Healthy Russian Food is Not-for-Profit

Cynthia Gabriel

Population Studies Center, Institute for Social Research, University of Michigan

“We are sick. We are unhealthy,” proclaims Mark, [1] a successful businessman from Nizhni Novgorod, Russia, who, in outward appearance, is the picture of robust health. Mark is far from alone in his opinion; demographers, statisticians, Western journalists, and aid workers all seem to agree. As Michael Wines of The New York Times puts it, health in Russia has “collapsed.” Mark and Wines disagree, however, on what is to blame for the health crisis. Wines—along with Abigail Zuger, Stephen Massey, and others writing for a Western audience—tends to blame a lack of hard currency and internal Russian politics for the state of Russian health. They insinuate that the real problem is an underfunded medical system, brought about by a combination of economic depression, corrupt governmental policies, and misguided priorities (Wines 2000; Zuger 200;, Massey 2002; WHO 2003). By highlighting infectious diseases, such as tuberculosis, these writers fan fears that “the country itself may turn into an epidemiologic pump, sending infectious diseases into the rest of the world” (Wines 2000).

My Russian informants, on the other hand, while not denying that these problems are quite real, see the cause of their health problems rather differently. They emphasize the problems of daily life. In particular, they blame Western imported food, low domestic food quality, the introduction of stress, and a loss of time for many of their new health problems. Embedded in these seemingly quotidian problems I discern deep concerns about changing human relationships in the post-Soviet era. As I researched health in Russia, time and again my informants directed conversations to issues of subsistence and sustenance, focusing on questions of how, from whom, and where to find healthy, nourishing food in Russia today. I realized that many health-conscious Russians are eschewing certain foods—especially imported Western foods and food sold by profit-making merchants—in favor of what they call “ekologicheskaya chistaya” food, or “ecologically clean” food. I argue that by defining food produced by impersonal, large-scale farms or corporations (or, as Mark calls it, “capitalist food”) as unclean, these Russians are affirming an attachment to personalized, informal exchange networks. When the health of these social networks is troubled (as, for instance, when a lack of time to cultivate relationships weakens them), physical health is also understood to be troubled. I posit that the practices associated with growing, distributing, and eating ecologically clean food are a new, post-Soviet lived critique of capitalism and of capitalist-driven, biomedical models of health.

Vulnerability: feelings of weakness in Russian individual, social, and political bodies

Demographic statistics paint a bleak picture of Russian health. According to figures provided by Dr. Mikka Vienonen, head of the World Health Organization in Russia, “Russian medical figures show that only one baby in ten is born healthy here, while pregnancy is around ten times more dangerous for a Russian woman than for her British counterpart” (Wyatt 2001). An oft-quoted statistic is the depressingly low life expectancy for Russian men. From a high of 64, this number plummeted to a low of approximately 55 in 1993 and is currently recorded as 58.9 (WHO 2003; Cockerham, Snead, and Dewaal 2002). Though women live quite a bit longer on average, their life expectancy is also relatively low for an industrialized nation, at 71.8 years in 2000 (Cockerham, Snead, and Dewaal 2002). As birth rates have also fallen, most Russians are keenly aware that Russia is losing population. According to the conservative estimates of President Putin, the death rate outstrips the birth rate by 750,000 persons per year (Putin 2000). More poetically, in the words of one informant, Dr. Yakoleva, “Russia is dying.”

But what do these statistics mean, especially to those who are most affected by them—Russians themselves? As I listened to my informants talk about health concerns, I realized how inextricably beliefs and metaphors about health and disease are interwoven with and constitutive of beliefs and metaphors of economics, politics, and business. As anthropologists such as Emily Martin have pointed out, the way we understand our bodies—our health and our sickness—is profoundly related to the way we understand the wider world (1994). As the social order is reconfigured (as it has been so dramatically in the former Soviet Union since 1992), so too are visions of the body. In the post-Soviet period, as I have indicated, many Russians perceive a general and dramatic weakening of Russian bodies.

