume poor-quality products.

Equally intriguing was that after articulating this critique of capitalism, our friends suggested that the proper response to this problem was not to focus on the palate but rather on the gut. They refused to treat their upset stomachs by restricting the foods they ate to bland foods, as my husband and I did by following the American trend of the so-called BRAT diet (e.g., bananas, rice, applesauce, and toast), coupled with weak broth and weak tea. Nor did they suggest that it was necessary to swear off ever consuming those ice creams again in the future. Instead, our Russian friends eagerly dug into huge quantities of grilled meats, oil- and mayonnaise-laden salads, spicy tomato and pepper dishes, and high-fat, dairy-based dishes. We watched in amazement as our friends suffered through the physiological consequences of their food choices but yet continued to state that they refused to sacrifice their taste buds. Instead, they claimed that the food choices they made were helping their bodies recover by forcing their stomachs to respond strongly and to familiar foods. Curiously, it seemed to be true: our friends seemed to recover about the same time that we did.

These gastric events raise intriguing questions about how eaters asso- ciate bodily sensations with cultural issues. In this case, these individuals interpreted the physiologically sensory effects of an apparent bout of food poisoning as the direct result of Russia’s new political economy of market capitalism, which has been popularly blamed for replacing familiar domestic products that were believed to be safe and of high quality with low-quality foreign products (Patico). With their strategic use of fighting nausea and diarrhea with spicy foods, these eaters then further evoked particular sen- sory experiences as forms of engagement with, and even resistance to, these changes. As expressions of “somatic modes of attention,” bodily experiences became the means by which these individuals engaged the particular so- cial world that they inhabited—in this case, a new capitalist Russia (Csordas 138).1

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This insight that sensory experiences are forms of engagement with the world is fundamental to understanding why eaters like these Russians interpret their own bodily responses as expressions of political engagement and critique. Food can merge the political and the personal, and even bring the political directly into the most personal spaces of the body, because of its capacity to evoke multiple sensory realities (De Silva; Ferrero; Seremetakis; Sutton, Remembrance of Repasts, “Food and the Senses”). Physiological sensations like taste, smell, hearing, and touch are all means of know- ing, recognizing, remembering, and interpreting the world that one inhabits (Bourdieu; Herzfeld; Seremetakis; Stoller; Sutton, Remembrance of Repasts). As Constance Classen has noted, “we not only think about our senses, we think through them,” a point echoed by David Sutton’s statement that the sensory aspects of eating are means to access “whole worlds of experience and interpretation” (Classen 9; Remembrance of Repasts 15). Because “the body is a major repository of cultural memories,” whereby past events and experiences are inscribed in bodily registers, fla- vors, aromas, sounds, textures, and appearances thus become powerful mnemonic triggers that document, reinforce, and convey experiences (Stoller 638).

Yet accounts of the relationships among food, body, and the worlds that eaters inhabit have typically prioritized moments of production and consumption as key sites of analysis. As Sidney Mintz has suggested in de- scribing the unique relationship between humans and food choices, “nothing defines our nature as living creatures more dramatically than our ingestion” (Mintz 4). It is either ingestion—or the lack of ingestion as with non-eating, under-eating, or purging—that is presented as the moment that best captures how and when cultural values are consumed or repelled and that draws the attention of food reformers seeking to change or even “improve” eating habits (Mintz; Terrio; e.g., Lappé; Petrini; Pollan).2

Yet as the attitudes of my Russian friends suggest, this privileging of ingestion, and hence of the palate, might not be the only site to understand the relationships that exist between food and body, and between the health of individual bodies and the nation and state. Although less prominent than ingestion in food discourses, indigestion and other bodily processes further along the digestive tract have been prominent themes in my acquaintances’ conversations about the significance of their dietary habits over the past two decades. From physicians and politicians who claim that Russia’s declining work force is the direct result of broken bones caused by poor nutrition to social workers who have to consider matters such as hypertension and constipation when providing welfare services to their clients, digestion and excretion are themes within commentaries on politically salient matters in Russia. Thus, in many respects, the importance of food in Russia is very much tied not just to the palate but also to the gut.

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Attending to processes of digestion and excretion demonstrates that bodily sensations are not confined only to the experiences of taste, smell, touch, and sound that occur at the point of entry to the body but in fact con- tinue throughout the entire process as food moves through and is processed by the digestive track and is expressed through stomach pains, intestinal cramps, and other lower-body sensations. Moving beyond ingestion and the palate offers a productive new vantage point for rethinking what and where the sensory experiences associated with food occur (Hennion; Mann et al.). As the provocative “eating with fingers” experiment conducted by Anna Man, Annemarie Mol, and their colleagues revealed, how foods “taste” to eaters may change when those foods are touched by fingers and other body parts (Mann et al.). By expanding the range of types of contact with food beyond those that occur at the palate, the possibilities for types of sensory expe- riences also expand, reflecting Hennion’s provocation to “feel the feeling of” as a form of subjective and active knowing that enables the feeler to understand and experience the thing that is felt—or tasted, in this case—in a wholly different but yet still wholly personal and individualized way (98).

