ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the ways the communist food system shaped women’s real lives and wider societal gender expectations both deliberately and inadvertently in the German Democratic Republic. The establishment of a scientific, internationally recognized, and popularly embraced network of collective eating establishments ironically confirmed the necessity of female home cooking, at the same time that it successfully enabled women to spend less time in their kitchens and, as a result, to join the workforce in record-breaking numbers. Scholarship has rarely accorded particular significance to either workplace canteens or school cafeterias, despite the central role these sites played for the establishment of the postwar industrial order. Although scholars hesitate to connect women’s experiences in the labor market with the industrial food system, this study argues that the two are inextricably intertwined.
