Good, Clean, Fair … and Illegal: Paradoxes of Food Ethics in Post-Socialist Latvia

Abstract

If the Soviet Union perpetuated an economy of scarcity, the European Union maintains an economy of purity: in Soviet Latvia a lack of raw materials restricted production, while in the EU, hygiene regulations restrict processing and sale of homemade foods. In both periods, producers and consumers have cultivated informal social networks that challenge relations to structures of power, equating illegally obtained food products with an ethical stance. Positioning local informal networks as illegal obscures persistent inequalities in access to markets for the smallest home producers, and stigmatizes local practices and social networks as backwards without addressing the causes.