In this article, I take up this concern with the sensory experiences evoked by food beyond the palate by examining how Russian eaters ex- perience and interpret post-ingestion processes as means of engaging and responding to larger cultural phenomena, most notably events in Russia’s political history. By recognizing and giving meaning to sensory experiences that occur further along the digestive track, Russian eaters engage at a deeply visceral level the larger cultural systems in which their bodies—and their foods—are embedded. This resonates with David Howes’ observation that “any period of great cultural change will be a time of sensory confusion, for social revolutions are always sensory revolutions, [and which] may be experienced as an illness in the body of society or of the individual” (11). At the same time, Russian eaters prioritize different points of intervention into the body, thereby challenging prevailing notions that eating experiences be- gin or occur only at the mouth. Consequently, shifting this attention from the palate to the gut and to other peripheral body parts changes how Rus- sian eaters conceive of the dynamics between the personal and the political. When the political becomes the gastric-political, entities like the state and the nation become invested in the most intimate spaces of their citizens’ lives—that is, in the most intimate spaces of their bodies.

To address these themes, I begin by describing ways in which foods and their sensory dimensions have become channels through which Russians have experienced, understood, and explained the world they inhabit and the experiences through which they have lived. I then examine how Russians’ own physical bodies have been shaped by acts of ingestion and other sensory experiences located further along the digestive track. Finally, I conclude by considering how this reorientation of where the sensory is most productively

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located might shed light on rethinking current food theories about taste preferences and consumer choice.3

VOTING WITH ONE’S TEETH AND STOMACH: TASTE AS POLITICS

Like eaters throughout the world, Russians have found food to be a particu- larly evocative symbol of political processes as well as a powerful medium through which those political processes take shape and become materialized. Both food production and consumption are highly politicized activities, as consumers can “vote” not simply with their feet but also with their teeth and stomach. In Russia, consumers have “voted with their teeth and stomach” in many ways, beginning in the 1990s with a backlash against the proliferation of foreign foods and the perceived Westernization of Russia—what Russians have derisively described as the “Snickerization” of their culture. Through forms of commercialized nationalism, Russians alternately rejected foreign products, including imported frozen chickens from America that Russian consumer-citizens pejoratively labeled “Bush Legs,” and instead embraced food and other products that made claims on Russia’s national heritage and culture (Caldwell, “The Taste of Nationalism”).

In response, Russian food producers promoted a return to “traditional” food products and dishes that were familiar from different moments in the nation’s political history. Russian manufacturers resurrected food brands and packaging from Soviet-era factories and used recipes promoted by Soviet dieticians and health reformers. Important historical moments and person- ages from Russia’s past and present, ranging from ancient Rus’ and Imperial Russia to the Soviet and post-Soviet eras, were used in branding and la- beling to connote various aspects of Russian cultural life.4 Peasants, bucolic villages, churches, revolutionary slogans, wartime battles, pre-Soviet nov- elists and artists, and Soviet and post-Soviet leaders have all emerged as markers that convey the more appropriately Russian, and hence presumably higher quality, taste, and reliability, of domestic food products.5

Vodka and chocolates have been especially noteworthy examples of how “national,” and hence “traditional,” themes and values have been used to promote products and the qualities of those products. The most prominent Russian candy companies—Red October, Red Front, and Bolshevik, among others—have routinely used pictures from traditional Russian fairy tales and paintings by Russian artists as decorations on the labels and boxes of their products. For the case of vodka, both historically important political figures and “traditional” modes of distilling have been promoted by marketers and vendors alike as distinguishing their products as superior to foreign products. One series of vodka advertisements featured famous Soviet aeronautic heroes with the slogan “When I return,” while another enterprising vodka brand has

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capitalized on the hero worship of President Vladimir Putin with a brand of Putinka vodka. On different occasions in restaurants and liquor stores, when I have been considering which type of vodka to purchase, I have been advised by waiters or store clerks (and in one case by the drunken liquor store security guard) that I should buy only Putinka vodka because it was obviously the best quality and the most traditional “Russian” vodka. In the case of the drunken security guard, he also informed me that Putin himself monitored the vodka that came out under his name, so I could be assured that it was of the highest quality and cleanest flavor (e.g., with “clean” in this sense meaning that the vodka did not have any noticeable aromatics or flavors).

As public displays of religious practice have become more common over the past two decades, cakes, pastries, and other food items associated with Russian Orthodox religious holidays and rituals, or even pre-Christian rituals, became more visible in grocery stores and restaurant menus. After 70 years of severe restrictions against religious practice, today restaurants in Moscow frequently offer a special “Lenten menu” that follows Orthodox restrictions against dairy and meat. Both individual churches and monas- teries and the denominational body of the Russian Orthodox Church have their own lines of food and beverages—some of which have been officially “blessed”—that they sell in commercial food retailers. Within this context of a “return to the nation,” foods and beverages represent opportunities for Rus- sians to express and ingest their cultural and even political values, especially their views about Russia’s shift between its socialist past and its capitalist present.

The value of food for ingesting and expressing Russians’ political sen- sibilities lies not simply in its communicative capacity as a cultural symbol. Rather, the more profound significance of food is in the extent to which con- sumers directly associate food with the physical effects of food in the bodies of both those who produce it and those who consume it. In multiple ways, political sensibilities are explicitly manifested in consumers’ claims about preferring or disdaining certain sensory qualities of food. A university col- league recalled an occasion in the 1970s when she first tasted a banana and fell in love with the flavor. At that time, bananas were scarce and available only to elites who were allowed to shop in closed stores or eat in private cafeterias. My colleague was not a member of the elite class but had been invited to the private cafeteria after a special meeting. When she described the flavor to a friend, the friend chastised her for being “unpatriotic.” By calling her “unpatriotic,” the friend criticized her for enjoying an elite taste that was denied to ordinary citizens. For the friend, the very flavor of banana was a marker of a particular political identity or sympathy, and consequently a “good,” “patriotic,” and “ordinary” Soviet citizen was one who did not like the taste of banana and so did not eat it.

