Nourishing Culinary Memories Through Consumption
摘要
I examine the role of food retail in shaping community, analyzing how cultural diversity and multilingualismmultilingualism are mobilized through culinary practices. Mix MarktMix Markt serves not merely as a retail space but as a cultural hub that reflects and reinforces a sense of belonging through food, language, and marketing strategies tailored to mélange identities. My research reveals how Mix Markt caters to a shared yet fluid cultural memory. Its standardized multilingual messages and product offerings highlight the consumption habits that bind communities across different migrant trajectories. While the chain capitalizes on cultural familiarity, it simultaneously fosters spaces where diverse post-Sovietpost-Soviet and East European affiliations converge. The chapter explores how food becomes a vehicle for preserving memory, forging continuity, and constructing comfort zones within transnational social spacestransnational social spaces (TSS). It highlights the agency of post-Sovietpost-Soviet immigrantimmigrant entrepreneurs who use economic and sociocultural strategies to establish businesses that meet both practical and emotional needs. Finally, it argues that Mix Markt does not create community identity but connects and sustains it, functioning as a site of transnational social actionactionsocial. This chapter thus illuminates how culinary consumption contributes to immigrant agencyimmigrant agencyagencyimmigrant and the symbolic reconstruction of home in a migratory setting.