“Buka is holy”: Meaning of Food for Bosnian Culture

The social life of my parents in Bosnia [and thus their children] was regularly made up of the gathering of friends to eat a lot of bread and drink, sing and laugh together. No one ever called that dinner meal thing "all activity was brought to the bread," but it could never be reduced to it. In Bosnian, the word that describes the activity in question is wound, which means sitting down, since the whole process consists of landing around a table, eating, drinking, and being with others for fun. When I want to take out any images of my parents when they were happy [not an easy task], I think of them sitting with their friends at a table, laughing and enjoying delicious food.

This sometimes lasted for the entire weekend - at times we went to a mountain resort, stayed with friends of parents, and their families on May 1st, Worker's Day.

To us, like everyone around us, the bread had to be divided among people, so it is illegal to eat while someone else sees you and does not eat himself. The bread was other people. We hated eating for ourselves, just as we hated it when we were alone.

I don't have any memory of my parents going to a dinner dinner, before or even after they got married. There was no restaurant culture in pre-war Sarajevo. The restaurants were either too expensive or too good, sometimes both. Nor in Canada, where we had fled as refugees in 1993, my Séke parents received the taboo to go and have their own supper.

Apple pie

Spending money for a dinner was an unknown gastronomic territory, while mother's cooking was the most exoticly good in the world. For my family, eating meant no exploration, not even the expansion of cultural experiences. The part of having food content was to match certain expectations, while its inevitability stood in providing energy for work and thus for survival. The bread was an existential need, an irreplaceable element in the structure of daily life, and it shouldn't be fucked away in any expensive place that happened to be the place of avoiding friends and family.

The only place in Hamilton, Canada, where those two were going to eat bread was a Chinese restaurant. The withdrawal from this Mandarine restaurant was largely the result of the habit of eating all that-can-be-old, where the otopic concept of cheap and infinite abundance, dreamt of generations of Slavic villagers, is finally fulfilled.

When my parents were growing up, there was very little bread. As adults, they reached the level of comfort when they had enough; then they had a little more, so they took a loan to buy a refrigerator so that they would not spoil their food. The etos of the poor people who had adopted him, where nothing was to be thrown into the trash, was perfectly linked to the fact that uncontrolled consumption was banned in the socialist system, where everyone had to take what he needed and so forth.

One aspect of the ethical management of bread was thus always the attempt to avoid food waste. When I saw my father under the Chinese free offer, he mixed all the soy sauce that came to him with the offer and that he ate beyond what he needed, I realized that eating, as much as you ate, was proportion to the uncertainty of the future.

Food can never be enjoyed in itself; it's never just sensitive experience. Its meaning always depends on the catastrophic potential of situations, its value relates to the contest of life and party history.

Author's mother tearing potatoes

The restaurants that claim that their epicurran taste by expert gives them the right to value food are nothing but fools who think that something as basic as eating can be objectively appreciated.

I took my parents to expensive restaurants, within the possibilities, where they remained confused and pessimistic about the traditional value of food. We'd be hungry within an hour,” my mother told me, presenting the design of an uncertain future. In a stable world, being hungry in an hour simply means eating within an hour. But for my parents, a god knows what can happen within that hour.

The bizarr Sandy in the whole restaurant concept, too clear to be invisible, is in being a place where foreigners serve foreign food, knowing nothing about what they like, what they think, what they are, what their story is. The bread in the restaurant is personal, uncommunicative, consumed in public space isolation.

In my family, food is part of a complex system of knowledge that has its own hierarchy of values, where meat and bread are on top. It is valued according to all its variations: cutting, smoked meat, sausage, baked in the oven. It has inner values because in the rural past, it never came from a butcher or a supermarket but from living creatures whose number meant wealth, which could have been named and passed on to the family home.

The value of the flesh is proportional, based on the work that was done until he arrived at the table. That is why vegetables are always considered inferior. Although you stand ready for the garden to take a lot of time and sweat, the trees and vegetables simply grow, and when you had to eat, you just cut or add vegetables to the meat, you couldn't leave them names, and you couldn't predict the size of having wealth. Perims were thus viewed as a side dish, not just food. Although we can respect vegetarians, we are too embarrassed to understand them. The choice not to eat meat means the high level of comfort and privileges that few of us could achieve. My family can't understand that. Why eatThis brocholi when you can eat any meat you want?

Author's Parents

The bread [used here in the sense of his pardon], on the other hand, is practically holy. In Bosnian, there is an idiom that is given to every good person “as good as bread.” Although it takes up the earth and much hard work to produce it, it is the symbolic value of the greatest importance. Bread is the main element of poor people if you have bread, food, and if you have food, you can live. [The translators: in some cases, because of popular use, we have used that bread instead of food. When we say I'm eating bread, or when we ask him to eat bread?

My family's bread is stored in the refrigerator, since leftovers are an important part of coming lunches and dinners. Throwing food into trash is a sin against all those generations of poverty. This overloads the parents ' refrigerator - beyond what they need on a daily basis - there are things that expect final consumption - half of the sausage that is old several weeks; fried eggs once upon a time; ancient soup placed inside a pot, and so on. My parents can't hunt leftover food, just like I can kill a living thing has something to do with something deep inside us, with a cell moral law. Not long ago, I took the initiative to clean up my parents ' refrigerator. Only a short time later, it was refueled, even more.

And even though her parents had run out of poverty and had become high - class Socialists, they had learned that the comfort structure they had spent their whole life building it did not offer protection from history. No matter how little you had lowered your anxiety over food, it had been reactivated with the war, which was completely shaken during that time.

The remaining values are also rooted in the ailing domestic economy and gender work sharing. Women were to manage food, just as they were supposed to raise their children and do all those other chores.

Some years ago, Father went to the doctor and was diagnosed with high blood pressure. The doctor told her to stop eating red meat. After a few weeks when I called him, he picked up the phone. I asked him. “Never, I'm eating bacon,” he told me without any concern. I was screaming right away, but he wouldn't know.

It's not red meat, it's completely white,” told me. /Article translated with cuts from The Guardian Convert EOL to LF Periscope. com