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The cultivation of citizens’ taste preferences was part of a Soviet project to regulate and improve both the country’s food system and the diet of its citizens. As part of a civic project of disciplining citizens’ bodies in order to cultivate a strong, healthy workforce and to encourage socialist values, socialist-era social reformers and officials targeted bodily disposi- tions. Through instructional guides, architectural styles, home furnishings, and other activities meant to train citizens’ bodies in proper bodily behav- ior, citizens’ bodies were conditioned in proper ways of walking and sitting, responding to weather conditions such as heat or cold, wet or dry, and rec- ognizing and appreciating particular flavors and aromas (e.g., Buchli; Reid; Tura).6 Personal health and hygiene manuals instructed parents on the proper foods to prepare and serve to their children, thereby ensuring that children learned to appreciate a particular flavor palate (Tura). The following sec- tion from a Soviet-era parenting manual is illustrative for the ways in which parents were instructed in how to teach their children to eat properly:

Food should be tasty, appropriately hot, pleasantly composed. For exam- ple, a child might refuse soup with macaroni, but eagerly eat soup with macaroni in the shape of stars or little roosters. Beautifully presented food increases appetite. Therefore it is necessary to pay attention to the tastes of the child and his preferences. (Tura 87)

Additionally, the standardization of recipes in restaurants, food factories, and private kitchens, and the formal professionalization of food services, ensured a homogenized and rather narrow set of taste preferences and food styles (see also Shectman; cf. Jung, “From Canned Food. . .”). Even “exotic,” “foreign” foods were heavily regulated and normed toward a standard by virtue of both the regulations on recipes and the limited supply of unusual spices. Today, Russian chefs and home cooks alike complain that Russian cuisine’s emphasis on salt and vinegar has limited consumers’ palates only to salty and sour, thereby making it difficult for both professional and amateur cooks to introduce alternative flavor profiles into their menus or home- made meals. During the course of my research, I regularly encountered complaints from women who wanted to try new recipes at home, including more “healthful” recipes that were lower in sodium or used olive oil instead of butter, but were stymied by husbands and sons who refused to eat those new foods because they did not have the “correct,” that is familiar, flavor or texture.

Linking cultural values with physical sensations is one of the objectives of flavor chemists, R&D professionals with food corporations, restaurateurs, and food reformers alike, who are keen to identify the “flavor profiles” asso- ciated with distinct cultural groups (see also Rozin and Rozin). For the case of Russia, flavor chemists working in the Russian site of a major transnational

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food corporation claimed success when they achieved a mushroom flavoring that appealed to Russian preferences for earthiness and slight bitterness. As one of the chemists explained, his goal was to produce the right combina- tion so that Russian consumers would recognize the product as “authentic” through the deeper, more unconscious awareness of their taste buds and not by appealing to a more superficial level of awareness through the visual cues of branding. Ultimately, the chemist and his superiors hoped that when Russians ate foods that contained this particular flavor profile they would feel comfortable that they were bringing “authentic” Russian experiences and values into their bodies.

Infused in these efforts to identify and cultivate “correct” sensory cues and responses is a concern with the morality of taste. Not only do taste preferences represent ethical or moral values, such as with concerns about labor, environment, and health that are promoted in ethical food movements, but taste preferences themselves might be understood as moral, as in the case of the Soviet citizen who identified a taste preference for bananas as unpatriotic. In this instance, a dislike for bananas would have been the preferred, moral state (e.g., Guthman; Jung, Klein, and Caldwell).

In the post-Soviet period, taste preferences have become powerful con- duits for moral codes about the Russian economy, most notably the values associated with Russia’s new capitalist market. In Russia, much like in other parts of the state socialist world as officials, citizens, and corporations have negotiated the structures and values of socialism and capitalism, as well as the relationships between socialism and capitalism, food and taste prefer- ences have emerged as prime sites for both debate and intervention (e.g., Caldwell, “The Taste of Nationalism”; Klumbytė; Mincyte; Patico; Shectman). In very tangible ways, the production and consumption of food have long been the frameworks for evaluative commentaries about Russian life—from the stories of bread lines that prompted the revolutions that led to the for- mation of the Soviet Union, through the accounts of starvation, cannibalism, and the ethics of responsible consumption during the Second World War, to the tales of “heroic shopping” for scarce food goods that Nancy Ries documented during the late Soviet period.

Continuing into the post-Soviet period, Russians’ ambiguous relation- ships with market capitalism have been rendered alternately through the novelty and prestige afforded to Western foods and the denigration of for- eign products and preoccupation with “nationalist foods” (Caldwell, “The Taste of Nationalism”; cf. Klumbytė). As an explicit project of food national- ism, Russian culinary nostalgia allays public anxieties about the potential loss of cultural heritage in the postsocialist period by directly linking consumers to their national past through familiar flavors, aromas, textures, and visual cues of “traditional” foods (Caldwell, “Tasting the Worlds. . .”). The reassur- ances offered by the familiar sensory cues of traditional foods are especially evident in Russian preferences for foods grown and processed in natural

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settings such as gardens, forests, and rural agricultural settings. These foods are presumed to be healthier, tastier, and more “nationally appropriate” than their industrially produced counterparts. In a series of interviews and surveys I conducted with Russian university students in the late 1990s, I asked why “traditional” foods were so important. One respondent succinctly summed up a perspective I had heard repeatedly from other respondents with her simple answer: “Russian taste buds prefer [Russian tastes].”

