PEOPLES POLAND ON THE PLATE: CULINARY REALITY IN COMMUNIST POLAND. A RESEARCH PROPOSAL

This article sketches some of the main directions in which research could go, mentioning the most important issues that construct the social reality of those times, mainly regarding food as a research subject. By trying to reconstruct social realities (especially food consumption patterns) more than just a simple ethnographical description is given; questions raised about the relations between everyday life and official state propaganda can also be answered. Furthermore, issues connected with gender studies (such as the position of women in the household hierarchy, their control over food flows and their associated responsibility) and family life and structure are considered. The aim to create the New Man, as defined by communist propaganda, was one of the leading aims of such propaganda, especially in the 1950s. Moving the responsibility for most of the decisions from an individual level to the level of society had also its influence on food, which became a social issue. Because of this, the state tried to take responsibility for feeding people by establishing cheap, subsidised food bars and canteens in schools and workplaces. That situation inevitably lead to confrontation with tradition and traditional images connected to food and its consumption.