Summary of the discussion between Olena Stiazhkina and Olesia Ostrovska-Liuta

One of the things that seemed to be very outdated and even unreal is the function of Ukraine and Ukrainian lands as what was called the granary of Europe or the granary of the world. It was a metaphor perceived as something of the ancient past. And suddenly we found ourselves in a situation where it became an absolutely current state of affairs. On the other hand, as many researchers say, this revealed the injustice of the global circulation of food. It is grown in several places in a concentrated manner and is transported to other places. This injustice often has a very complex history of land degradation. This is often linked to the history of colonialism. This is a very complex multi-layered situation.

In duscussion Olesia Ostrovska-Liuta, Director General of Mystetskyi Arsenal and Olena Stiazhkina, Doctor of Sciences in History, talked about the relationship between man and food in our recent Ukrainian history.

Full video of discussion you can watch by the link. 

Summary of the discussion

Olesia Ostrovska-Liuta:
One of the things that seemed to be very outdated and even unreal is the function of Ukraine and Ukrainian lands as what was called the granary of Europe or the granary of the world. It was a metaphor perceived as something of the ancient past. And suddenly we found ourselves in a situation where it became an absolutely current state of affairs. On the other hand, as many researchers say, this revealed the injustice of the global circulation of food. It is grown in several places in a concentrated manner and is transported to other places. This injustice often has a very complex history of land degradation. This is often linked to the history of colonialism. This is a very complex multi-layered situation. However, today the topic of our conversation with Olena is the relationship between the person and food in our recent Ukrainian history. And why is this relationship what it is? What does this tell us?

I would like to start off with one of the artworks which is a part of this exhibition and which you can see if you walk through the exhibition to the end. This is an installation by Zhanna Kadyrova titled Palianytsia. You definitely won’t miss it and you won’t be able to immediately understand what it is about when you see it. These are small sculptures made by the artist from river stone during her evacuation in the Zakarpattia region, to where Zhanna escaped in March 2022. As you know, in the Zakarpattia region, there are many large stones on the banks of rivers that look very much like loaves of bread. But you know it’s not bread. You know it’s a stone. You know it is very much connected with a lot of environmental problems, even a lot of abuse. That is, it already has many meanings in it.

But what Zhanna did—she sliced those stones like a loaf of bread. And when you look at the resulting sculpture as a viewer, you have two feelings struggling inside you. On the one hand, it’s very, very similar to bread. It reminds you of something very close, and on the other hand, you know very well that it is not food. It is something that is deadly to a human, to the human body. And in this sculpture, this conflict largely determines the conflict in the relationship between the person and food, in particular the person with the Soviet experience. To begin with, could you please share your reflections on this?

Olena Stiazhkina:
My scientific focus was on the history of Soviet food, on the taste of Soviet food in the second half of the 20th century. As my crusade was to stop normalizing the Soviet at that time, which is considered to be the golden age and everything beautiful and nostalgic. This is what was important to me.

This bread cut from stone is a story about the relationship between the Soviet state and the eater, primarily the Ukrainian eater. This is absolutely true. We will talk about Holodomor practices and how they affected us later. But if we look at the history of resistance against the Russian Empire and then to the Russian Bolshevik invasion, we could say that in 1920-1921, it was the eastern regions of Ukraine, namely Donetsk and Kharkiv, that demonstrated the greatest resistance. And the Bolsheviks could not cope with it. They could not cope with that movement and passed an order to organize a food blockade in those areas. That is, eventually, the experience of introducing subjugation by famine was tested during that period and was quite successful. One and a half million families of those people who fought for Ukraine were starving in those territories. In the end, they were forced to return to their families, were physically confined in villages and exterminated, sometimes together with their families. So, for us, stone bread started much earlier than we could imagine. However, we must admit that one way or another the Soviet state took on the functions of a breadwinner father. And that breadwinner father fed people for good behavior and did not feed for bad behavior. Such family abuse continued not only in the 1920s-30s-40s but also as long as the Soviet Union existed. It’s just that the forms of coercion were completely different: to eat/ not to eat, how to eat, what to eat, etc. And if in the 1920s-30s-40s they were completely straightforward (if you don’t listen, you will starve), then in the 1960s-80s they were such Jesuit forms. You simply won’t be able to protest, because we will lock you in lines; you will be so tired of searching for products that you will not have time for anything else.

