Designing the Future of Polish Food

Abstract

This article explores the cultural work behind the newly emerging interest in Polish cuisine, culinary traditions, and local ingredients among urban, educated, upwardly mobile middle-class foodies who a decade earlier would distinguish themselves by conspicuously consuming foreign fare. Cultural intermediaries, or tastemakers, have been central to this process of creating new forms of value and meaning in Polish food. Given their reflexivity, the iterative and collaborative character of their modus operandi, and their focus on the future, we frame their practices in the analytic language of design. They redesign Polish food in terms of space—through the rearticulations and new embodiments of the categories of “local,” “regional,” and “national”—and time, through materializations of history, tradition, and aspiration.