Hi everyone and welcome to another special issue of ‘The Long War’—that’s two in a row, as I had anticipated the past few days have been fairly hectic and I haven’t been able to write the usual newsletters (though this also means I have some interesting stuff coming down the line).
We will this time be looking at food and gastronomy in wartime Ukraine, with a compilation of stories published in Ukrainian and Western outlets as well as a selection of academic articles (all of which are in open access!). I’ve also included what I think is a fairly unique selection of cookbooks on Ukrainian cuisine, all the way from Galician menus at the end of the 19th century to the nostalgic food of Ukraine’s summer kitchens. I hope you enjoy this issue—you know the drill about considering signing up, upgrading to a paid subscription or making a one-time donation. Thank you!
Food in wartime
Ukraina Moderna (in Ukrainian) | Old and new gastronomic practices of Chernihiv residents living under blockade and occupation | May 2023
A fascinating piece in which ethnologist Olha Vorobey details how locals in the city of Chernihiv—besieged by Russian forces from February 24 to the end of March—, as well as the wider region, managed to find and prepare food while almost completely cut off from the rest of the world and subjected to constant shelling. Creating chat rooms on the messaging app Viber to take stock of everyone’s stocks in a neighborhood or apartment building, drinking birch sap when water started lacking, making canned meat to preserve the food from the freezers now useless because of the absence of electricity… it’s an amazing dive into the very basic and extremely acute problems of surviving in wartime.
Compared to the besieged city of Chernihiv, the situation in the Russian-occupied villages of the region from February 24 to April 2 (the full length of the Russian occupation of the region) was very different. [...] Initially, people said, food wasn’t an issue—but things gradually worsened over the 36 days of occupation. For example, in the village of Mokhnatyn, the occupiers ransacked the local food store in the first days, while the supply of bread very quickly ran out, making its preparation a priority. According to Mokhnaty residents, grain normally used to feed chickens and a household mill were used for baking bread—other products were then baked using this flour of dubious quality. Those who had yeast used it to make a fermentation starter, which they shared with their neighbors. [...] Villagers had significantly fewer water problems than Chernihiv residents, because every home was equipped with a well or a water pump.
Supply of food to the population during the active hostilities became an acute problem both in Chernihiv, then surrounded, and in the occupied villages near the city. There were differences in what residents of Chernihiv and villagers could do: in the city, it was easier to receive support from volunteers, while those volunteers were only able to deliver food to the occupied villages after the liberation of the region. In the besieged city, it was easier to survive in the private houses than in the apartment buildings. Owning a cellar, a garden, preserves or domestic animals became a sort of “insurance against hungers” for villagers, an insurance that people living in apartment buildings did not have.
Financial Times | From ramen noodles to war: the chef feeding Ukraine’s special forces | April 2023
In Ukraine’s food circles, Zhenya Mykhailenko was already a well-established figure before the war, famous in particular for his “Ramen vs Marketing” Japanese restaurants in Kyiv. Since the onset of the Russian invasion, Mykhailenko has been based in the southern city of Zaporizhzhia, cooking hearty meals for Ukrainian special forces units operating in this part of the front. It’s a great example of the tight-knit relationship between the military and civil society, as well as of the general mobilization of the country’s society.
Focus (in Ukrainian & Russian) | Borscht, porridge, salad, but no lard: here's how Russian POWs eat | September 2023
There apparently was a recent controversy about the food that Russian POWs are served in Ukraine (it slipped past me, but Focus says that “society is outraged”), leading the Ukrainian outlet to ask a representative of the Coordination Headquarters for the Treatment of Prisoners of War what, exactly, do Russian POWs eat.
According to Focus’ interlocutor, the ration in the camp consists of breakfast and lunch. The first meal is borscht or pea soup, the second meal is porridge with butter and a piece of meat or fish, and a seasonal salad—which can be sauerkraut or vinaigrette.
Prisoners of war also grow greens, vegetables, and bake bread themselves. Neither sweets, nor cookies, nor lard are included in their daily diet. Government institutions purchase candies and sausages for the camp stores, where the prisoners can purchase products at their own expense. The presence of shops in the camp is a requirement of the Geneva Convention. Products are purchased at the request of prisoners. They also have separate places in the refrigerators where they store what they buy in the shops.
"There are cookies, lard, carbonated drinks, hygiene products. They don't give this in the canteen. And these things are bought not with money from the budget, but from the camp's special fund. Relatives of prisoners transfer money to their personal accounts, from which they can then buy food in the store," Yatsenko added.
Dumskaya (in Ukrainian & Russian) | Loaves have been “decolonized” in Odesa | February 2023
Here’s a lede you don’t see every day: “Odesa’s bread factory n°4 has begun the ‘decolonization’ of its production.” The industrial bakery’s production line featured a bread named after Grigory Potemkin, the 18th-century Russian general appointed Governor-General of the southern provinces of Ukraine (then dubbed “Novorissya”, or “New Russia”) by Catherine the Great, and buried in Kherson until Russian forces took his remains out when they fled the city last year.