As expressions of political values and affiliations, sensory experiences such as taste preferences are powerful precisely because they transform the personal body into a civic body that is a both a repository for and agent of national values and state processes. In Russia, the body that prepares, tastes, and consumes food is intrinsically a politically invested body, a detail that is apparent in one of Russia’s most unusual political museums. The Museum of Public Catering (Muzei Obshchestvennogo Pitaniia) is a monument to Soviet history as told through the history of Russian cuisine and the professionals who have dedicated their lives to Russia’s food industry. The museum is staffed by former chefs and restaurant managers who volunteer their time and expertise to preserve Russia’s culinary history and pass that knowledge on to future generations through public lectures and cooking demonstrations.7

During my visits to the museum in the late 1990s before its recon- struction, my guides showed me extensive exhibits devoted to Russian food cultures from the 19th century to the present. Glass cases featured displays of cookware, dishes, and serving utensils taken from restaurants, public cafeterias, and private homes, as well as an exhaustive collection of per- sonal and industrial appliances. Other displays contained carefully preserved documents such as ration cards, advertisements, and product labels. Ornate menus from restaurants and private gatherings document special events such as the inauguration of Soviet leaders. Photographs, plastic replicas, and other forms of artwork documented Russian foods ranging from simple fare served in peasant homes or taverns to lavish banquets served in the country’s most elite restaurants and private dining rooms.

The halls of the museum were lined with formal portraits of chefs and foodservices officials dressed in their official uniforms and wearing Soviet medals denoting their culinary and political contributions, with special recog- nition given to foodservices workers who served their country during the war. Poems, stories, and drawings by both “hero chefs” from the war and by artists in their honor detailed their experiences and sacrifices. The careful arrangement of each item according to its appropriate time period and his- torical significance, combined with the guides’ efforts to keep visitors on a strictly chronological tour of the museum, ensured an accounting of Russia’s political history in which every event between the Imperial Period and the contemporary period was narrated through food. Although on most days the sensory emphasis is on the visual and textural evocation of Russia’s past, on special days the museum hosts cooking demonstrations and tastings that

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allow visitors to connect the visual and textural representations of the past with the flavors and aromas of those pasts.

During my visits to the museum, I was escorted by Pavel Ivanovich, the retired manager of Yar’, an elite Moscow restaurant that has been in contin- uous operation since before the 1917 Revolution. As Pavel Ivanovich walked me around the museum, he described the various exhibits and the larger social contexts behind them: menus and plastic replicas of foods reminded him of meals that he had prepared for special occasions, such as the banquet he had hosted for visiting dignitaries from Life magazine in the 1960s or the dinner he had quickly put together when Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev unexpectedly visited his restaurant. Pavel Ivanovich framed his recollections not simply on descriptions of past meals but more precisely on the particular sensory experiences of those meals. Interrupting his narratives to smack his lips and whisper reverently “kak khorosho! (how good!)” and “Kak vkusno! (how tasty!),” he recalled the precise tastes of specific meals and the wines and champagnes with which they had been paired.

What Pavel Ivanovich conveyed so elegantly with his shrugs, pursed lips, and facial expressions of ecstasy was that these stories could only be captured and conveyed through the flavors, aromas, and textures of each dish. For him, Russia’s political past resided in and was expressed in the sensory nature of these foods. By appealing to the visceral, experiential quality of these events, Pavel Ivanovich opened up possibilities for his au- dience to grasp those events—and become intimate with the participants in those events—through their own bodies.

This appreciation for the sensorium as the place where political events, knowledge, and values reside and are expressed appeared frequently in in- terviews with ordinary Russians as well. Larisa Antonovna, a retired historian, similarly used the sensory experiences of food to document and communi- cate the two political moments that have the most significance for her: her childhood during World War II and the period of glasnost in the late 1980s. For Larisa Antonovna, these two series of events are necessarily correlated with the tastes of particular foods. For the case of World War II, the flavor of stinging nettles (krapiva) in homemade soups and teas instantly evokes the wartime deprivations she and her family endured. During the war, she and her sister were sent to live with their grandmother and, like many Russians, the three of them fed themselves by picking nettles and other wild plants. Later, during the food shortages of the glasnost period in the late 1980s, Larisa Antonovna began foraging for nettles to supplement her meager food supplies.

Larisa Antonovna was not unusual among Russians of her generation, as many people ate so much krapiva and other wild grasses during the war that they acquired a preference for the flavor, especially the flavor of young nettles that are at their freshest and most tender. In recent years, nettles have been resurrected as part of Russia’s increasingly popular culinary

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nostalgia trends (Caldwell). Russian restaurants, cooking shows, and cooking magazines alike have featured nettles and other “deprivation” foods like wild grasses as a way to remind elderly Russians of their wartime experiences and connect younger generations with their country’s history through its flavors and aromas.

