“What’s the Big Deal to Be Romanian if You Don’t Have What to Eat” : Food Practices in “Transition”

Abstract This article examines some of the main changes in food practices from the first half of 1990s shaped by the new political and economic environment. Based mainly on an analysis of press articles from this period, three main themes are identified in the discussion of alimentation: “hunger”, queues, and new configurations of commerce. This article suggests that these are entangled in a changing culture of shortages specific to the 1980s through an adaptation of older practices of consumption and commercialization of food, discursive tropes and moral judgments. In this way, a simultaneously prospective and retrospective orientation appears in which some of the ethos of the previous social order is used in new ways of making sense of the present. Food plays an important role in this orientation, its rationalization and precariousness specific to the 1980s being now replaced by new worries and uncertainties raised by the economic measures of “transition”.