Amidst the economic collapse, something is blooming in Russia: Potatoes!
In yet another unmissable tidbit of post-Soviet life from Laurie Taylor’s excellent Thinking Allowed show on BBC Radio 4, he interviews a Syracuse university professor who claims that a boom in potato cultivation since 1991 reflects Russia’s spiralling poverty and social stratification since the collapse of Communism.
According to the show’s blurb,
The potato, with just a little bit of milk, can provide all of the nutrients necessary to sustain human life. Its wonderful productivity and the fact that it can be grown in small family plots in urban and rural areas means that, according to Professor Nancy Ries, it provides subsistence when local economies fail and other sources of food disappear.
This fact more than any other explains why Russia, the home of the vast collective wheat farm, increasingly relies on the potato. Nearly half of all agricultural production in the country is potatoes and 90 per cent of that is in small family plots. Is the potato a tool of oppression? Does it perpetuate poverty? Laurie Taylor is joined by Professor Ries and by John Reader, author of The Untold History of the Potato.
The last time there was a potato boom in Russia was during WWII, when the government gave people plots to grow them on.
It’s a form of self-reliance in financial hard times.
In fact, one of the fastest growing fast food chains in Russia is a jacket potato chain!
Also, potato growing is the opium of the people: it takes them out of the cities in the summer and makes them less susceptible to revolt!
Perhaps that is a stretch, but certainly the self-sufficiency inherent in potato cultivation can lead to to a sort of creeping political alienation, a digging in and dropping out.
Or perhaps potatoes just go really well with MAYONNAISE!
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