I<\/span>n the autumn of 1999, just a few months after I had moved to Berlin for a post-college fellowship, I attended a party hosted by a good friend. Like most of my friends at that time, she was East German, a fact of which I was barely aware. This particular party proved unexpectedly memorable, however, as it was the stage for my first experience of the infamous\u00a0Mauer im Kopf<\/em>, the \u201cWall in the head\u201d that was still a subject of much debate a decade after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The hostess had provided abundant snacks for our enjoyment, including, to my delight, one of my favorite sweets:\u00a0Knusperflocken<\/em>, small candies made of crunchy grains and milk chocolate. I was enthusiastically reaching for a handful when a guest warned me away: \u201cI can\u2019t believe it\u2014don\u2019t eat those,\u201d he said. \u201cThose are so\u00a0Ossi\u00a0<\/em>[East German].\u201d \u201cWhat do you mean,\u201d I asked innocently, \u201cI think they\u2019re delicious.\u201d \u201cNo, they are not,\u201d he insisted, \u201cthey only have two ingredients!\u201d This both simple and nonsensical answer revealed that this\u00a0Wessi<\/em>\u00a0defined East German food by what he perceived as inadequacy and lack\u2014not poor flavor per se, but the abstract problem of having \u201conly\u201d two ingredients (chocolate and grain). His explanation bemused me; it only made sense when I began to understand it as part of a larger discourse that existed within recently reunified Germany. It also was my first exposure to the pervasiveness of food-based fantasies on the part of both East and West Germans with regard to one another in the wake of reunification.<\/p>\n

Perhaps the most famous example of this sort of West German fantasy of East German \u201cbad taste\u201d is the infamous satirical magazine\u00a0Titanic<\/em>\u2019s cover image from November 1989: the smiling \u201cZonen-Gabi,\u201d or \u201cGabi from the [Eastern] zone,\u201d holds an enormous peeled cucumber under the headline, \u201cMy first banana\u201d (See Cover Image\/ Fig. 1). The\u00a0Titanic<\/em>\u00a0picture was only the most famous in a veritable flood of cartoons and images memorializing the fall of the Wall\u2014an overwhelming number of which focused on bananas (See\u00dflen). These jokes almost always described a profound East German desire for bananas, one that was so strong it bordered on the pathological. For example, East Germans were depicted as monkeys or as ravenous hordes consuming overnight the entire supply of bananas in the FRG (Federal Republic of Germany or West Germany). These jokes often revolved around the idea that East Germans\u2019 tastes were so underdeveloped that they could not actually identify a banana when they ate it\u2014or did not eat it, as the case may be. Most frequent was the premise of the\u00a0Titanic<\/em>\u00a0image: an East German ate a pickle, cucumber, sausage, or other deeply familiar food, but in their ignorance they \u201ctasted\u201d a banana. In other words, post-reunification discourse on the GDR normalized assumptions not only about how much East Germans ate (a lot) and what they ate (drab, non-delicious foods), but also about their inability to identify specific flavors. Most of these jokes could be summed up with the premise that the GDR was a land inhabited by people who were universally afflicted with \u201cbad taste.\u201d<\/p>\n

Theories of taste have been a crucial part of discussions of class, difference, and identity at least since Pierre Bourdieu\u2019s influential work\u00a0Distinction<\/em>, in which the sociologist noted that \u201ctastes in food also depend on the idea each class has of the body and of the effects of food on the body, that is, on its strength, health and beauty\u201d (190). However, taste is not simply a component of the expression of individual and collective identity. People\u2019s tastes in food have long been a central concern of modern states. Economists and nutritionists have struggled to determine, explain, and modify individual tastes in food since the emergence of the industrial economy; the rise of industrialization meant that economic health depended upon eating habits. Labour productivity was seen as directly related to popular diets, and food production and consumption became increasingly important components of the national economy. This recognition of the economic and social significance of individual dietary preferences has inspired countless projects to improve how and what populations eat. However, nutritionists\u2019 consistent failures to modify what they consider unhealthy popular eating habits has only confirmed anthropologist Jack Goody\u2019s observation that foodways often seem to be \u201cthe most conservative aspects of culture\u201d (150). Indeed, since the emergence of the modern nutritional sciences, nutritionists have consistently complained about the near-impossibility of changing popular tastes (\u201cPsychologische Grundlagen des Ern\u00e4hrungsverhaltens\u201d). As a West German nutritionist explained grimly in 1967, \u201cit is the task of nutritionists to work against false dietary habits, and this obligation makes nutritionists unpopular. Nowhere is the human spirit less reasonable and more stubborn than when it is defending traditional and false eating habits\u201d (Holtmeier 312). Thus taste remains individual and almost impossible for external forces to regulate at the same time that peoples\u2019 tastes in food matter profoundly to modern states because they determine what and how much individuals eat.<\/p>\n

