Spending 14 hours in airports and planes yesterday offered me the rare opportunity to read an issue of the New Yorker cover to cover. Reading one of the stories, “The Borscht Belt” by Julia Ioffe, I could not help but be reminded of what I was just talking about in relation to fire and the fossil record. The article is focused on the efforts of Maksim Syrnikov to restore and recover a genuine Russian cuisine.
“Syrnikov began to travel around the country, sleeping on boats or in tents, exploring what remained of Russia’s peasant culture. There wasn’t much. Thanks to decades of inefficient collective farming, vital expertise had been lost, and Russian agriculture has not yet fully recovered. The culinary traditions of the peasants had likewise fallen into obscurity, as had the intricate infusion of Russian and French cuisines favored by the bourgeoisie and the aristocracy. In their place, the country’s diet was dominated by the bible of the Soviet kitchen, “The Book on Delicious and Healthy Food,” which was published in 1939. Through countless editions in the following decades, it helped Soviet cooks adapt to the growing dearth of the most basic produce.”
Cultural conformity is not unique to humans and is yet another avenue through which knowledge can be lost. In the case of Russian cuisine, at least according to this article, the traditional food practices persist only along the cultural margins of former Soviet society as part of a socio-economic/ecological process.
I also cannot resist the shout-out to one of my favorite cuisines, as one of the dinner guests at the end of the article remarks, “I like Georgian food better.”
