Russians eat well. The ladies here understand nutrition as a part of healthy living, and work hard at keeping their families healthy.
      Long lines of women waiting to buy food are a thing of the distant past, and were mostly a creation of American Cold War propaganda even then.
      The average cost of food in Tver is only about 20% less than that in the US, and since many people, especially teachers and hospital workers, make less than $20 a month, food takes up a major part of a family's budget.

Food Distribution.


      In Tver, at one end of the scale, there are a few modern 'Supermarkets', not much bigger than an American 7-11 but equipped with grocery carts, check out counters, and laser scanners. They sell the same variety of products that their American counterparts do. Their prices are noticeably higher than most of the other local stores, however.
      At the other end, a single farm women, sitting on a box with her own produce surrounding her on the sidewalk spends the day talking with her friends and makes the occasional sale. On one side of her might be a woman with the mushrooms she's collected in the woods, and on the other, a man who has caught more fish than he could eat himself. A very small time businessmen might invest in a crate of oranges or bananas and try his luck selling them. Farther on, a woman in a fur coat that my mother would have envied is trying to make a living selling nothing but dried pumpkin seeds. A pleasant enough occupation in the summertime, I suppose, but all too often, I've seen them sitting out there in the snow when it was twenty below zero, old people and the occasional small boy.
      More prosperous vendors have a sort of tent sitting on the sidewalk, and there are a large number of Kiosks, small, permanent buildings, scattered about the city streets and walkways.
      In between these extremes, there are the old, inefficient, state operated stores, where each small section of counter is attended by a separate woman. You tell her what you want, settle on the price, hear her tell you that what you wanted is probably spoiled and that the identical stuff next to it might cost a little bit more [twice as much], but that you'll be happier with it. Sometimes, she's just trying to raise her commissions and sometimes it really is spoiled. If it is, you have no recourse but to throw the stuff away. There are few lawyers in Russia, no observable consumer protection laws, and CAVEAT EMPTOR is the way of things.
      Anyway, the counter girl packages it up and sets it aside. You then go to a Kiosk on the other side of the store, wait in line, and pay the price agreed upon, receiving a receipt. Then you go back to the counter girl, and once she finishes what she's doing she takes your receipt, tears it so you can't use it again, and gives you your stuff. You then repeat this process for each section of the long counters that might have whatever it is that you need.
      You must visit many stores, scattered around town, to fill your refrigerator. Sausages are sold in one place, fish in another, bread and pastries somewhere else. Most of them also sell beer, tea, and fruit juice, and have a few small tables where you can eat and drink what you just bought.
      Eat and drink, but not defecate. Toilets are for the help only, and you must threaten to desecrate their floor before they'll let you use one. Russian shoppers must develop very large bladders.
      Farmer's markets seem to deliver more food and other goods to the city than all the indoor stores do. There are several multi-acre fields set aside for them, and every day these are covered with specially made tents selling everything from food to clothing, hardware and video discs. Whatever it is, legitimate, bootlegged or stolen, you can find it there.
      Shopping takes a major part of the average Russian homemaker's day, but the women seem to enjoy it. It seems to be their major social event of the day, and all that walking and hauling does nice things to their bodies.

Snack Food



      American snack food is neatly packaged to be quick and easy to eat, to permit you to stuff a maximum number of calories past your teeth in a minimum amount of time. For those counting calories, there are many less nutritional items, but they are still meant to go down fast. This is true even when there is no need for speed, as when you are watching television or drinking beer with friends. It still goes down fast, only now it's saltier and greasier.
      The thing that typifies Russian snack food is that it is very labor intensive. They like to eat nuts as we do, but not big walnuts or filberts. They eat things like tiny Cedar nuts which have tough shells, but have less meat than a grain of rice. Sunflower seeds are popular, but not the large gray and white striped sort popular in the US. They prefer the tiny black oilseeds we use to feed songbirds.
      Pumpkin and squash seeds are high on the list of munchies. Small ones, without much inside.
      There is so much work involved in opening these things that I suspect that there is a net caloric loss in eating them. Russians may eat such difficult items because it is a way to snack and not get fat. Maybe they do it to save money, since you couldn't possibly eat a ruble's worth of sunflower seeds in a solid day of munching. Or perhaps, being Russian, they simply prefer to do things the hard way. THEY say that they are very tasty, and leave it at that.
      Dried fish is very popular among beer drinkers. This is any sort of small fish, salted and strung up whole to dry until it is as hard as your car's tires. They are not cleaned, scaled, or gutted. They take hours to disassemble and eat one, and every edible shred is eventually eaten. A lot of things that I would not consider edible are eaten as well, including the swim bladder, which is roasted over a match and eaten with relish. Also the fish eggs [The Caviar!] and the intestines.
      My lovely translator Nadia is particularly fond of dried fish. Seeing this immaculately dressed, perfectly groomed sweet young thing smiling while she chewed on dried, uncleaned fish guts was unnerving. She i nsisted that I at least try the dried caviar. I couldn't say no to a beautiful woman, but it was without doubt the foulest thing that I have ever tasted. I had to run out to the bathroom and brush the taste out of my mouth!

