Engineering Food Modernity: Crises and Industrial Food Making in the USSR, 1950s-1980s

• In Event: Environment, Technology, and Science in the Late USSR

Abstract

The paper will discuss the development of industrial food making in the late Soviet Union as part of the socialist project of modernity. It will examine dreamscapes and professional discussions and laboratory experiments of specialists—scientists and engineers— that shaped the notion of modern food and food challenge. Emphasizing science and technology as influential participants of the long-term development of industrial making of food, the research will demonstrate that state socialism was not only a space of food shortages and shadow economy of food making, but it was a more complicated combination of great concern about food crises, progressive experiment with nature, and weak industrial infrastructures and economic constraints.

Author

• Elena Kochetkova, U of Bergen (Norway)