Kvass street vendor, Rīga, Latvia, July 1977. Photo CC A 3.0: S. Vecrumba / Wikipedia. Some rights reserved. Sometime ago, after a fair amount of Friday night pub drinking with Ukrainian friends in London, I end up at their place for a 3am snack. They pull out a jar of tushonka, a post-war food staple made of canned stewed meat from military supplies shipped to the Soviet Union by the US. How did this fatty grub with a shelf life that makes it sound more like a post-apocalyptic survival food than a delicacy end up in London? As it turns out, it’s homemade: my friend’s parents sent it from Ukraine in one of those delivery vans that shuttle across Europe, transporting goods and parcels every week, thus sustaining a dense network of cross-border ties. In a city that has hundreds of restaurants, cafes, pubs and food stalls; where all sorts of meat are sold, from humble pork to exotic crocodile; where steaks are cooked every minute, to any degree of perfection, from blue to well done – in this city, a glass jar of processed meat with a thick layer of lard which has travelled over 1,000 miles to connect a village near Ivano-Frankivsk in west Ukraine with a flat near King’s Cross, seems to have a much greater symbolic than nutritional value.
It’s comfort food, and it tastes good at 3am after a few pints. But wouldn’t, say, a kebab be tastier? Doesn’t tushonka probably contain too much cholesterol? Isn’t it reminiscent of the dismal living conditions during and after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the 1990s? Isn’t it synonymous with the precarious state in which so many citizens of the former Soviet Union have been living to date? And are food choices also political choices?
There’s another side of this, though, a darker one. In April 2018, The Sun published an article mentioning that the former Russian spy Sergey Skripal may have been poisoned in Salisbury by buckwheat – one of the common porridges in diets of many countries of the former Soviet Union and Central and Eastern Europe – which was presumably brought from Moscow by an unnamed woman. While the article may or may not have been a hoax, the choice of buckwheat is symbolic. A cheap Soviet and then Russian culinary staple, ubiquitous “back home” and having a nostalgic value for many migrants, buckwheat was now presented as a carrier of a toxic agent and a potential transnational murder weapon.