Variety



      With many items, Russians enjoy a wider variety than we do in the states. Usually, we have commercially available only one type of mushroom, the snowball.
      Picking wild mushrooms is a popular pastime here, and hundreds of delicious varieties are available. Fresh, dried, and pickled, I have not yet had time to taste over a fraction of them, but I haven't been disappointed yet.
      At the typical American store, 5 or 6 kinds of fish might be available. At a Russian fish store, there are hundreds, fresh, frozen, smoked and canned. But I have yet to see a shellfish in Tver, barring some canned shrimp. No clams, mussels, oysters, crabs or lobsters.
      Caviar, salted fish eggs, is plentiful and relatively inexpensive [100 rubles for a small jar].

Condiments.


      I had long taken it as a truism that the hotter the climate, the hotter the food. Consider that Spanish and Italian food can be quite spicy, French food is half garlic, the English once survived on boiled meat and potatoes, and, if historical romances are to believed, the Scottish went for forty generations on nothing but unsweetened oatmeal.
      The same is true in the orient, where Mandarin food rarely went beyond a bit of ginger, Hunan food could get quite hot, and Thai cooking could blow the top of your head off, decorating the ceiling with your hair, blood and eyeballs.
      The North American Indians rarely used spices, but the Aztecs, farther south, spiced up their cannibalistic feasts to such an extent that the Spaniards had difficulty eating them. Well, for that and other reasons.
      And, indeed, the food put before you in a Russian home or restaurant will be well seasoned, but scarcely spicy. I was therefore completely unprepared for the contents of certain small jars I found innocently lurking on the Supermarket shelves.
      Catsup was invented in China, of course, but is now as universal as Pizza pie. But in America, all of our manufacturers make essentially the same product, a bland, sweet and sour tomato sauce.
      Russia has over 40 varieties that I have seen, with something like our stuff at one end of the spectrum, and an evil concoction twenty times hotter than anything that ever came out of Mexico on the other. This last is a bright red semi-solid innocently labeled as catsup to trap the unwary. Dipping the pointy end of a thin knife a quarter inch into this hells-brew brings up enough incendiaries to turn a tall bloody mary from mere vodka and tomato juice into something that would fry the tonsils off your average Thai chef.
      With mustard, you can take what I said about catsup and pretty much double it.
      The Soy Sauce usually isn't hot, but I have counted 17 varieties of it, and absolutely none of them has anything in common with any of the others, or with anything I've ever tasted in America. Good, though.
      Russian mayo tastes good, but it doesn't have the guar gum and other contaminants that turn real mayo into an American style paste. It's a thick liquid that can run off the edge of your sandwich.
      There are a lot of other things in jars with labels that simply don't translate into anything I've ever heard of. But every time I try to buy some, one of my translators gives me a worried look, takes it from my hand, and puts it back on the shelf. It's probably because I pay them too much. They are worried about loosing their jobs if I die of culinary ignition.

Meat.


      The beef here is strictly range fed. It is lean, natural, and amazingly tough, and can be eaten only after long boiling in stews and soups. I can now understand Erasmus's statement that "Being forced to eat either the flesh or the hide of a cow, I should prefer to eat the hide."
      I haven't seen a steak in six months, and the butchers here wouldn't know how to cut one. They take an axe and chop the carcass into random smallish hunks of lean meat and bone splinters. These are dumped frozen into a not very sanitary bin, and largely ignored by shoppers. I mean, there were crowds around the chicken counter, but not the beef.
      Change is on the way, though. A few specialty stores are now offering meat in the western style. Sliced into recognizable portions, it is water injected, chemically tenderized, and dipped in red food coloring before being wrapped in plastic to be sold at premium prices. Progress.
      Pork is slightly less tough than beef, but not greatly so. At many restaurants, they don't like to say in writing if you are getting dead pig or dead cow. They simply say "meat". You have to ask the waitress.

Bread


      Bread is the basic Russian food. Older women are horrified if you sit down at the table without bread. Never mind if the table is groaning with potatoes, rice, and six kinds of pasta. "Are you crazy? You HAVE to eat bread!"
      At least there is a large variety of different kinds of breads available. The famous Russian Black Bread is a medium brown in color, and is made with a mixture of whole grains. Good tasting, it breaks easily and makes lousy sandwiches. Then again, what the Russians call a sandwich is small, open faced, and has a lot in common with an hor'dovre.