Photo: Oleksandr Popenko © Mystetskyi Arsenal

O.O.-L.:
I immediately remembered those grocery sets we had for the holidays. For the New Year or March 8, remember? They were always similar. They usually included: sausage, peas, and mayonnaise. Do you think it affected the sensuality of a Soviet person? Did it affect the way the Soviet person felt the taste of food, the way they projected it into the kitchen?

O.S.:
We have to admit that a food basket consumed by the Soviet people was basically the same for everyone, including the nomenclature. It’s just that they ate the food that was of better quality, fresher and in larger quantities. But everyone ate the same way. That standardized basket, standardized grocery set, made us soldiers of the Soviet army. Because we all ate the same way, just in different amounts, food of different quality, different freshness, and some stood in lines for it, and some did not.

After all, it is food that builds trust in the world. This is the first brick from which our trust in the world is formed. Hugs of adults, hugs of mothers, and food. If trust in the world is not formed together with food, then there will be no trust in the world. I am happy that we already have a generation that does not distrust food, so let’s hope that after the death of Moscow, we will trust the world as such. But if we look at the stories of people who survived the Soviet times or died in the Soviet times, we can see not only famines that completely destroyed trust in the world, but also seemingly small practices when a person could not plan what they would eat. And most importantly, they couldn’t be capricious about what they wanted to eat and what they liked to eat. It was forbidden to not love food. You must have eaten it, you must have disciplined yourself: “you won’t get up until you eat everything.”

There is such an area of research as food studies, within which there is an interesting concept of comfort food. Olena Braichenko (Olena Braichenko — researcher of gastronomic culture) suggests saying “cozy food”. This is the food that we often subconsciously prefer to eat when we feel bad. Cozy food is our choice, the one we made when we were kids. This is our memory and comfort. Speaking of Soviet people (and there is nothing about this in food studies), we all have our uncomfortable food. People who survived the Holodomor often said the following: “I can’t eat green borshch, it seems that this is the grass I had to eat back then; I can’t, I’m sick of this borshch.” More fortunate people who did not experience the Holodomor cannot eat semolina porridge, because they were punished with this porridge in kindergarten. People of my generation are very suspicious of young people’s fascination with pasta because at one time they were so fed up with gray vermicelli that they cannot think of pasta as a holiday food. This uncozy, uncomfortable food attests to the fact that our trust in the world is very much in question. Because we should only have comfortable food, but there is also uncomfortable food.

O.O.-L.:
It seems to me that this thought can be developed and we can say that it is not as uncomfortable as violent food. The cases in kindergarten you have described are a continuation of Soviet control practices through food. Only in the case of the Holodomor or earlier, it was control through the absence of food, and here it is about control through the presence of food.

O.S.:
It is really like this, it’s violence and control. But what is interesting: children who grew up in the 1960s were the first generation to be forced to eat. Before that, eating was happiness by default. What you grabbed is delicious and what you took is great. But when there was already relative satiety (and compared to the Holodomor it was so), from that moment a new story began, when the powers of authority were concentrated not only in the NKVD, OGPU, ministries, and departments. They seep into all areas of life in such a way that we become a security major for ourselves.

The second story here is very complicated. We are not only torturers to our children, but we are also people who want our children to eat for us. We want them to eat for the dead, the living, and the unborn. We want them to taste for those who were eaten and buried. On the one hand, it is obvious control and violence, and on the other hand, it is a story about memory and love. Gradually, the story of memory and love fades out and food violence often becomes only about new disciplinary practices at all levels, including invisible ones, repressions in the Soviet Union.

O.O.-L.:
That is, in such a way, through our children, we give something to others whom we love?

O.S.:
We give something to those who are no longer with us. To our symbolic or actual parents, grandparents who cannot eat, but who once really wanted to eat. If we talk about love in that violence, then there is a drop of love here. Later, when our grandmothers passed away and only our mothers remained, it was no longer about love, but only about control, discipline, and learning to be a soldier of the Soviet army under any circumstances.

O.O.-L.:
I think this is a very interesting observation.

