The Legacy of Scarcity: Soviet Food Practices and Attitudes Toward Waste
This post is part of Danya Blokh’s 2024 Global Food Fellowship.
The waitress at Ukrainian East Village Restaurant walked past our table several times over a span of ten minutes. She looked at our plates with evident discomfort. My pelmeni were all devoured, but my friend across from me had only half-eaten her borscht. Finally, the waitress approached our table.
“All done?”
My friend nodded, and the waitress shook her head in palpable disappointment.
“Really?”
When the waitress walked away with our plates, my friend asked, “what was that all about?” To me, the waitress’ reaction was perfectly predictable. It was what I dubbed Post-Soviet Food Syndrome, a condition I’d grown up witnessing at my own kitchen table. If I didn’t finish every last bite of my Russian mother’s potatoes or cabbage soup, it would cause her palpable concern. “Are you feeling alright?” she would ask. “You always used to like this dish.” My Ukrainian father intervened too, though more pedagogically: “you know, Danya, you should never waste food.” The leftovers were never thrown out. They were saved in the fridge for a day, two days, and then, eventually, I would walk into the kitchen to find my mom or dad finishing the scraps on my behalf.
Many immigrant diasporas in the US who experienced food insecurity in their home countries are thrifty in their treatment of food, retaining their old rituals of food preservation. Nonetheless, Post-Soviet Food Syndrome has always felt unique to me in its ethical charge. For my post-Soviet family members, throwing food away was not just financially irresponsible, but morally reprehensible, while saving food was not only a means of conserving resources but a moral obligation. My summer research project sought to uncover the underlying causes of Post-Soviet Food Syndrome through academic research accompanied by interviews with immigrants from the USSR.
In my research, I was able to isolate three primary causes of Post-Soviet Food Syndrome. The first, and least surprising, was the memory of food scarcity in the Soviet Union. Grocery stores in the USSR were characterized by unpredictability, frequent shortages, and long queues. One interviewee, who grew up in Moscow, explained that during the Khrushchev and Brezhnev eras, foods like fish and oranges were unreliable, while under Gorbachev even staple items like bread, milk, and cheese were frequently missing. His experience was specific to Moscow, which was better supplied than other cities. An interviewee who grew up in Kharkiv said there was a single store in his hometown where, once a month, residents could purchase cheese. Another interviewee explained that the situation was worst in small towns, that, for instance, people from towns with sausage factories couldn’t buy sausages because they were all sent to Moscow.
This uncertainty regarding the availability of certain products led Soviet citizens to become extremely attentive to the sudden availability of otherwise rare products. Soviet women, who were typically tasked with acquiring food for their households, often carried an avos’ka, an elastic, infinitely expandable string shopping bag which could be used to stock up on any rare commodities they came across. The word avos’ka derives from avos’, or “what if,” as people who carried such a bag had a mindset of “what if I find such-and-such unlikely product?” One interviewee explained to me that so-called meshechniki (bag people) from the provinces would come into Moscow and spend the day going from store to store, collecting food to bring back home. The arrival of massive groups of shoppers into Moscow, coming on buses or trains with their avos’kas at hand to purchase kielbasa at grocery stores, were dubbed kal’basniy disand (kielbasa paratroopers). Soviet citizens also learned strategies to navigate the long queues outside stores. Mothers, for instance, would involve their children in grocery excursions. One interviewee remembered that her mother would leave her to hold a place in line at one store while she ran over to another shop next door. Another recalled bringing her kids to the store because they’d sometimes give her bigger portions. Other parents, recognizing this, would ask if they could borrow her kids when they walked through the line so they could also receive more food.
In summary, Soviet citizens developed a complex set of practices for acquiring food, practices which came to occupy much of their time and attention every day. These routines have remained embedded in the minds of post-Soviet citizens. A person who remembers waiting in line for several hours to buy a piece of meat will likely hesitate to discard some expired sausages in more fortuitous times, even four decades later.
Indeed, some Soviet emigres to other countries reported feeling uncomfortable with the sudden…
This thrifty and utilitarian approach to food intersected in a curious way with the second element of Post-Soviet Food Syndrome, that of ideology. In her essay “Cold War in the Kitchen,” Susan E. Reid writes about the great degree to which the global conflict between the US and the USSR was waged in the domestic sphere. In the context of peaceful economic competition,’ Reid writes, “the kitchen and consumption had become a site for power plays on a world scale.” One paradigmatic example is the 1959 Kitchen Debate, a spontaneous discussion between Khrushchev and Nixon at a propagandistic US exhibition in Moscow showing a “typical American kitchen” in order to flaunt American prosperity and technology. Khrushchev’s comments during this debate—for instance, his critique of the unnecessary difficulty of American devices and the overabundance of items in the kitchen—reflect the USSR’s striving to define its proletarian ideology as frugal and rational, in contrast to the indulgent decadence of bourgeois Westerners. Reid writes that “intervention in the forms and practices of daily life was an essential aspect of the way the Khrushchev regime sought to maintain its authority and bring about the transition to communism. Everyday life—as the title of a brochure for agitators proclaimed—is not a private matter." Thus, Soviet citizens internalized an ideological prerogative to exercise caution and thrift in all aspects of their daily lives, including their treatment of food.