Scholarship on the GDR has only recently begun to address issues of food production and consumption as key components of everyday life (Ciesla and Poutrus). This literature has carefully documented East Germans\u2019 struggles to purchase foodstuffs given the vagaries of a socialist economy. Poor quality products, irregular and inadequate supplies, and inequitable and unpredictable distribution shaped consumer culture generally, but also of course determined how and what people ate. Historians have been less aware, however, of the ways in which the GDR\u2019s distinctive food culture incorporated citizens\u2019, especially East German women\u2019s, struggles to purchase foodstuffs. Moreover, they have ignored the existence of an elaborate network of collective-eating establishments in workplace canteens and school cafeterias, as well as a variety of individual strategies for food acquisition, including a reliance on private gardens and barter and trade as methods of compensating for inadequate state-provided supplies. More generally, the expanding literature on consumption practices in the GDR has rarely explored the issue of taste. While scholars such as Paul Betts, Judd Stitziel, and Eli Rubin have addressed the relationship between taste and East German identity vis-\u00e0-vis, respectively, furniture, fashion, and plastics, food has been marginal to these discussions. Nonetheless expressions of taste as a strategy of social ordering and hierarchy are inseparable from food itself. While we usually assume that good taste (or flavor) determines the foods that we eat, we simultaneously believe that other people\u2019s \u201cwrong\u201d food choices are made because of their underdeveloped or inadequate tastes. In short, the relationship between the actual flavor of specific foods and their symbolic association with \u201cgood taste\u201d or \u201cbad taste\u201d is fluid, often contradictory, and heavily influenced by larger external political and social categories.<\/p>\n

This essay thinks about the category of taste as a way of exploring both the history and the legacy of the GDR by focusing upon two distinct discourses that constructed East German popular food tastes as flawed or bad. During the 1970s, the East German medical establishment came to the consensus that its population was too fat because of its inappropriate appetites for both too much food and the wrong sort of food. Actually the 1970s and 1980s witnessed the emergence of a so-called obesity epidemic in both East and West Germany, as well as across much of the industrialized world. Obesity posed a particular problem to the socialist state because its very existence suggested that popular taste was flawed, and that the sorts of \u201cordinary\u201d foodways generally conceptualized as central to the state\u2019s identity caused serious health problems. This disturbing idea that East German citizens did not, in fact, like the \u201ccorrect\u201d foods suggested that some core values of socialism needed to be redefined. The obesity epidemic thus became a source of tension between nutritionists, who believed that excessive levels of fatness revealed poor eating habits, and a larger political, economic, and cultural discourse that associated socialism with cheap, abundant, and tasty foods. This essay compares this tension surrounding East German obesity with West German descriptions of East Germans as both impoverished and overweight, a population imagined as relying upon poor-tasting and undesirable foodstuffs. Here, East Germans\u2019 poor taste was imagined as being the direct and inevitable result of the economic system; West Germans imagined the East German population as icons of \u201cbad taste\u201d because they were forced to live within the inadequate consumer landscape of state socialism. Although these discourses served different purposes and emerged out of different contexts, they shared a common perception of the flawed nature of East German bodies and appetites.<\/p>\n