Totalitarian discourse of the culture of eating in 1920-1930 Soviet Russia

The culture of eating includes the set of products and dishes characteristic of the socio-cultural reality, which satisfy the acceptable strategies of pleasure and the basic cultural codes; and the consumption practices that reproduce a definite type of physicality and its identity. As one of the basic structures of everyday life the culture of eating also transformed inevitably in the situation of the major totalitarian socio-economic changes. In 1920-1930s Soviet Russia had a global reform of structures of everyday life, the main tendency of which can be designated as changing the social space from private to public, from individual to collective, from personal body to collective body. Therefore the sphere of the culture of eating became the aim of strict government regulation and public control. Early 1920s up to 1935 (food products derationing) and 1939 (the first edition of the «Book on Tasty and Healthy Food») was the time of major changes when new, communist eating habitude was introduced. The «Book on Tasty and Healthy Food» became the basis of the culinary mythology of Soviet people, it represents the basic strategy of the culture of eating and fixes the system of the binary codes of food, which is determined by the social and ideological situation: food of labourers - food of capitalists, clean - dirty, simple (useful) food - delicious (unhealthy) food; satiety - hunger; the food industry of capitalism that eliminates the low quality of food and the food industry of socialism that preserves best quality of food. Thus, major transformations of the culture of eating, which we denote as totalitarian, are elimination of private cuisine and socialization of the cuisine; rationalisation and medicalisation of food; replacement of the principle of pleasure by the principle of utility; functionalisation of food and human body; the situation of permanent food deficit, which existed along with the myth about gastronomic abundance as the achievement priority of the Soviet government that cares about labouring people. The analysis of the totalitarian project of the culture of eating allows us to see some of its characteristics, which still exist in contemporary culture. For example, the common features of totalitarian gastronomic culture and modern gastronomic culture are the following: a strong decrease of the traditional semiotic status of the cuisine; impoverishment of the cultural semantics of eating; advertising of a specific gastronomic discourse, which, in fact, performs the function of social control

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