Spices


      Every spice available in America is either not to be found here, has a different name, or is just plain different. Vanilla in Russia is not a brown liquid. It's a brown powder.
      Since there are hundreds of spices on the shelves, one either has to be prepared to spend a small fortune and buy one of everything, knowing that most of it will go stale due to non-resealable packaging, or to take the experimental route. This involves buying something new every week and trying it out.
      Frankowski's Law on becoming a good cook says that if you cook it, you have to eat it, as a culinary delight, as a learning experience, or as a punishment, as the case may be. Well, I've had a lot of learning experiences lately, and been a bad boy on occasion.

Sweets


      All Russians seem to have a sweet tooth. Pastries, ice cream and candy are extremely popular. A meal always ends with desert.
      If you offer an American girl candy, she'll either call you a dirty old man or get mad because you're trying to make her fat. A Russian girl getting chocolate acts like a stray dog getting a sausage. Sometimes they'll follow you home.
      Chocolate is available everywhere, and a large number of the women I've met were out and out chocoholics.
      One that I had dated dozens of times and had finally gotten into bed with wanted some chocolate afterward, the way some girls want a cigarette. When told that there was none in my apartment, she jumped out of bed screaming. She was out the door in minutes, never to be seen again.
      I have since mended my ways, and keep some chocolate just for emergencies, hidden in the back of the freezer wrapped in a chicken bag so my translators won't find it. Many girls here even eat chocolate with their beer.

Packaging


      American sales and advertising executives are convinced that the package sells the product, to the point that the plastic covering generally costs more than the actual product inside. Everything comes in sturdy, reusable, resealable packages that are rarely resealed and hardly ever reused, but are wonderful for giving us America's gift to posterity -- the biggest and the best land fills in the world.
      While most things in America are over-packaged, everything in Russia is woefully under-packaged. Everything comes in the lightest, cheapest possible package, usually a thin plastic bag made of some polymer guaranteed to burst if you drop it. Nothing is resealable, not pickles, mayonnaise, sour cream, or cottage cheese. The attitude is, if you want Tupperware, we'll sell you Tupperware, at very high prices.
      And after you've bought whatever it was, you'd better have your own shopping bag with you, because they're not free at the grocery store here. They will cost you a few rubles extra, each.
      Most Russians carry a plastic shopping bag in their pocket of purse. Besides needing them for shopping, you put your fur hat in one when you check your coat at the restaurant or theater.

Drink


      In terms of volume drunk, the favorite drink in Russia is not vodka, beer, soda pop, or coffee. It is fruit juice. Tomato, orange, cherry, apple, apricot, pineapple, or any of a dozen other flavors, "Sok" is the drink of choice for most people except for men when they are out together. Despite huge advertising budgets, Coca Cola and its competitors have not made the smallest dent on the Russian market.
      [Hours after writing this, I took a woman and her 8 yr. old son to an imitation Macdonald's. He ordered a coke and got one. Shit.]
      Tea is the other major drink, and the Russian variety, while it tastes like ordinary Orange Pekoe, is much darker and looks different in the box. It is not shredded, but granulated. The only difference this seems to make is that the spent grounds wash down the drain easier.
      People here like coffee, but most find it too expensive to drink regularly.
      I have seen no herbal teas in Tver, and nobody seems to drink kvas anymore. At least I haven't found any to try.
      Russian beer is cheap and outstandingly good. Dozens of brands are available, each distinctively different. It's not like in America where they're all trying to taste like Budweiser. Which is to say, to have almost no flavor at all. Beer is the average man's drink with supper, when he is out with friends, and when he is celebrating something special, such as Tuesday, or evening, or the nice way the cap came off the last bottle.
      Vodka is a traditional drink, and sells for just over a buck a bottle. In Russian male company, one has to occasionally prove one's manliness by chugging a few large glasses of the stuff, but after they know you're okay, everybody settles down with beer.
      Vodka is the preferred drink of the serious drunk, and Russia has a lot of these. Most other people rank drunkards right along with the other drug addicts, which is, of course, true.
      [My impression is that America has more drug addicts while Russia has more drunks. I don't know who lost the toss.]
      The young women here have seen too many examples of drunken husbands to want to have anything to do with one. If you want to make it with the ladies in Tver, never let yourself get drunk, at least not in their presence.
      Russian champagne is inexpensive [$1.50/bottle] and quite good. It is almost identical to American champagnes and thus, to my untutored tastes, far better than the overpriced crap that comes out of France. But strangely, Russians refuse to drink it except at formal holidays and other celebrations. They think of it as something special, to be kept for special occasions.
      Hmmm. I was going to talk about Russian restaurants, but it's getting late. Some other time, I suppose.
      Hang in there---

Tver, Russia, 2004