2004 Annual Meeting - Abstract

Sampling the World of Today and Yesterday: Culinary Tourism in
Post-Soviet Russia

Melissa L. Caldwell

Contact Information:
Visiting Assistant Professor of Anthropology
Department of Sociology & Anthropology
539 Holmes Hall
Northeastern University
Boston, MA 02115
melissa.l.caldwell@att.net

Abstract: Because of the restrictions that the Soviet state placed on international travel and trade, and because of the state’s concomitant privileging of domestic products and culture, Soviet citizens’ familiarity with foreign locales was shaped largely by institutionalized conduits such as restaurants, the media, and public exhibitions, rather than by personal experience. In the decade following the dissolution of the Soviet Union, however, Russia’s borders have become more permeable, facilitating increased movement of people, goods, ideas, and trends both into and out of the region. In this transnational setting, tourism and cuisine are increasingly linked as opportunities for Russian consumers to imagine, understand, and experience the foreign Other. Tourist agencies offer reasonably priced trips abroad, and ethnic restaurants in Russia attract customers by packaging foreignness through themed menus, decorations, and entertainment. Culinary journals strategically market the foreign to readers through articles that present recipes and descriptions of food practices as forms of imaginary travel. More intriguingly, these trends have inspired a type of “time travel” associated with specifically indigenous foods. Restaurants serving “traditional” Russian dishes entice diners to experience life in Russia's near and distant past. In some cases, restaurants offer consumable nostalgia with menus drawn from Russia’s Imperial and peasant pasts, such as in hunting-themed lodges and historic monasteries. In other cases, they present ironic commentaries on the Soviet past with culinary parodies of Soviet public dining. In both cases, these restaurants offer Russian consumers opportunities to experience the past as a temporal Other, just as they experience the cuisines of other countries as foreign Others. By examining the phenomenon of culinary tourism in Russia today, this essay analyzes the interconnections of travel and time in the postsocialist moment and situates them within larger globalizing processes affecting ideas of home and home cooking currently at work in Russia today. Specifically, I am concerned with the ways in which Russian consumers are negotiating new standards for home cooking and local cuisines through their imagined and actual culinary journeys.