Wartime Food Practices as Cultural Resistance: Philosophical and Socio-Cultural Dimensions of National Identity Transformation in Ukraine (2022–2025)

This article examines the transformation of food culture in Ukraine during the full-scale Russian Ukrainian war (2022 to 2025), interpreting nutrition as a key element of cultural resistance, symbolic survival, and national identity. Based on empirical observations, historical analysis, and interdisciplinary methodology, the study explores how traditional Ukrainian food practices, especially the preparation and collective consumption of dishes such as borshch, varenyky, and salo, function as both a response to material deprivation and a reaffirmation of national belonging. The article highlights the role of wartime kitchens, food volunteering, refugee adaptation, and everyday cooking as domains where meaning is produced and cultural memory is maintained under extreme conditions. Particular attention is given to the symbolic and sensory dimensions of food, where taste and smell evoke collective memory and serve as anchors of psychological resilience in displaced and traumatized communities. The article also explores how the wartime experience reshapes the perception of everyday meals, turning them into rituals of continuity and defiance. Furthermore, it addresses the environmental and ethical challenges faced by food systems during the war, including the degradation and contamination of agricultural soils caused by shelling, chemical exposure, and the destruction of ecosystems. This aspect, often overlooked in philosophical or cultural discourse, reveals the deep entanglement between nutrition, ecology, and conflict. By analyzing food through the lens of philosophical anthropology, memory studies, and the sociology of everyday life, the article proposes that nutrition during wartime transcends physical survival and becomes a political, existential, and ethical phenomenon. It concludes that in the Ukrainian context, food practices offer not only nourishment but also resistance, healing, and the continuity of national identity through embodied and affective experience.