Maia Grdzelishvili still remembers, as a child in the early 1990s, waking up at 4 am to the strong scent of baking bread. It meant the electricity had returned to her family’s Tbilisi apartment for two hours, and Grdzelishvili’s mother was baking bread with hoarded supplies to avoid the need to stand in bread lines. It was a way to feel normal in an era that was anything but.

With the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union, Georgia, like other former Soviet republics, faced economic insecurity, political chaos and rising criminality, but also a more basic challenge -- how to find food.

“The most important thing was survival,” Grdzelishvili, today a 33-year-old gender specialist in Tbilisi, says of the period.

Severe food shortages brought on by the gradual collapse of the centralized food-distribution system had forced this agriculturally rich nation -- once a cornucopia -- to start from scratch and recreate ways of supplying food.

Sometimes that meant standing in line for hours with a ration card for just 300 grams of bread. Or bartering or using connections to get your next meal.

In 1993, later American food anthropologist and social-policy advisor Mary Ellen Chatwin, author of “Socio-Cultural Transformation and Foodways in the Republic of Georgia (1989-1994),” recorded a sense of “desperateness and urgency,” with even “well-dressed people” stealing at Tbilisi’s central bazaar. Humanitarian aid was not exempt, she added.

For some Georgians, though, finding and acquiring food became a type of sport; an activity that gave them a strong sense of self-accomplishment when successful.