The Visible and the Invisible: Intimate Engagements with Russia's Culinary East

10.6641/PICCFC.11.2009.14

Melissa L. Caldwell

Chinese and Northeast Asian Cuisines: Local, National, and Global Foodways.

第11屆（2009 / 10 / 15）

17 - 1-17-20

英文

Accounts of Russia's stunning culinary transformation have privileged ＂the West＂ as the source and inspiration of the new food cultures that have emerged in the postsocialist period. This orientation is evident in the attention paid to the proliferation and widespread visibility of American fast food chains, Finnish and French grocery stores, Swiss confectionaries, and Italian restaurants, to name but a very few of the many ＂Western＂ food cultures that have become popular among Russian consumers in the past twenty years. While studies of the movement of ＂Western＂ food cultures into Russia shed important light on how Russia is reinventing itself as a postsocialist, cosmopolitan consumer society, the particular geographic orientation implicit in these accounts limits our abilities to understand Russian consumers' engagements with other non-local food cultures, especially those from Russia's ＂Eastern＂ neighbors. In this paper, I will challenge this prevailing Western orientation by critically examining and comparing the place of Korean, Chinese, and Japanese food cultures in contemporary Russian food practices. In particular, I will suggest that attention to the emergence of ＂Eastern＂ food cultures in Russia sheds important light on the growing importance of economic and cultural relations between Russia and its Asian partners. Specifically, Korean, Chinese, and Japanese culinary traditions have been-integrated in Russian food practices in very different ways, thereby revealing intriguing degrees of socio-political visibility in Russian daily life. This visibility, in turn, reveals differences in how Russians imagine and value not just the countries of Korea, China, and Japan, but also the movement of peoples and resources from those countries into Russia. For instance, Korean foods, most notably spicy salads, are highly visible in Russian grocery stores and markets but not marked as particularly foreign or exotic by Russians. Rather, they are considered ordinary and even local, an orientation that reflects the more general integration of Koreans in Russia's population. By contrast, Chinese foods are marked as ＂foreign＂ and have not yet found widespread popularity among Russian consumers. More intriguing is the spatialization of Chinese cuisine. With the exception of a few elite Chinese restaurants catering to Moscow's foreign tourists and business elite, Chinese foods are relegated to sidewalk kiosks that sell packaged boxes of industrially prepared noodles that are reheated in a microwave by the vendor. These sidewalk kiosks rank at the bottom of Russia's restaurant hierarchy, both in terms of their spatial placement and in terms of their clientele, a feature that mirrors Russians' attitudes toward Chinese immigrants, who are primarily unskilled laborers and seen as displacing Russian workers. Finally, Japanese cuisine occupies the most visible position in Russia's food culture, as sushi, tempura, and noodle restaurants have spread widely across Russia and other formerly Soviet countries. One Japanese chain that was founded in Russia has now spread to Ukraine, and sushi has replaced French fries as the most common side dish on menus in all Russian restaurants and is gradually appearing in grocery stores. Despite the widespread popularity of Japanese food, its appeal suggests not a domesticating process like that with Korean food, but rather a persistent fascination and exoticization of Japan as a productive Other, matched by the government's encouragement of Japanese businesses to invest in Russia. Thus, by comparing the appeal of these three different cuisines to Russian consumers, I will show how food reveals larger cultural attitudes about Russia's stakes and position within the global flows of immigration and capital. This analysis will, in turn, challenge prevailing paradigms in globalization and consumption studies that have privileged a West-to-East geographic orientation by shifting our vantage point to a very different set of East-to-West interactions. Accounts of the dramatic culinary and-cultural transformations taking place across the formerly Soviet world over the past twenty years have consistently emphasized the influence of global commerce. From the arrival of McDonald's inside ''the Iron Curtain,＂ first in Yugoslavia in the late 1980s and subsequently in the Soviet Union itself in 1990 (Caldwell 2004), to the more recent arrival of avant-garde international cooking trends such as dining in the dark, molecular gastronomy, and the creative experimentation promoted by Spain's EI Bulli restaurant (Shectman 2009), post-Soviet culinary traditions have undergone profound changes. Perhaps nowhere have these transformations been more striking than in Russia. Unlike the early 199Os, when consumers' food choices were limited to a small assortment of cabbages, potatoes, carrots, cucumbers, and onions sold from the backs of dusty trucks; loaves of bread, unwrapped and unprotected from the elements, sold from rickety sidewalk tables; and the meager supply of tinned meats, limp cheese, and greasy sausage available in the Iocal grocery store, today's Russian consumers have virtually anything and everything at their disposal. A quick stroll through even the smallest neighborhood grocery store reveals a diverse selection of fresh fruits and vegetables - just a few weeks ago, the local produce stand by my apartment in Moscow sold no fewer than eight different kinds of tomatoes, four different types of cherries, as well as numerous types of squash, melon＂ peaches, apricots, apples, cauliflower, eggplant, and herbs. In sharp contrast from the Soviet .period, when ＂foreign＂ foods meant cuisine from the other Soviet republics, today Russian consumers can purchase spices and ingredients from around the world - Indian spices, Thai curries, Mexican tortillas, rice stick noodles of every size, shape, and consistency, and even fresh avocadoes! And unlike their Soviet and early post-Soviet counterparts, who could scarcely find a sidewalk kiosk where it was possible to get a snack or a quick drink, much less a restaurant that could prepare any of the few standard dishes listed on its menu - meat cutlets with potatoes, beef stroganoff, and heavily salted and dried fish - today's Russian diners have at their disposal a veritable World's Fair of options: American-style hamburger and steak