For other Russians, the combination of taste and texture is equally sig- nificant as a sensory reminder of past events and experiences. Svetlana An- dreevna, also an elderly survivor of World War II, has difficulty using basic kitchen utensils like spoons and forks because her fingers have permanently stiffened into a straight position. She explained that she suffered this dis- ability during World War II, when she lived with her family in Leningrad. Owing to the personal sacrifices she made to help support her family during the Leningrad Blockade, most notably during the winter months, she suf- fered frostbite and her fingers froze. Today, she struggles to hold utensils, frequently spilling food on herself. As Svetlana Andreevna explained, this disability is a constant reminder and testimony to her experiences and those of her family during the Great Patriotic War. In a very visceral way, the legacy of the past comes through every day in her body as she attempts to feed herself.

As examples such as these show, the sensory aspects evoked by the in- gestion of food inscribe political values and sensibilities into eaters’ bodies, thereby transforming the political into the personal and transferring public politics into the most intimate personal spaces of individual citizens. Yet paying attention to the sensory qualities of foods only at moments of an- ticipation or consumption privileges qualities such as flavor, aroma, texture, and appearance as the catalyst for subsequent value-making activities and overlooks other ways in which bodily sensations might be responses to po- litical issues. An intriguing question, then, becomes how might narratives of politics and value change as food makes its way through the body? In other words, how might refocusing attention further along the digestive track change our understandings of the sensory dimensions of cultural and politi- cal phenomena? Ultimately, how might processes of digestion and excretion provide a new way of thinking about what taste is and where it is located? These questions are the focus of the following section.

FROM THE PALATE TO THE GUT: COLON-IZING TASTE

Studies of taste have privileged the mouth and the nose—the palate—as the site where tastes are cultivated and recognized, where choice and agency are expressed, pleasure occurs, and responsibility is assigned (e.g., Brillat- Savarin; Korsmeyer; Petrini; Pollan).8 Ultimately, because it is the palate where values enter the body and shape all that follows, taste and choice precede and produce particular types of bodies, a paradigm that contains

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an explicitly moral message: If individuals or institutions (governments, food producers, regulating bodies, etc.) do not exercise sufficient care with what goes into the mouth, then bodies suffer. This is the recurring perspective promoted in much contemporary food scholarship, especially in “health” studies, but also in other food studies focused on Slow Food, organics, Fair Trade, and sustainability. In these approaches, scholars, activists, and food enthusiasts present moralizing ideologies about the appropriate conditions that need to be met in order to ensure that consumers put into their bodies proper food that will produce bodies that are strong, healthy, thin, and cul- tured (Biltekoff; Guthman). Hence if bodily spaces like the mouth and palate are privileged as the spaces to be protected and rewarded with the inges- tion of “good” and “tasty” foods, then other bodily spaces such as stomachs, colons, and body fat are to be feared, regulated, and even punished (De La Peña; Guthman; Nestle & Nesheim; Stearns).

An important alternative to this approach has emerged from anthropol- ogists and other social scientists who are writing from science and tech- nology approaches that are more attuned to the nuances of bodily poli- tics as they play out in other bodily spaces and registers. Critiques of the so-called obesity epidemic have been especially significant for illuminat- ing how the privileging of the palate has mischaracterized the social and political value of other body parts. As Guthman and DuPuis have argued, studies that identify body fat as social, economic, and political “problems” not only demonize that part of the human body but deliberately misrec- ognize the political work that body fat can contain and perform (Guthman and DuPuis). Guthman has convincingly demonstrated that when body fat, blood glucose, and other bio-markers are pathologized, the obvious solu- tions are directed at the act of ingestion, with strong preference for “alter- native” or “real” foods (i.e. fresh, organic, artisanal, and sustainable, among other qualities) that prioritize the palate. By shifting the question to ad- dress why body fat, blood glucose, and other bio-markers are both cultur- ally salient and politically productive, Guthman persuasively illustrates how bodily processes such as digestion and metabolism are thoroughly imbri- cated within political processes (Guthman; see also Biltekoff; Landecker; Nestle & Nesheim). In her research on the political history of milk in American society, Melanie DuPuis’s observation that “the privileged dis- course about the perfection of milk has left out those people—mostly people of color—who are genetically lactose-intolerant” (11) directly links presumed taste preferences with the sensory experiences of racial politics at the most basic, gut level. Thus attention to digestion and metabolism offers an im- portant vantage point for understanding more clearly how politics are not simply ingested but embodied and evoked within the most intimate spaces and sensory experiences of the body.

In their own work on different dimensions of the politics of food and taste preferences, Elizabeth Dunn and Heather Paxson focus on the

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organisms that inhabit foods, be it the botulism spores that Dunn describes for canners in the formerly Soviet Republic of Georgia or the bacteria in cheese described by Paxson, thereby reorienting understandings of how and where acts of agency, choice, and responsibility occur, as well as of the precise relationship between the individual and the larger society in which that individual lives. As Paxson notes in her discussion of what she calls “microbiopolitics,” “dissent over how to live with microorganisms reflects disagreement about how humans ought to live with one another. Micro- biopolitics is one way to frame questions of food ethics and governance” (16). Elizabeth Dunn makes a related point in her argument that states may become apparent and active in both formal institutional structures as well as in micro-materialities like spores that move between foods and the bodies of those that consume those foods (244).

For the Russian case, it is through digestion and metabolism that po- litical processes come to be inscribed physically in and on the bodies of citizens. This correlation became apparent in accounts related by informants who worked as physicians and who called my attention to how bodily ex- periences beyond the palate were crucial sites of national politics. Anatolii was a professor of orthopedic surgery at a university several hours south of Moscow. When Anatolii learned that I was researching food and political history, he argued, “There is no connection between food and history.” In- stead, he informed me, “you should study the connection between food and the skeleton.”

