Abstract
Food has played a central role within human society from time immemorial. It supplies nutrients necessary to preserve functions of human organism and thus assures survival (see Counihan 1999, Farquar 2006, Lupton 1996).
Farquhar notes that "mantra": "'You are what you eat' continues to be invoked in studies ranging across the human sciences to remind us that food makes human form - it directly produces bodies and lives, kin groups and communities, economic systems and ideologies, while being produced in its turn by these formations' (Farquhar, 2006: 146). Food is, thus, a precondition of reproduction, the primary form of contact with the world, requirement of all actions, a mediator of socialisation, a sign of identity and social cohesion but also a tool of power.
What happens to the social actor and his/hers everyday bread in times of extreme hunger and overall material scarcity? On the example of war and post-war diet in Bosnia and Herzegovina, this presentation attempts to show, in which context food can function as an effective tool of power and violence, and how the genesis of industrial cuisine relates to modern warfare. Not only food is an effective tool of control of the population in general but especially of chosen groups.
In an extreme case, an attempt to eliminate these groups through preventing them from the accessibility of food might arise. The aim of this presentation is to unfold discussion regarding these and other premises in comparison with the ethnographic data from fieldwork in Srebrenica, BiH, where during the last armed conflict, the lack of salt became a serious problem; in the "Silver City", salt paradoxically became in a sense more precious than gold.