Features of the food culture of modern Russian Germans and Germans in Germany (based on the products of meat processing enterprises Brücke LLC and Kaufland Fleischwaren)
Authors:   Novosibirsk State Technical University, Plavskaya Elena L. 
Published: December 2024

The preservation of the ethnocultural specificity of the people is impossible without attention to the traditions of its national cuisine. The latter can exist not only where it was born and existed for a long time, but also as a cultural heritage of peoples who moved to new territories and live in the socio-political conditions of another state. While exploring the culture of our country, it is interesting to turn to the small cultures of immigrants, since they demonstrate the distinctive features of the culture of their people and, at the same time, the connection with the Russian culture with which they interact. The subject of this article are the peculiarities of the national cuisine of the Russian Germans of Siberia living in the German National Region of the Altai Territory. The national cuisine of any nation is represented by a large variety of dishes, but often not all of them are iconic for a particular culture. In this regard, in order to identify the specifics of the German national cuisine, meat and sausage products produced by Brücke LLC in the region were chosen, since these dishes are the symbols of German culinary art. To understand the regional specifics of the manufactured products, a comparative analysis was also carried out with the range of products of one of the leaders of the German meat processing industry - the German concern Kaufland Fleischwaren. The data for the analysis were taken principally from TV
interviews with representatives of enterprises and official websites of companies, where a range of meat and sausage products is presented.
As a result of the study, the stability of the preservation of the national specificity of the food culture is noted both among residents of Germany and among German settlers of the Altai Territory. Thus, the desire to follow the national model of nutrition with a predominance of meat and sausage products determined the peculiarities of the choice of the profile of food industry enterprises among the Germans of the German National Region, the largest of which was the meat processing plant. At the same time, we note the presence of borrowed dishes both in the assortment of the German concern Kaufland Fleischwaren and Brücke LLC.
In our opinion, in the first case, these borrowings are due to the Americanization of the food culture, focused on fast food and characteristic of many modern national cuisines of the world, on the one hand, and on the other, due to the geographical proximity of European countries, where cultural exchange, including in eating habits is inevitable. The presence of borrowed dishes in the assortment of the Altai enterprise is primarily associated with the stable technological traditions of the Soviet food industry. At the same time, it is obvious that the enterprise strives to produce German meat and sausage products based on traditional recipes, as well as to develop new types of products of German origin, but with a recipe adapted to the realities of Russian food culture.