By way of explanation, Anatolii commented that since the early 1990s, he had observed a sharp decline in the food-related health of his patients. During the Soviet period, his patients were primarily elderly persons who had suffered broken bones due to falls. In the post-Soviet period, however, his patients were more and more often young men in their twenties and thirties with broken bones. This apparent increase in bone injuries among young men was clearly visible in places like Moscow and St. Petersburg, where casts on arms and legs were so ubiquitous as to appear a fashion trend. Although popular wisdom typically blamed these injuries on violence (frequently alcohol-fueled), Anatolii suggested that these young men were also injured from falls. Anatolii argued that the increasingly frail bodies of Russia’s young men were the direct result of the proliferation of foreign food products in Russian stories, thereby invoking the refrain of food nationalism that was prevalent in Russia at that time. Anatolii placed special blame on American foods, which he claimed were high in konservanty, or preserva- tives. It was this connection between food and the declining body that I should investigate, he said.

Several weeks later, I was visiting friends in another small city outside Moscow. Lena is also a physician at a state-run hospital, with a secondary, lucrative private practice in alternative medicine. Over dinner, Lena reflected on the escalating cost of groceries, and she noted how difficult it was for

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ordinary Russians to feed their families. Lena finished by commenting, “To- day many people, children in particular, are just not getting the nutrition they need because prices are so high. It is really affecting their health.” What Lena witnessed in her medical clinic were children with thin and frail bodies.

As both Lena and Anatolii suggested from their perspectives as physi- cians whose attentions are focused directly on the physical bodies of their patients, political processes can be borne out directly within consumers’ bodies, such as in their bones and the strength of their muscles. By framing their medical assessments about the health conditions of Russian patients as commentaries on Russian political processes, Lena and Anatolii articulated a potent critique of Russia’s transition to market capitalism by arguing that the new, foreign food products that were available to Russian consumers were of lower nutritional quality than their Russian equivalents. Consequently, foreign foods were bringing about the decline and frailty—both physical and symbolic—of Russians and, by extension, the Russian nation. These concerns have been mirrored at the national level in Russia, with grow- ing public and governmental concern about the physical weakening of the country’s military. Media exposés and soldiers’ letters home to parents have documented inadequate food, which is resulting in illnesses and injuries. Mothers of conscription-age young men expressed their worries about how the food provided during their military service would weaken, and even break (literally), their sons’ bodies.

Bodily frailties are experienced sensorily, as with the pains associated with broken and healing bones. But even healed injuries can still evoke sensory responses as food moves throughout the body. One memorable afternoon, I was visiting my elderly friend Aleksandra Petrovna for lunch. During an otherwise normal conversation about her adolescence during the Great Patrotic War (i.e. World War II), she asked me if I would like to see her scar. Curious, I assented. Without warning, Aleksandra Petrovna quickly unbuttoned her blouse and removed her undergarments. Tracing a thick scar from just under her chin all the way down her chest and down to her groin, Aleksandra Petrovna narrated the story of how it came to be. During the war, she was sixteen and lived on the outskirts of Moscow with her mother and sister, while her father was at the front. The German army had advanced to a nearby position, and she and her neighbors had grown accus- tomed to the constant shelling. One day, as Aleksandra Petrovna was on her way to pick up her family’s food ration, bombing caused a tree to topple over, pinning her beneath it. After she was eventually rescued, her stomach hurt terribly. Without medicine or access to a physician, her mother strapped tight bandages around her chest to relieve the pressure.

Years later, she continued to suffer pain in her chest and stomach, which worsened during and after meals. Only after her second son was born and Aleksandra Petrovna was being treated for post-delivery complications did a physician determine that her pains were due to her long-ago untreated

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injuries. Her stomach had been severed into two parts from the force of the tree on her, thereby preventing her from being able to fill her stomach with more than a few tiny bites at a time and further hindering digestion. A surgeon successfully tied off the smaller section of stomach and created an alternative esophagus to the more effectively functioning section. Now, although she still cannot eat more than a few bites at a time, she no longer endures extended bouts of indigestion.

In narrating this story, Aleksandra Petrovna reflected that because of the physiological symptoms of this past trauma, every bite of food that she ingests is a painful reminder of the past. She thus has to be careful about the food that she puts into her body because of the physiological sensations it might evoke. Foods with small pieces, such as breads, fruits, and chocolates with nuts and seeds, or fruits with high acidity levels, or even excessively hot foods will all cause her to feel pain. Yet despite the unpleasant effects of eating irritating foods, this does not stop her from consuming them altogether. Because these are foods that she enjoys for their flavors, she refuses to give them up entirely. Rather, she simply moderates the quantity and timing of her meals. She has thus found ways to manage her digestive processes so that she can continue to acknowledge and even pleasure different parts of her body.

