The Second Life of Products: The Temporality of Food and Supply Paradoxes in Chukotka

Abstract

This article studies the social life of expired products in Chukotka. The authors examine the relationship between people and food, not only supplied from outside and sold in rural stores, but also produced within the community in the course of the interaction of local people with the landscape. The research presents the results of fieldwork conducted in 2017–2019 in the Iultinskiy rayon of the Chukotka autonomous okrug. The paper analyses the temporality of food as well as the supply paradoxes that local people face on а daily basis. Trying to answer the question about the reasons for the appearance of expired food products in the villages of Chukotka, the authors focus on the processes of the transformation of materiality of food and the mobility of food products. The article discusses strategies for maintaining food autonomy by local people in order to minimize dependence on supplies from public and private trading companies in a context of limited and low-quality supply. The authors conclude that expired food is the result of infrastructural inequality and, accordingly, unequal opportunities for organizing high-quality supply. Overdue food products act simultaneously as a temporal and spatial phenomenon. They appear as a result of a combination of both multiple displacements and states of immobility.