Not surprisingly, many Russians with whom I work make explicit connections between the vulnerability they feel about their personal health and the vulnerable position they understand Russia to occupy in the geopolitical world order. For instance, Sasha, a young computer programmer, links poor nutrition with national security by asking, “How can we win the war against terrorism in Chechnya? Our Army is weak. Our soldiers are poorly trained and they are unhealthy. They are undernourished and too weak to fight properly.” In their post-socialist present, many Russians think they live in an unhealthy place and in an unhealthy economy. They feel physically vulnerable both to political/military attacks (internal and international) and to the proliferation of various diseases and pollutants. They also feel an acute lack of political and natural defenses; the world seems cold, harsh, and inhospitable to life. Health-promoting nourishment, including nourishing food, is hard to find.

My task is not to dispute the statistics, [2] but rather to understand their cultural context. The Russian economy is clearly undergoing significant changes. Less visible, but no less significant, are concomitant shifts in thinking about health, medicine, and human bodies. Though I do not aim to answer the unanswerable question “which change comes first?,” I do posit that there can be no full understanding of the Russian economy or of Russian politics without attention to these intimate, personal areas.

In this article, I take as my starting point the concern expressed by so many of my informants that Russian health is poor and Russian bodies are weak. My research follows their lead by delving into the issues that they think are relevant to Russian health, especially issues of subsistence. Many Russians are deeply worried about their food sources. I was told more than once that food quality is so low that continued human life is threatened. Here, I explore the question “how are the cultural categories of ‘healthy’ and ‘unhealthy’ food understood and constructed?” from the point of view of Russians with whom I worked. I see that “healthy food” in this context is food that is healthy for both the physical and the social body. Food that helps cement desirable social relationships is healthy; food that disrupts these relationships is not. This understanding of sustenance, that more than just one’s physical body must be nurtured and nourished for true health, is quite contrary to the biomedical, Western view of health, bodies, and nutrition.

The data and interviews I present in this article come from a larger research project on the Russian medical system and the political economy of childbirth. Throughout my research, whether talking with medical professionals or lay Russians, I found myself discussing questions related to food and nutrition. I conducted fieldwork primarily in two urban settings, Nizhni Novgorod and St. Petersburg, during the year 2000 and on a month-long research trip in 2002. In Nizhni Novgorod, I worked closely with a homebirth physician and a group of Russians (many of whom had chosen homebirth) who self-identify as alternative medicine adherents. I also taught an introductory course on cultural anthropology at a local undergraduate institution. In St. Petersburg, I worked as a midwifery apprentice in a more orthodox biomedical environment: a maternity hospital or roddom. Like many anthropologists, I often found that chance encounters (on a train or in an employee lunch room while on a tour of a chicken factory) illuminated certain issues even more clearly than my formal interviews (Tsing 1993). Rather than follow a particular group of people, I prefer to follow what I call “cultural discourse.” Many of the ideas and themes I found compelling enough to follow in 2000 were those that seemed strikingly different from those I encountered in 1990-1991, as a college exchange student. The result is an interweaving of encounters from a variety of cultural contexts.

I was surprised throughout my fieldwork at how often Russians of disparate backgrounds and ages used similar words when describing markets, food, and health issues to me. Nonetheless, I should note that the discourses and practices I describe here come almost exclusively from encounters with European Russians who live in large urban centers. Only a handful of my informants were pensioners over the age of 55; most were between the ages of 17 and 40. I would characterize most of my informants as struggling middle-class (exceptions to this are noted in the text). Though disposable income was often non-existent, most had at least some post-secondary education and most were employed (except the university students). Attitudes and practices of rural Russians, many of whom have extremely limited access to Russia’s cash economy (Humphrey 2002:70), may differ in significant ways from those I encountered.

