Russian Views on “Ecologically Clean” Food: Basing Beliefs About Health on Personal Connections to Food Production

Cynthia Gabriel

In 2000 and 2002, upon meeting many Russians for the first time, I was drawn into conversations about the “terrible quality” of North American food. Discussion of Iraq or Chechnya seemed to take a back seat to worries about imported food and, implicitly and explicitly, imported capitalist influences. Slowly, I realized that concerns about food are a powerful means of criticizing global capitalism without appearing to invoke political and military nationalism.

In this paper, I will examine how Russians think about, talk about and act about their food. In particular, I will explore what the phenomenon of “ecologically clean” food means to Russians and how it informs Russian health and economic practices.

The Russian phrase “ecologically clean” differs from the English word “organic” in a particular way: it refers to the human relationships that go into food production more than the physical processes of agriculture. Local food grown in the countryside, by friends and relatives, is considered the most healthy and most clean, whereas imported food and food produced for a profit is the most dirty and unhealthy. Unlike in Canada, such home-grown “dacha” food provides the majority of food consumed by the Russian population. Economic motives are only part of the story; many Russians are eschewing packaged food out of health concerns. Contrary to popular western portrayals of Russia’s medical, economic and political systems as “collapsed,” many urban Russians are living a self-consciously “organic” life.

Full Paper

Source
Presented at the First Annual Conference for Social Research in Organic Agriculture. Guelph, Ontario. January 2004


Author Location and Affiliation
Department of Anthropology, University of California at Santa Cruz,
motherearthbirth@yahoo.com


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