Food in Poland

When I traveled to Poland for the first time in 2016 as a journalist on trip organized by the Adam Mickiewicz Institute, I immediately became interested in the fast changes taking place in the Polish food world. After two years of preliminary research, together with Mateusz Halawa, a researcher in the Max Planck Partner Group for the Sociology of Economic Life at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Science in Warsaw, in 2018 I became the recipient of a tree-year grant from the National Science Centre, Poland, for the project Reinventing “Polish food” in the cosmopolitan foodscape (Przemiany “polskiego jedzenia” w kosmopolitycznym pejzażu jedzeniowym, DEC-2017/27/B/HS2/01338).

The objectives of this research project are: (1) to investigate the newly emerging interest in local and traditional Polish foods among urban, educated, upwardly mobile middle classes in terms of individual and collective identities; (2) to explore the apparent revaluation of Polish food in terms of space – through the rearticulation of the categories of local, regional, and national – and time, through discourses around history and tradition, which include debates on authenticity; (3) to examine new forms of cosmopolitanism resulting from both homegrown social dynamics (cultural omnivorism and need for distinction) and the entanglement with global cultures and practices through social media and other forms of communication; (4) to understand how cosmopolitanism through the revaluation of Polish food influences the experience of the Polish national identity and heritage in everyday life.

The research project, based at Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Science in Warsaw, is taking us all around Poland, from Kraków to Gdańsk, Poznań, and Toruń. We will be posting updates on our work on the blog.