Food as a threat to health: imported foods

Michael Taussig notes that “[t]he attribution of disease to a foreign-agent would seem as old as human-kind. But only with modern Western medicine and the late nineteenth century ‘germ theory of disease’ did this idea largely shed itself of the notion that the foreign-agent was an expression of specific social relations” (Taussig 1980:6). In Russia, I would argue, current discourse about diseases and sickness do not follow this Western model. Many foreign-agents of disease are understood to be literally foreign (like imported food) and are therefore explicitly understood as expressions of specific social relations between nations. Most of the Western food available falls into the junk food category: Cheetos, Pringles, Snickers, and various chewing gums, for instance, are easily accessible in urban Russia. Many Russians, especially over age 30 or so, go out of their way to tell me that they have tried Western food products (when they became available here as of 1993 or so) and that they have become disillusioned with our supposedly superior food. They now prefer to eat “our” (nash)Russian-grown/made products because they are “better for you” and they “taste much better.” [3] One Russian acquaintance I spoke with believes that the United States is trying to exterminate Russians by poisons such as food additives and preservatives. There is a strong “buy Russian” (anti-import) sentiment among large numbers of urban Russians that is abetted by government-sponsored advertising. This sentiment seems most operative in the arena of food.

So strong is the association between the United States and “bad” food that a number of my first encounters with new acquaintances revolved around this topic. On one occasion, I was touring a chicken factory near Nizhni Novgorod at the invitation of its CEO. In the employee cafeteria during lunch, a worker at our table realized I was an American and immediately launched into a diatribe against American food. “Europe doesn’t want your food, so you’re trying to dump it on us,” he said. “When will you understand that no one wants to eat your chemicals?” And at a dinner party, one Russian opened our conversation with the question, “Can you explain why Americans are so fat?”

At the childbirth education classes and at the maternity hospitals where I conducted fieldwork, I quickly realized that Russians saw me as a source of useful information on some topics—but food and nutrition was not one of them. When I dared to interject something on this topic, I was usually ignored or challenged. My American status, in this instance, signaled an inherent lack of knowledge or understanding of good health and nutrition. This association made all of my nutritional advice—and the nutritional advice in pregnancy books and magazines from the United States—suspect. [4] I realized that the cultural discourse of “weak” Russian health is, like all cultural discourses, full of contradictions, ambivalence, and relative positionings. Russian health may be weak, and Russians may fear that they are vulnerable to disease, but on the whole, many will express the belief that they are healthier and more capable of survival than Americans.

My previous experiences in Russia had not prepared me for this particular hostility. In 1990-1991, my very presence as an American often elicited passionate and confrontational condemnations of the American capitalist system. My Russian peers, after years of studying works by Lenin, Soviet Marxists, and Karl Marx himself, were much more adept at philosophical and political-economic analysis of capitalist practices than I. In 1993 and 1997, new Russian acquaintances often launched our cross-cultural conversations with comments about international politics: NATO expansion, the United States’ interests in Yugoslavia, and, most contentiously, the United States’ position on Chechnya.

In 2000 and 2002, the direct, confrontational language about capitalism—and the political-economic theory behind it—that was so omnipresent during the Soviet period has all but disappeared. None but a very few use Marxist terminology these days. My students at the Volga-Vyatskaya Academy (mostly 19-21 years old) proudly claim, in fact, to have never read Marx. Instead, they speak in the idiom of health. I argue, though, that this idiom still contains a pointed, albeit indirect, critique of capitalist practices (both foreign and domestic), especially that of commodity fetishism.

Vocalizing concerns about imported food is a powerful means of criticizing the United States and global capitalism without appearing to invoke political and military nationalism. Growing international anxieties about mad cow disease, genetically modified foods, and other food-technology issues lend validity to Russian fears. Many Russians with whom I interacted are expressing their newfound position within the world order by opposing Western corporate farmer-capitalists on the grounds of health, rather than ideology.

