Description:
1. Food studies is becoming increasingly popular in both conferences and in classrooms. This book explores the late Soviet era through food including: the anxieties around continual problems of scarcity, the luxury and prestige attached to certain items, and the creativity Soviet citizens applied to their provisioning and cooking.
2. The book is written with undergraduate audiences in mind and will have strong appeal for course adoption.
3. Darra Goldstein, a prominent scholar of Soviet food culture, will provide a preface for the volume. Brintlinger is an established academic with several monographs and edited collections to her credit. Lakhtikova and Gluschenko are earlier-career scholars with extensive teaching and research experience in the Russian émigré culture and Soviet food.
Review Quotes:
"Seasoned Socialism manages to pull off the difficult trick of being at once a serious academic exploration of food's role in history as well as a highly readable social history. . . . This book, celebrating the indomitable spirit of Russian hospitality and its essential ingredients, is a must-read for all serious students of Late Soviet history, culinary historians, and anyone interested in a compelling examination of the relationship between food and history."--The Moscow Times
"Overall, Indiana University Press has published an attractive, well-edited volume. . . . Recommended."--Choice
"The volume makes a significant and long-awaited interdisciplinary contribution to the areas of consumption, material culture, gender, film, and poetry studies. It is a well-written and well-organized collection of approaches to understandingthe nuances of Soviet food and gender relations, as well as food cultures under socialism; it is, therefore, highly recommended to anyone interested in these areas of study. Each scholar contributes to the general topic suggested by the editors by adding to the overall picture their own research focus and lens, which makes the volume a rich collection of thoughts about the diversity of food cultures and modes of gender relations in late Soviet society."--H-Socialisms
"As an important synthesis of oral history, literature, and film studies, Seasoned Socialism will undoubtfully be very useful for teaching courses focusing on Soviet culture and society in late socialist years and beyond."--The Russian Review