Although Aleksandra Petrovna’s story is extreme, it was not the only one like it that I encountered, as acquaintances gradually revealed long- ago injuries such as hers. More generally, though, Aleksandra Petrovna’s careful attention to digestive ailments was commonplace. Other friends and acquaintances have repeatedly complained about stomachaches, nausea, and intestinal troubles related to the foods they have eaten. Bottled waters are particularly suspect for causing stomach distress, and friends have lamented the poor bottling processes that produce tainted water. Yet because tap water is not always safe to drink, consumers still buy bottled water, even when they know it will distress their stomachs and colons. Meanwhile, consumers’ complaints about fast foods like McDonald’s focus not on the flavors of the foods but on the subsequent physiological sensations caused by these foods. Acquaintances have described in great detail how their stomachs feel bloated and their skin feels flushed from excess sodium in these foods. While such comments are perhaps not unique to Russian consumers, as American acquaintances have also expressed such sentiments, it was noteworthy that Russian respondents did not usually also comment that the foods tasted poorly and thus should be avoided.

Other acquaintances have described the unpleasant bodily sensations of constipation and diarrhea that have resulted from eating unfamiliar foods served at “new” (i.e. not Russian) restaurants. Recipients in several Moscow food relief programs have not infrequently grumbled that the starchy foods and lack of fresh fruits and vegetables served in their hot meals and con- tained in their supplemental food bags frequently result in extended bouts of

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constipation, a complaint seemingly borne out by the grunts and howls of pain that relief workers and I have heard coming from the toilets used by recipients. A physician with a medical relief program serving low-income Moscow residents related that most of his clients suffered heart palpita- tions and other physical conditions from high blood pressure that was likely caused by the high-sodium foods they were given as part of their food relief packages.

Russians’ concerns with their digestive processes are not unique but part of a longer historical trend both in Russia and elsewhere in which social reformers have focused on the gut, and on processes of digestion and indigestion, as the site for cultivating and transmitting moral values. American food moralists like Kellogg and Post—both Seventh-Day Adven- tists who contributed to the founding of America’s cereal industry, and Gra- ham, who invented the digestive biscuit the graham cracker—found their counterparts in Soviet and post-Soviet moral reformers who have taught citizens how to manage their colons as a way to become productive and compliant workers. By the mid-19th century, dietary advice focused on di- gestion, and excretion was a frequent topic in Russian medical and domestic hygiene texts. With recipes and tips that displayed a nationalist orientation, these texts encouraged readers to pay attention both to particular foods and the origins of those foods in order to protect and improve their digestive tracks (Smith 64–91). Cabbage was valued especially highly as part of the Russian diet, as evident in the Russian annotated translation of a French hygiene manual. In response to the French author’s assertion that cabbage should be avoided because it is “difficult to digest, it agitates, and continued use of it may upset the stomach and even bring about the actual inflammation of it,” the Russian translator inserted the comment that “‘in all likelihood, the author gives his opinion about cabbage simply from hearsay. In all of Rus- sia those who eat shchi [cabbage soup], never complain about it, and even more would very unwillingly replace it with watery French soups” (quoted in Smith 64–65). Similarly, cured cheeses (also associated with French cuisine) were described as foreign, dangerous, and could only be eaten by those who had already ruined their digestion (Smith 66).9

This interest in how foods were processed by the digesting and excreting body continued into the Soviet period. Child-rearing manuals included tips about how children should chew and swallow their foods so as not to upset their stomachs:

[Parents] need to teach children how to chew and not to swallow food directly with a beverage. This is dangerous because thick food gives off warmth and kisel [a fruit drink] or water is room temperature. As a result, it creates a rapid change in the temperature of the stomach, which impedes the process of digestion. (Tura 87)

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From a young age, children were also taught to eliminate properly through individual and collective practice (e.g., Tura). Institutions such as schools and orphanages trained children to eliminate at certain times through group training. Images from the socialist era show groups of children sitting to- gether in a neat line of training potties. In more recent periods, Russian hygiene reformers and advocates have begun promoting bariatric surgeries, colonics, and other digestion-focused interventions to create healthy Russian bodies.

Despite their complaints about the unpleasant digestive experiences as- sociated with particular types of foods, today’s Russian consumers do not necessarily choose to forego those foods. Within the food relief programs described above, recipients who complain about constipation and heart pal- pitations nevertheless specifically request that their supplemental food bags continue to include bowls of instant ramen noodle soups, which contain high quantities of sodium. Hypertension is an increasingly problematic ail- ment among these recipients, and the physicians affiliated with the program are increasingly insistent that recipients need to reduce their sodium intake drastically. Nevertheless, recipients continue to demand the soups and ex- plain that they will find other ways of managing their ailments, either with other medications or, more commonly, through homeopathic means.

In contrast to prevailing North American models of healthy eating that advocate vigilance to the types of food that one eats—notably, low-fat, low- sodium, limited red meat, preponderance of fruits and vegetables—Russian ideals of healthy eating have typically featured meat, starch (bread and pota- toes), and dairy. American-trained physicians in Russia have complained that the high-sodium and high-fat content of much Russian food, coupled with high rates of alcohol consumption among certain populations, is di- rectly leading to food-related health diseases like hypertension, high choles- terol, and malnutrition, as well as the brittle bones noted by Anatolii, the orthopedic surgeon.

Yet as the practices of my informants reveal, consumers tend to focus their interventions elsewhere, primarily on the stomach and the colon, which means that their dietary concerns are different. Russians’ heavy reliance on dairy, especially dairy products with active bacteria cultures like yogurt and oatmeal, helps them cleanse and protect their digestive systems from harm. Respondents note that fruits, especially berries, can lower blood pressure and help with weight loss, thereby counteracting the effects of high-sodium and carbohydrate-heavy diets. In still other cases, if all else fails, herbal teas, dietary supplements, and medicines such as purgatives and charcoal can be consumed to control the stomach and the bowels. This refocusing came up clearly during a series of interviews I observed in spring 2011, when a health food company tried to understand how a group of Moscow consumers made choices about healthy eating. What the researchers in that project discovered was that many of their informants commented that while they knew that

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certain foods were not healthy for them, they chose to eat them anyway because they enjoyed them. They resolved the tension between enjoyment and unhealthiness by instead medicating their digestive processes through natural medicines, ingesting charcoal, and other foods.