Domestic foods

At the same time that many Russians worry about imported food, they are concerned about the low quality of domestically produced food. To a large degree, they blame this problem on agricultural chemicals, pollution, bad soil, and other environmental problems. For instance, in the magazine Moi Rebyonok (My Baby), a special section on children’s food claims that “[a]llergic reactions are today, unfortunately, not a rare occurrence. The culprit is bad ecology and chemical-based agriculture” (Moi Rebyonok 2001:vii). These ecological and agricultural problems, fairly or not, are in turn routinely blamed on foreign capitalists. Many of my informants identify the United States and international profit-driven corporations as perpetrators of world-wide environmental degradation. Prominent Russian figures such as Alexey Yablokov (President of the Center for Russian Environmental Policy) link domestic environmental problems directly with foreign imports. In the middle of a depressing list of severe and specific environmental problems in Russia, for instance, he mentions in a broad, sweeping statement that “Russia also imports low quality food and goods and purchases polluting technologies from other countries” (Yablokov 2001).

Environmental problems which may have existed for decades (such as air pollution, water pollution, poor soil quality, and erosion) [5] are, in this way, culturally associated with Taussig’s disease-causing “foreign-agents.” One informant, Lena, acknowledges that pollution problems may have pre-existed the collapse of state communism, but explains:

Nostalgia for the state communist past, which has been written about by political economist Michael Urban (1997) and anthropologists Katherine Verdery (1996) and Barbara West (2002), among others, informs present-day beliefs about nutrition and food. Many Russians express the belief that it is no longer possible to get the vitamins and minerals one needs from food. Like Lena, they associate this change with post-socialism and the collapse of the Soviet Union. Doctors now recommend that pregnant women take multivitamins. According to Moscow physician Dr. Trotsko, twenty years ago such advice was frowned upon as “bourgeois” and lazy. “We tried to eat right [back then] and teach people about the nutritive qualities of food,” he explains.

Now, when I interview doctors, they say there are no vitamins in the food and that they do not trust pregnant women to eat well because it so “impossible” these days. [6] A French-based company, Vision, a multi-level marketing company, markets vitamins by appealing to this common fear. One successful marketer, Sasha, begins most of her spiels with the phrase, “As we all know, it’s impossible to be healthy by eating a good diet anymore.” [7] This fear is especially acute in the spring, when Russians worry that the long winter has sapped stored foods of their potency. At a childbirth education class on March 22, 2000, one of the women warned the group to “be careful eating potatoes this time of year. And, in general,” she said, “I’ve heard that the elderly and invalids shouldn’t eat potatoes after February 1.”

Organic versus “ecologically clean” food

Not surprisingly, a new phrase has joined the everyday Russian lexicon to express these new fears about food quality: “ekologicheskaya chistaya”or “ecologically clean.” I originally interpreted this label to mean something along the lines of what the word “organic” means in the United States. That is certainly how multinational corporations, such as Hipp (a German producer of organic baby food), use the Russian phrase. On handouts produced by Hipp and distributed by pediatricians in Nizhni Novgorod, their baby food ingredients are defined as “ecologically clean” in Russian and “organic” in English. But this facile translation does not tell the whole story. My time in Russia forced me to think more clearly about what these words—and the concept of “ecologically clean” food—really mean. Ultimately, I found that though these words sound similar, they index very different concepts and cultural values in North America and in Russia. In short, whereas North Americans emphasize the physical, environmental impact of food production when they question the ecological cleanliness of their food, Russians tend to emphasize the human relationships that went into food production and distribution. When Russians say that a food is “good for you,” they mean in more ways than purely nutritional value.

In North America, the word “organic” is almost always defined in strictly physical terms. The Northeast Organic Farmers Association in the United States, for instance, gives detailed instructions about land, soil, and animal feed requirements. To be eligible for certification, strict controls are placed on how far organic fields must be from conventional fields, how long land must be free from pesticides, and how often soil samples must be submitted (Northeast Organic Farmer Association 2002). But here, as elsewhere, certification does not depend in any way on humane labor agreements, minimum wage compliance, or other “human” concerns.