The admonition of wastefulness was accompanied by a glorification of labor. Children were taught that food production required labor, and that this labor made the food worthy of respect and admiration—a lesson which many Soviets learned firsthand through mandatory farm service. One interviewee told me, “the way I thought about it, if I built a fence and someone destroyed it, I would be unhappy. So if I expect respect toward my labor, I should respect others’ labor. Even if the person who made that bread never finds out that I threw it away, it’s still wrong to throw it away. I thought about how I would feel if I had made that bread.”
This conception of food and labor was passed down through official ideological channels, such as publications and brochures, as well as educational institutions. One interviewee recalled being forced to eat food in kindergarten. “They gave you bad food, mannaya kasha with clumps, eggs, really bad borscht. Kids didn’t want to eat it, but they forced you. The approach was, nothing should be left on your plate. If you didn’t finish, they would literally kick you out of the classroom. They would take my desk into the hallway and force me to finish it, even if I was gagging and crying.”
Yet the repugnance for waste was not only transmitted in schools, but also unofficially, in the domestic sphere. One interviewee remembered her grandmother, a generally kind and permissive person, becoming very disappointed if she didn’t finish her food. “I didn’t want to eat her soups but she would keep saying, just one little spoon, come on. Is it really so hard for you to finish your food?” Another interviewee explained, “if an adult caught a child throwing food away they would reprimand them and say, that’s labor, someone collected those grains and ground them, that’s all labor and so it’s bad to dispose of it. No one said, eat that bread because I paid fifteen cents for it. They said, eat that bread because it’s labor, it’s saintly, during the time of the war that bread would last someone a whole day.”
This passing reference to the war underscores the third constituent element of Post Soviet Food Syndrome—inherited wartime trauma. The war had been a time of widespread famine in the Soviet Union. One interviewee’s mother, evacuated to Irkutsk, mostly got by on fried potato skins; another said his parents, who were evacuated to Uzbekistan, ate so many turnips that their stomachs became constantly stretched. Starvation was most acute in Leningrad, where over a million Soviets died during two years of siege by the Germans. Though none of my interviewees had directly experienced the blockade, many were familiar with the national mythos of the “blokadeniks” and their years of famine.Wartime horror stories about hunger abounded in the late Soviet decades, invoked for moral lessons regarding perseverance, self-sacrifice, and, often, food consumption. [insert a bit more here]
Soviet attitudes toward food were shaped by these three conditions—food insecurity, Soviet ideology, and wartime trauma. What I call Post-Soviet Food Syndrome, however, refers specifically to the persistence of Soviet attitudes beyond the disappearance of these conditions. Like my parents, the Soviet immigrants I spoke to were middle class Americans with reliable access to food sources; most were long disenchanted with Soviet ideology; and few had surviving relatives who still remembered starvation during World War II. Yet the practices shaped by these conditions continued. One interviewee explained that he still used Soviet techniques for saving food, like adding water to oversalted food, or cooking herring in fish to make it less salty. Another continued to preserve the breadcrumbs left on his kitchen table after a meal, a habit passed down from his father. Additionally, several interviewees reported feeling lost and uncomfortable in American grocery stores, overwhelmed by the sudden multitude of options. One told me, “I realized that having less choices made things simpler.”
As I mentioned earlier, the aversion to food waste is not a uniquely post-Soviet phenomenon; in fact, various people with no direct connection to the former Soviet sphere told me that their own families acted much like my own. Yet what strikes me as unique about the Post-Soviet Food Syndrome is the way its component parts influence and reinforce one another. It is possible that, without the mythology of wartime starvation, the Soviet ideology of frugality and moderation might not have carried the same moral weight; without the direct experience of food shortages, the war stories may have lost their relevance in popular consciousness; and so on. But I believe these three coexisting strands legitimized and strengthened one another. In my conversations with immigrants from the USSR, I not only noticed that these same three topics repeatedly come up, but that they frequently blended into one another. Interviewees quickly departed from relating their experience with food lines to telling me about their parents’ memories of war, or went on a tangent (usually laden with irony) about the ideology they were raised with. These three elements of the Post-Soviet Food Sydrome, though disparate, came together to reinforce the idea that food is sacred and should not be wasted for any reason. In the future, I would love to expand this project by researching other cultures and identifying the constituent elements of their approaches to food waste, thus setting the Post-Soviet case alongside other examples.
Note: the thumbnail photo was taken on the Yale Farm and is not an official contribution from Danya’s fellowship experience.