Ultimately, Russians are using foods homeopathically for their healing qualities, and specifically for their ability to soothe the ailments of indigestion and constipation, as well as relying on medical interventions to compensate for the foods they put in their bodies. In so doing, they are creatively balanc- ing the beneficial and potentially harmful qualities of different foods so that they can indulge the palate and compensate at the gut. Such practices reveal that consumers are not necessarily concerned with eliminating indigestion but rather are focusing their attentions on engaging indigestion itself. They privilege the gut as the site of sensory experience, and consequently also the site of intervention and management. As my informants have repeatedly emphasized, they do not intend to give up the foods they love. Rather, they look for ways to manage their body’s responses to those foods. In so doing, they are not denying the sensory experiences that occur beyond the palate but rather acknowledging and including them in a more holistic awareness of how “taste” encompasses the entire body.

GASTRI(C)POLITICS: THE MICROBIOPOLITICS OF TASTE

What might a reorientation away from the palate and to the gut tell us about the political work of taste, both in Russia and more broadly? If prevailing moralities of taste in current foodist accounts have emphasized the palate as the point of entry to the body, then moral issues pertaining to appropriate behavior and appropriate values are associated with ideas about agency and control over what enters the body. As Guthman and DuPuis, among many others, have observed, consumers are exhorted to be mindful about what they eat, lest it have negative repercussions on their bodies. The pleasures of eating then become secondary to the pleasures of restraint. In many ways, restraint becomes a form of pleasure itself, especially in cases of extreme dieting (e.g., Griffith). Yet if the focus moves to the gut as the site of expression and management, and especially compensatory intervention, then this changes how notions of choice, agency, and even pleasure are configured and where they are located. Consumers do not have to exercise restraint at the moment of ingestion but can perhaps pleasure their palates, even at the expense of their stomachs, intestines, or hearts. Because ingestion is connected to, and not separated from, digestion and excretion, this longer process of moving food through the body allows for additional points of engagement and intervention.

Relocating agency and control further along the digestive process in turn changes concerns and practices of responsibility and blame. For nutritionism

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proponents, responsibility must occur before ingestion, whether it is that of the eater or that of the producer (see discussions by Biltekoff, Nestle & Nesheim). But can post-consumption, digestive management also be a form of responsible healthfulness? If one of the concerns about the health of the nation is tied up in the bodily health of its citizens, can a healthy nation be one in which the state is interested in managing its citizens’ digestive processes, whether it is by advocating particular foods and healing treatments or by training their bodily processes? Given Russia’s past history, in which Soviet health reformers did direct their attentions to the digestive processes of citizens, this is a question that could be productive for understanding health transitions elsewhere in the world, not least the United States, where digestive interventions are increasingly the norm for managing the country’s health problems.

Finally, to return to the themes of microbiopolitics raised by Dunn and Paxson, what is the nature of the sensorium when taste is expressed and ex- perienced so deeply inside the human body? At one level, sensory qualities such as flavor, aroma, texture, and appearance are inadequate for capturing the physical experiences associated with digestion and metabolism, which occur in body parts and bodily registers removed in space and time from the mouth. At another level, theories of how taste preferences are the external manifestations of deeply ingrained cultural values and practices overlook how taste preferences might in fact be the deeply ingrained physical mani- festation of external cultural values (Bourdieu).

Here Hennion’s inspiration to “feel the feeling of,” coupled with the idea of “tasting with fingers” proposed by Mann et al., provides an important way into rethinking the sensorium beyond the palate because both concepts emphasize the encounter with food itself as the point of departure for under- standing how bodies respond to and interpret what they encounter (Hennion 98). Eaters encounter and engage with food both outside and inside their bodies, through both willfully controlled acts such as touching, smelling, seeing, and tasting, and through involuntary, reflexive responses such as ab- sorption, metabolization, and excretion. Stomachs, muscles, blood vessels, and colons are not empty spaces but rather spaces occupied by a plethora of other organisms, which are in turn inhabited by a plethora of cultures and politics. As such, there are multiple points and moments at which the sensorium is realized and expressed, a fact that Hennion notes in his com- ment that “taste” is perhaps best understood as “a situated activity. . .[that] points toward the contact, a situation of ‘between-the-two”’ (101). And if physical, sensory contact can occur in bodily registers beyond the palate, then so too can cultural contact. Consequently, just as the cultural politics of the sensorium can be evoked at the palate with the moment of ingestion, the sensorium evoked at the gut can illuminate much about the experience and consequence of a politically engaged body.

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FUNDING

The research on which this analysis is based was supported at different times by funding from the U.S. Department of Education (Title VI); the Mellon Foundation; the Kathryn W. and Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Russian States, the Department of Anthropology, and the Committee on Degrees in Social Studies, all at Harvard University; and the University of California, Santa Cruz.

NOTES

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

2. 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.

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

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

5. 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.

6. 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.

7. 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.

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

9. 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).

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