Proponents of organic food point out, however, that “buying organic” has important secondary benefits. Green Earth Organics in Toronto, Canada, supplies its customers with a list of ten benefits to organic food. Beyond better taste and environmental reasons, they include these two points: “Protect Farm Workers Health” and “Help Small Farmers.” Clearly, farm workers’ health is better protected by not being exposed to pesticides. And most organic farms, they claim, are “small independently owned and operated family farms of less than 100 acres.” They do acknowledge, however, that “more and more large scale farms are making the conversion to organic practices” because of the potential profit (Green Earth Organics 2002). But these benefits to human lives, however important, are incidental to government agencies, distributors, certification bodies, and many consumers. They are side effects.

In Russia, I found quite opposite assumptions at work. Even the source material that is available for my research points to a significant divide between Russian and North American emphases. In North America and Europe, legal documents, websites of non-profit organizations, and trade books that focus on organic farming abound. But whereas the word “organic” has come to be legislated, parsed, and clearly defined over the last two decades in the North American context (even if there are several competing definitions), the phrase “ecologically clean” is less rigidly defined in Russia. It can be used more fluidly to mean different things in different situations. Though the phrase is part of everyday speech, I did not find it in the major newspapers. There is no defining law or standard, at least in 2003, that is recognized as authoritative.

In advertisements such as those produced by Hipp and other multinational corporations, the phrase “ecologically clean” mostly refers (like the word “organic”) to the environmentally pure conditions of food production. But in common parlance, I find the phrase to most often mean that the human source of the food is known and/or that the food was not produced by a for-profit entity. For most urban Russians, the most ecologically clean food is produced in the countryside on personal plots of land, regardless of the environmental condition of that land. [8]

Ecologically clean food and Russian informal networks

Apparently, even unborn Russian babies can tell the difference between food grown for a profit and food grown for health and sustenance. One of my informants, Ira, shared with me the journal she had written while pregnant with her first child. When she was approximately two months pregnant, on June 1, 1997, she wrote:

Ira, like many Russians, believes that cold water baths promote a healthy immune system. For health and other reasons, she also prefers to buy her food from vendors at a nearby outdoor food market, rather than what she calls the “robot”-like grocery store. After years of frequenting this market, she knows the vendors individually and proudly introduces me, her American friend, to her favorites. They give Ira’s son special treats and inquire about her health and the state of her second pregnancy.

In the hierarchy of ecological cleanliness and nutrition, then, not all food sources are created equal. At least four tiers exist. Worst of all, as Ira’s baby journal indicates, is the produce available in stores and supermarkets. This, of course, includes all Western imported food. Next in line are the permanent outdoor “city markets” that dot most Russian cities. [9] Considered to be more ecologically clean and more nutritious than the food found at the city markets is the produce at local farmers’ markets. But the most ecologically clean and nutritious food is that produced by Russians in the countryside for their own use or the use of friends and family. It is easy to accept this definition of local farmers’ market food or self-grown food as more nutritious because it is produced locally and is eaten soon after it is harvested. But Russians mean far more than just this. When they proclaim the nutrition and cleanliness of a food, they take into consideration the human connection to that food.

This definition resonated with me when I was given a bucket of apples by friends, Ivan and Katya, in Nizhni Novgorod. When they presented me with the bucket, they proudly proclaimed the apples to be “ecologically clean,” unlike the ones sitting on my kitchen counter, purchased at an outdoor market. “Throw those away,” Katya told me. “These are much better for you!” These apples were grown on the land at their countryside dacha that I had visited some weeks before. During my visit, Ivan had spent a great deal of time explaining the problem he was having with his fruit trees. Several of them had died and he blamed an infestation of insects. His neighbor, fortunately, had access to pesticides from a privatized farm in the area and shared these chemicals with Ivan and Katya. These apples, so proudly labeled ecologically clean, were from the very trees treated with these pesticides. When I protested calling the apples ecologically clean on this basis, Katya said, “But that doesn’t matter. We grew them ourselves. With our own hands.”