Photo: Oleksandr Popenko © Mystetskyi Arsenal

O.S.:
Let’s be honest, now a gap emerges again. When we are in a war situation, we understand that it is about food supplies, and not that they should be tasty, they should be extremely pragmatic: either can be cooked very quickly or without flame or without gas, or be very nutritious and light. Today we’re back to food that will sustain us, but it’s definitely not about relationships of trust.

O.O.-L.:
Remember when, during the battle for Kyiv, everything was still working, supermarkets were working, and suddenly food inequality arose? The range of products in supermarkets varied depending on how close the supermarket’s location was to unoccupied areas.

O.S.:
There were many stories about trust and solidarity in Kyiv at that time. There was not so much bread then, and when the signal was given that there would be bread, people took two or three loaves each. When someone came in and saw that the bread had run out, those who took two or three loaves gave one to them. We are more resilient now, we believe that tomorrow there will be bread and therefore we should share it today. 

O.O.-L.:
But why do we believe that we will have bread tomorrow? Isn’t it because we have more control over it? Because this is no longer the totalitarian father who will decide everything himself.

O.S.:
Of course, during the thirty years of our independence, we learned how to feed ourselves. And it was very difficult—to feed ourselves and not rely on others, to realize that we were capable of something, and after that—that we were capable of everything.

Except for trusting in the world, food is always about desire. First of all, taste desires, and then other ones, such as physical or bodily. It is not only about food as such, but also about the smell, about the density of what we like and what we don’t like. After all, it’s about choice. And when the Soviet state created a standardized set for everyone, it worked in that field very seriously. We were not taught to choose. We do not know what we like, because we eat what we are given. And then we don’t know how to choose, because we ate what we were given. And the availability of a certain amount of food and the ability to choose is, strangely enough, about freedom. It’s about learning to be free, to have a choice—one’s own and not an imposed one. And we have to admit that this is not easy for the older generation.

O.O.-L.:
You say that now we choose food and it is joy, but we are talking from inside the war. And despite that, we have a different experience of relationship with food than in some completely peaceful 1970s. Why is this so?

O.S.:
This is because we have grown up. We have not yet become adults, but we have definitely grown up and felt what freedom is. Actually, this is what we are fighting for now. We felt that freedom is our basic value, our basic idea and our need. And this freedom speaks to us and embraces us in different ways. To put it simply, we fight to admire pictures. Those that are interesting to us, and not those that are allowed or forbidden to see. To be wrong and right, to have the right to apologize, grow, and change. In general, to eat everything we want, but in a symbolic sense. To take and put everything we want into our minds.

Photo: Oleksandr Popenko © Mystetskyi Arsenal

O.O.-L.:
Could we go back a little now? At the very beginning, you mentioned the practices of the Holodomor. What has remained with us from those practices until now?

O.S.:
When we walked through the exhibition, we saw a collection of artworks about how people are afraid to throw away food. I myself can’t throw away food. Even when there are a few potatoes left, I think: okay, I’ll eat them tomorrow, I’ll put them on a small plate, or should I throw them away? And this process is very painful, and often what I can’t throw away wins.

Or we sometimes kiss bread. Not when they bring us bread and salt as a tradition. I myself like to smell bread, and it seems to be alive. We talk to food, don’t we? We ask it not to boil out, we say: “Well, what are you doing there, are you boiling?”. It’s as if we cast a spell on food, we enter into a very complex, fantasy and symbolic relationship with it, and we want to be friends with it, we want it not to leave us. And this is also about the Holodomor.

Having survived the Holodomor, we are recovering being not Soviet people, but Ukrainians. We recover and take a step towards flavors again. This point is very important. I wanted to research only Soviet experiences and practices. But when you work with Ukrainian material, you cannot ignore the differences. And these differences are very significant.

