Authors

Discussion

When McDonald’s arrived in Poland in 1992, it was welcomed as the symbol of the country’s Westernisation and civilizational advancement. In media narratives burgers and French fries came to signify cultural and economic change, exemplified by new eating practices, but also by new ideologies of work championed by the fast-food chain. The process of ‘McDonaldisation’ of Polish food culture was however far from straightforward. McDonald’s intervention into the Polish food landscape provoked heated debates on the role of food in national imaginary and on the place of national heritage in the future-oriented visions of capitalist modernity.

Drawing on media debates surrounding McDonald’s expansion in 1990s Poland, this paper analyses negotiations over the role of (fast)food in the Polish national habitus. Departing from Norbert Elias’ theory of the civilising process, the paper sheds light on the ways in which food could become weaponised in the discussions of social and cultural change in the decade following the end of the Cold War. How did the economic and political transformation affect what people ate and how they made sense of it? How could food be used to redefine the national habitus? What counted as ‘modern’, ‘civilised’ food and what needed to be modernised? What was the role of eating in reimagining the future in the years of post-socialist transformation? Rather than approaching this history through a top-down analytical perspective, this paper highlights how local media and customers responded to corporate marketing strategies and how they negotiated McDonald’s presence in the Polish food landscape. By focusing on the importance of local food cultures, this paper showcases the processes of domestication of Western cultural imports in post-socialist East Central Europe.