restaurants, Italian pasta and pizza, regional French cuisines, Irish, Scandinavian, Mexican, Indian, Thai, Tibetan, Middle Eastern, Australian, South African, and everything in between. These changes did not happen all at once, however, but rather occurred in two distinct waves: the first, initial wave occurred during the 1990s with the ＂importation＂ of Western food products, cuisines, and restaurants; the second occurred in the late 1990s with the arrival of Asian foods and restaurants - most notably Japanese sushi restaurants but also Chinese, Thai, Tibetan; and Mongolian restaurants. A third wave that has begun in the past two years is the arrival of restaurants featuring ＂Southern＂ foods - i.e., cuisines from Russia's southern neighbors in the Caucasus and Central Asia. This wave is too recent to explore fully here and certainly beyond the themes of this conference, but I do think there are some intriguing parallels between what I am going to talk about here and the increasing invisibility of one particular type of Southern cuisine - Georgian cuisine - from Russia in the wake of the heightened political tensions between Russia and Georgia over the past two years. I would be happy to talk about this issue later. Such dramatic changes in post-Soviet culinary practices have intrigued anthropologists and provoked intense debates about what such a shift to an international, cosmopolitan culinary lifestyle might mean for the continuation and preservation of distinctive regional identities across the formerly Soviet landscape. Some anthropologists have reported that post-Soviet citizens have described their embrace of foreign cuisines and food products as the desire to signal their departure from a ＂backward＂ Soviet lifestyle and their movement to a more ＂modem,＂ even ＂normal＂ lifestyle (Fehervary 2002; Lankauskas 2002; Jung 2007; Rausing 2002). Other anthropologists have documented how post-Soviet consumers have appropriated foreign food trends as means for highlighting and celebrating indigenous cuisines; for instance, Stas Shectman (2009) describes how Russian chefs and cooking schools are drawing on the standards and institutions of international cooking competitions and media to elevate Russian cuisine to the level of an international cuisine and to make it internationally visible. Still other anthropologists have reported how foreign cuisines have provoked a domestic backlash, so that post-Soviet consumers demonstrate their patriotic and nostalgic sentiments through a return to Soviet-era ＂traditional＂ foods, such as with the revival of Soviet-brand sausages in Lithuania described by Neringa Klumbyte(2009; cf. Caldwell2002). Within such approaches, globalization is clearly the context and mechanism through which post-Soviet consumers are making sense of themselves and articulating a sense of authentic local cultures. Yet how anthropologists have theorized globalization reveals a curious set of suppositions about the natural origins of these processes. their trajectories, and their significance for evaluating the successes of these changes. Specifically, accounts of the ＂positive＂ effects of cultural globalization have consistently privileged West-to-East movements of cultural trends, commodities, and people, so that ＂the West＂- that is, the capitalist world embodied in North America and Western Europe - is held up as the inspiration and goal within a normalizing evolutionary process (Patico and Caldwell 2002). Because of this emphasis on ＂the West,＂ the second wave of globalization shaping Russia's culinary culture, that of the East-to-West movements of cultural trends and culture brokers, has received far less attention, even as its effects are no less profound or revealing of Russians' cultural transformation and their efforts to resituate themselves in a global world. Moreover, as I think you will agree, the East-to-West movement of food trends into Russia is perhaps far more complicated and intriguing than the more usual story of globalization from the West. Thus, in this paper I hope to present an alternative to this persistent privileging of the West in accounts of Russia's culinary transformation in order to illuminate not just what Easternization might tell us about Russian culture and Russia's relationship with its Eastern neighbors, but also what Easternization might tell us about the process of globalization itself and the geopolitical work that globalization performs. To do so, I will compare the place of Korean, Chinese, and Japanese food cultures in Russia. In particular, I suggest that attention to the emergence of ＂Eastern＂ food cultures in Russia sheds important light on the growing importance of economic and cultural relations between Russia and its Asian partners. Korean, Chinese, and Japanese culinary traditions have been received by Russians in very different ways, thereby revealing intriguing degrees of socio-political visibility and acceptance in Russian daily life. This visibility, in turn, mirrors how Russians imagine and value not just the countries of Korea, China, and Japan, but also how they view and evaluate the movement of peoples and resources from those countries. Here I am talking not just about the movement of cosmopolitans in a transnational world order (Hannerz 1990), but rather specifically about the place of migrants as carriers of culture. UItimately, food reveals larger cultural attitudes about Russia's stakes and position within the global flows of capital and immigration. To explore these themes I will pay particular attention to issues of visibility as markers of familiarity, comfort, and prestige. Spatial visibility is an important aspect of food cultures in Russia. As I have described elsewhere (Caldwell' 2006, 2009), Russians' sensibilities are oriented to the spatial location of both food products and the gustatory, olfactory, and visual sensations evoked by these foods - what one .writer described as ＂geogastronomic＂ to capture the topographical arrangement of different cuisines throughout Moscow (Anonymous 1998:8). As a result, the physical placement and visibility of food and food settings Is essential to how Russian consumers experience and evaluate them. After briefly describing the different degrees of visibility and invisibility of Korean, Chinese, and Japanese food in Russia, I will turn my attention to the place of immigrants from these three societies in Russia society and point out some fascinating parallels. I will then conclude by offering some thoughts on what culinary Easternization can tell us about how global trends and global agents become domesticated in Russia.