Paper short abstract:

Career shifts from white collar jobs to gastronomy and food production, although niche, became recently visible in Poland. I will consider what happens when foodwork moves beyond domestic space and becomes a basis for the professional projects of those having prior middle-class careers.

Paper long abstract:

Passion driven, middle class career shifts from white collar jobs to gastronomy and food production – similar to those reproduced by global media images – became a part of food landscape in contemporary Poland. In the paper I will look at what happens when foodwork goes beyond domestic space and becomes a basis for the real-life professional projects of those having prior middle-class career. I am interested in the narratives on producing food that accompany and support this niche, but symbolically important, professional mobility. I will analyze the interviews conducted with people who embodied or tried to embody a similar scenario in the Polish pre- and after 2020 context (taking into account the transformations of the Polish food scene, ideas about good food, and the Polish class system).

I am interested in the way foodwork is reinterpreted when moved to public space and framed with narratives of passion and personal fulfilment. I will show how it is described as a complex hybrid with material, bodily, emotional, knowledge-intensive and symbolic dimensions selectively (and not equally) mixed. I will consider how do people deal with the potentially low status of jobs in food sector. What legitimizes or mediates unobvious choices of my interviewees? What happens to manual character and corporeality of foodwork? Which characteristics of foodwork are emphasized and which are marginalized or even silenced? What tensions does it imply?