We recover in such a way that our food always tells more about us than we even think. I’d like to refer to writer Yevhen Hutsalo and his piece Private Life of a Phenomenon:

“Having no sleep for several days and nights, she herself cooked marinated eggplants and peppers, mashed potato, pike caviar, carp with honey, bream twisted pie, piglet twisted pie, boiled belly with stuffing, toasts with lard, cottage cheese and sour cream sauce, sour milk, baked milk, smoked sausage, smoked goose sausage, and blood sausage. And also different kinds of borshch for every taste: Ukrainian with meat, Galician with giblets, beetroot with mushrooms, with pickled apples, and with crucian carp. And also soups: game soup, pea soup with lard, mushroom and pea soup, pike soup, flour soup, and mushroom soup with dumplings. All kinds of fish: eel with horseradish, bream, crucian carp in sour cream, pike perch baked with mushrooms and crayfish, tench with cabbage, pike perch stewed in sour cream, pike perch with mushrooms, bream with horseradish and apples, and pike rolls. And also cooked by the counselor’s wife: ham, stewed meat, Volyn meat rolls, Poltava cutlets, tongues with raisins, Ukrainian tripe stew, stewed pork belly, piglet with horseradish, stuffed pork belly, caul fat filled with buckwheat porridge, fried veal rolls, chickens in sour cream. And also: dumplings with butter, with onions, with cheese, cookies with honey, flour porridge with lard, cakes with honey and poppy seeds, donuts, pampushkas, buckwheat cutlets, pancakes, toasts with milk and honey. And all sorts of varenyks! And dumplings! And pancakes! Uzvars, jelly, ring pies, and meat jelly! Pampushkas, pastries, twisted pies, cakes with cheese, pies, rolls, bagels, cookies, cheesecakes, biscuits, Vilshan honey cakes, centenary beignets, Baturyn cakes, crackling cakes, salted fingers, verguns, sweet pies, sandwich cakes, pastries with cherries, Zhotovodsk cakes, bagels-whistles, poppy seeds cakes! And not to mention the drinks! Hastily brought large supplies of varenukha spirits, uzvar, spotykach, palenka, mokrukha, plum liqueur, apricot liqueur, blackthorn liqueur, raspberry liqueur, cherry liqueur, lemon liqueur, gooseberry liqueur, strawberry liqueur, honey liqueur, ashberry liqueur, Mezhyhiria honey, Old World honey, Kyiv honey, Zaporizhzhia beer, Moshnohirsk beer, as well as all kinds of brew—Cossack, Zaporizhzhia, raspberry, lemon, cranberry brew, and so on.”

1982. The Holodomor has been survived and the passion for food has been restored. What keywords were there? There were many keywords that Yevhen Hutsalo used to tell our history. For example, Baturyn cakes. Or Volyn meat rolls, Poltava cutlets, Vilshan honey cakes, centenary beignets, Old World honey, Kyiv honey, Cossack honey, Zaporizhzhia honey. He tells us not only about delicious food, he tells us about Baturyn, from where the cakes are still like a bone across the throat for Russia. He tells about Mezhyhiria beer, about the first monastery built there in the 10th century. He is talking about Moshnohirsk beer or wine, and thus about the Vyshnevetsky family. There are Haidamaks, there is Magdeburg law, this is where history comes from. Between these things from Poltava and Galicia, there is authenticity, unity, and history. And all these are restored after they thought we were dead.

O.O.-L.:
That sounds very inspiring. As I understand, what you are saying is that food is not only a connection for people to the world but also a symptom of certain historical events, right?

O.S.:
Yes, always. It is always a symptom, always a sign, one can even talk about predictions. If there is food and trust in the world, then a person is strong. They believe that the world is not hostile, and therefore you can try to resist, and not be a cannibal.

O.O.-L.:
If you were to project our experience now into the future, what do you think our food would tell about us?

O.S.:
What our food can tell about us today is that we still keep in mind our sad experiences. Now we can teach the world what it does not like and, hopefully, what it will never need: how to sit between two walls, how to buy an LED lamp, how to equip a shelter and drag a neighbor who cannot walk there. Artem Chekh wrote about that. No one will need our invaluable experience. But as of now, we have a dream. And when we talk about consolation or cozy food, we do not come back home, but to the time when there were cafes and restaurants, when we all had some place where we could sit down and eat.

O.O.-L.:
That is, we will have a different consolation, we will be recalling the good times.

O.S.:
We have a different consolation even now. Even now we are thinking that when we win, we… And we have a list of things we want to do after that. This list is not about grief, this is a banquet list, a festive list, a list of joy. Shall we have a drink, shall I cook something, shall I buy myself something? We have that list for the victory time, and it is completely different.

Our task today is to save our resources, survive, and win.