It is probably just a start, according to the story by the Odesa-based “Dumskaya” outlet, as several other breads in the bakery are named after figures from the Russian empire, including the “Diukovsky” bread (named after the French Duke of Richelieu, first governor of Odesa), the “Vorontsovsky” (for Mikhail Vorontsov, a 19th century-era Russian general buried in Odesa) as well as the “Lanzheronovsky” bread (named after yet another Frenchman, Louis Alexandre Andrault de Langeron, who became a general in the Russian army before being appointed Military Governor of Kherson and Odessa; he is also buried in Odesa).
The Village Ukraine (in Ukrainian) | Should the food supply system in the military be reformed? We asked chef Zhenya Mykhailenko, who has been feeding soldiers for a year | February 2023
This story is also about Zhenya Mykhailenko’s work to feed Ukrainian special forces, but it goes into much greater detail on how the chef and his team operate. A truly extensive dive into the logistics of such an initiative and the general challenges of feeding soldiers.
Soldiers eat differently depending on how close they are to the frontline, with different challenges at every level. “It’s pretty much impossible to deliver food to the units on the very first line of defense, so they’re sent there with dry rations. And that’s normal, the important thing is that they get rotated out regularly because you can’t survive for long on MREs. The second line of defense is further away from the front, which allows for some cooking processes, but they usually do not have the necessary equipment. What this means is that they are close enough to the frontline to be hit by artillery or mortars, but they are still far [from the field kitchen]. And that is if there is one field kitchen that can provide for everyone”.
Problems can arise at different levels, Mykhaylenko continues: "First of all, the rear kitchens are very poorly equipped. Secondly, it’s difficult to work with field or trailer kitchens, purely from a logistical point of view. The KP-130 [a standard Soviet-era field kitchen, used in the Armed Forces since the times of the Ukrainian Soviet Republic, - ed.] can only be pulled by a large truck, even a pickup truck cannot transport it. And it also smokes, and it requires firewood, which must be chopped and cleaned in advance. There are also warehouses, places for food preparation processes. Or there’s no canned meat, but raw meat that needs to be defrosted, cut and then cooked.”
La Croix (in French) | In the kitchens of the Ukrainian army, “we also provide reassurance” | January 2023
What makes this piece from my friend and colleague Pierre Sautreuil particularly valuable is the wider look it takes at the myriad of private initiatives looking to feed the Ukrainian military, from the elderly couple cooking soups for a small group of soldiers near the Kherson frontline to a company pivoting to making borscht MREs, as well the army’s logistical system for providing food.
Supplying food to the army began to be a problem in Ukraine in the mid-2000s, when tasks were outsourced to catering companies, some of them linked to former officers. Dubious practices became the norm: rigged contracts with suspect pricing, kickbacks, delivery of spoiled products... For around ten years, a handful of "clans" shared the military food market, which became one of the most notoriously corrupt in Ukraine.
A scandal broke in June 2016, when 169 soldiers were rushed to hospital after massive food poisoning at the Desna military base in the north of the country. Analyses revealed the presence of mold, staphylococcus and E. coli bacteria in the food supplied by the subcontractor, whose contract was revoked. But from then on, the market became increasingly monopolistic. […] On January 6, 2022, twelve invitations to tender were published. The total amount was colossal, approaching 100 million euros. With one objective: to end the monopoly on food supplies by diversifying suppliers. We were only a month and a half away from the start of the Russian invasion.
Who won these contracts? It’s a mystery. Since the start of the war, public contracts relating to military affairs have not been made public, so that Russian intelligence cannot detect any sensitive information. Has the Viyskservis-Volonter contract been extended? Contacted by La Croix, the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense did not respond to our inquiries. "We don't know," comments Yuri Nikolov, editor-in-chief of the Nashi Grochi website, who sees this turpitude as one of the reasons why Ukraine was not ready to feed its soldiers when the invasion began. "But the war has changed things. I've noticed that a lot of people have stopped doing whatever they want." The diversification of suppliers does indeed seem very real.
Cookbooks
Olia Hercules | Summer Kitchens: Recipes and Reminiscences from Every Corner of Ukraine
One of just two English-language cookbooks about Ukrainian cuisine that I own and easily my favorite, with gorgeous pictures, more than a hundred recipes ranging from the simple (Odesan zakuska, cabbage and cucumber salad) to the more complex (like the mouth-watering borscht with duck and smoked pears, or the Ukrainian wedding bread), and a dedicated section on the culturally crucial art of fermentation. It’s a book steeped in nostalgia, with every recipe introduced by personal anecdotes from Olia Hercules that provide some lovely context, without ever taking over what is very much a cookbook first and foremost.
