Paper short abstract:

This paper focuses on the revaluation of regional and traditional Polish food as a way for the upwardly mobile and educated city dwellers to express status distinction and reimagine their social identity through material culture, discourse, and practices in everyday life in contemporary Poland.

Paper long abstract:

This paper reports from an ongoing ethnographic fieldwork into the revaluation of regional and traditional Polish food as a way for the upwardly mobile and educated city dwellers to express status distinction and reimagine their newly created bourgeois social identity through material culture, discourse, and practices in everyday life in contemporary Poland. This research is based on media analysis, interviews. and observation conducted among Polish chefs, food manufacturers, and consumers. The paper is concerned with the circulation of people, ideas, and things that connect the Polish food landscape with cosmopolitan flavor profiles, images, and values, determining expectations about what ingredients, dishes, and food service in markets, restaurants, and stores should be like. We engage with the forms and strategies of elevation of regional and traditional food, the revaluation or enrichment of customs that allow them to acquire new visibility, as well as the reinterpretation and reimagination of relations to history, space, and nature in food production and artisanal activities. These dynamics are inscribed into social and geographical mobilities within the country and abroad, generating change in the gastronomy field. At the same time, these shifts negotiate cultural and class tensions between the present and an often imagined past, local traditional roots and global futures, as well as the rural and the urban.