ABSTRACT
This chapter explores an anthropological perspective to contemporary forms of culinary enterprise in the ethnographic setting of a complex industrial society. It does so by way of examining fast-food restaurants in postsocialist Hungary and the Central Eastern Europe region, focusing on the early 1990s – the very highpoint of social ‘transition’. A range of quickly prepared yet traditional ‘fast’ foods can be made in the home as a response to the need for less complicated and labour-intensive sustenance. The modern commercial variant of such traditional ‘convenience’ food is dissimilar in several respects, being differentiated in terms of the scale of production, the existence of the employee-employer labour structure, the primacy of monetary profit at the heart of production, and other relations of commercial activity which are firmly entrenched in business culture, industrial society and its organization of the food cycle.