Serhiy Pozhar | Кухня Карпат. Від простої їжі до делікатесів (“Cuisine of the Carpathians. From simple food to delicacies”)
Learning about a country’s national cuisine is great—diving into regional cuisines is even better. Pozhar’s “Cuisine of the Carpathians” has been a fantastic introduction to the hearty dishes from the Ukrainian part of this mountainous range that passes through five countries. And as expected for a cuisine emerging from a mountains range covering so many countries, you’ve also got many plates that are popular in neighboring regions—like the керезет (‘kerezet’), a delicious appetizer of cottage cheese mixed with garlic, various spices and herbs and spread on a toast that is also popular in Hungary, жур (‘zhur’), a ‘white borscht’ coming from Poland or, of course, the famous Hungarian gulash. There are also 7 separate borsht recipes (and more than 10 if you count zhur).
Ihor Lipo, Marianna Dushar | Шляхетна кухня Галичини (“Cuisine of the nobility in Galicia”)
This one… isn’t really a cookbook. What it actually is a history book diving into the gastronomy and tastes of the Galician nobility at the end of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th century. The book is chockful of amazing stories about the customs and social conventions of the time, in a region still heavily disputed between Polish and Ukrainian people. It also includes a ton of real menus served in the region’s fanciest hotels, some in Ukrainian, some in Polish, and many in French. It’s also a step back from the most typical portrayals of Ukraine of the time, usually heavily focused on either the peasantry or the burgeoning industrial in the Donbas. Damn appetizing, too.
Shalimov S.A, Yudeva V.K, Baranov M.I & others | Страви української кухні (“Dishes of Ukrainian cuisine”) & Українські страви (“Ukrainian Dishes”)
These two definitely are cookbooks—the unusual part is the fact they were published in the 50s in the Soviet Union. “Dishes of Ukrainian cuisine” was published first, in the early 50s, but targeted professional kitchens inside the various state companies of the Ukrainian Soviet republic. The second, published towards the end of the decade, was made for the general public, with both having the particularity (at the time at least) of being written in Ukrainian. Check out the next section, which includes a fascinating research article looking at this cookbook’s publication history.
Research
Open-access articles are marked ✅
Edward Geist | From Khrushchev’s Kulish to Chicken Kyiv: How Soviet Power Redefined Ukrainian Cuisine | The Soviet and Post-Soviet Review | November 2022 ✅
During the rule of Josef Stalin, the Soviet government sought to promulgate a common culinary aesthetic to facilitate the goals of the Soviet project. But pushback against these “socialist realist foodways” emerged in Soviet Ukraine. During the Khrushchev era the Ukrainian government took the step of creating Ukrains”ki stravy (“Ukrainian Dishes”). First published in 1957, this Ukrainian-language cookbook sought to articulate foodways that were both socialist realist and distinctively Ukrainian. The inevitable contradictions within this effort foreshadowed the problems that would dominate Soviet food discourse in subsequent decades, as the USSR’s citizens increasingly critiqued the shortcomings of the Soviet food system and attempted to reclaim prerevolutionary, and particularly national, culinary traditions. Drawing on published and archival Ukrainian sources, this paper explores the uncomfortable balance between nationality policy and official Soviet food discourse in the postwar era, and how this contributed to the eventual demise of socialist realist foodways.
Natalia Mamonova | Food sovereignty and solidarity initiatives in rural Ukraine during the war | The Journal of Peasant Studies | November 2022 ✅
This article examines coping strategies and solidarity initiatives in rural Ukraine during the full-scale war with Russia. Based on primary qualitative data conducted remotely, it explores the ability of different food producers to farm in military conditions, their mutual help and reciprocity. The article also discusses farmers’ mundane patriotism, the influx of internally displaced persons to the countryside, charitable initiatives of agribusiness, and local conflicts and tensions. It argues that the networks and collective action that emerged during the war accelerated the development of a vibrant rural civil society needed to promote peasant rights and endorse food sovereignty in Ukraine.
Multiple authors | The War in Ukraine and Food Security in Eastern Europe | Gastronomica | August 2022 ✅
This dispatch outlines some of the immediate consequences and long-term challenges posed by the Ukraine war on food security and production systems in Eastern Europe. We draw particular attention to the food aid and provisioning realities around many million (and increasing) numbers of Ukrainian refugees, and the current lack of systemic, government-coordinated responses to the humanitarian crisis. Further, we outline the distinct forms of agriculture characterizing Eastern Europe, notably, the short supply chains and farming networks that are socially and environmentally unique and valuable, and are a result of the persistence of smaller, family-led farms. However, these farms and farmers are facing increasingly difficult times as a result of inflation, rising fuel prices, rationing, climate stress, export bans, and now large numbers of refugees arriving to some already very poor rural areas. We highlight the need for these multiple stresses to be discussed together, for their consequences on food production in the short and long term, especially as the effects of the war extend beyond the region. These stresses include, in the immediate, a lack (and a lack of reliability on) of state aid and infrastructures for refugee hosts and food aid organizations and, in the longer term, persisting EU-policy and market pushes toward intensification that will greatly challenge the smallholder system in Eastern Europe.