Katya also served me a sugary kompot (fruit-based drink) at her apartment one time with the same warning. She claimed that her kompot was far better for me than “those store juices” I usually bought. Katya was not the first Russian to warn me against store-bought juice. Traditional wisdom holds that juice is too concentrated and bad for one’s kidneys. Students from the Volga-Vyatskaya Academy in Nizhni Novgorod issued disapproving comments when they noticed boxes of commercial juice in my refrigerator. The only kind of juice that is appropriate to drink, according to the physician Valentina, is fresh-squeezed that one makes at home. “If you buy it in the store, there are no vitamins left and there are probably lots of preservatives,” she informed nine pregnant women and me at a childbirth preparation class in March 2000. [10]

Amy Allington, a close American friend who has lived in Russia for seven years, tipped me off to this interesting divergence of American and Russian meanings of ecological cleanliness. She pointed out that Russians who claim to have produced ecologically clean food mean, as Katya said, that they have produced it themselves. They do not mean that the water is free of contaminants, that the soil is untreated with chemicals, or that the air is free of drifting pesticides and pollen. When I started to notice this subtlety, I began to pay more attention to the distinctions my Russian informants make between the city markets and farmers’ markets.

Merchants versus farmers

There are numerous city markets in Nizhni Novgorod, nearly one in each neighborhood, though some are larger than others. A central market is located on the main city street, Bolshaya Pokrovskaya, close to the Kremlin and a hub of public transportation. This market is divided into sections: fruits and vegetables in one area, meat and dairy in another area, and prepared foods, such as pickled cabbage or cucumbers, in still another. In the main section of this market, vendors have rented permanent spaces and sell their wares every day. Its permanent location includes outdoor and indoor stalls. At night, gates are locked and most of the vendors leave their products locked inside their own stalls or kiosks. Many, though far from all, of these vendors come from non-Russian ethnic backgrounds. But significantly, these vendors are merchants, not farmers. This distinction is not lost on most Russians.

Merchants, by definition, make money by buying at one price and selling for a higher price. During Soviet times, this form of merchant capitalism was illegal. Making a profit in this manner was called “speculation,” and both the word and the act were considered exceedingly distasteful and demeaning (Humphrey 2002:44; Ledeneva 1998). Though this attitude has some roots in tsarist times (especially for peasants) and figures prominently in many traditional Russian fairytales (Afanasev 1945), it was actively cultivated by Soviet leaders from Lenin to Gorbachev (Geiger 1968). Caroline Humphrey noted in Russia in 1995 that “to engage in trading professionally is to step over some invisible line of decency” (Humphrey 2002). Merchants at the city markets were referred to as liars and cheaters by many of my informants. I was told repeatedly to hold onto my wallet and hide my money whenever I entered such a market because the people there are dishonest and untrustworthy.

One way that merchants can cheat customers is by changing their scales in their own favor. For this reason, almost every market has an official scale that customers can demand to use. But the most common way that merchants can cheat customers is simply by charging too much money—in other words, making too large of a profit. “You used to know the price of everything. You turned it over, its price was right there,” remembers my friend Lena. Though only 21, she can remember this aspect of the Soviet system clearly: that prices for all goods were standardized. Deviation from this state price was illegal speculation. Today, according to Lena, prices are confusing: “You never know what you should pay.”

Western visitors to Russia have often discussed the fascination with prices that many Russians exhibit. As Nancy Ries notes in Russian Talk (1997), conversations about prices make up a substantial portion of Russian talk; they are part and parcel of an ordinary day. Despite the ubiquity of such conversations, however, I have never read an analysis of these conversations that makes a connection between “price talk” and the cultural creation of economic systems and orders. Talking about prices that change—that differ from one consumer to another and in one location from another—is an explicit acknowledgement that the Soviet economic system has changed drastically. When I lived in Yaroslavl in 1990, goods may not have been available, but their prices were absolutely predictable. Today, for better or worse, market fluctuations, once given names such as “exploitation” and “price gouging,” have entered the lives of Russian citizens.

But far from feeling normal, price changes, comparison shopping, and haggling are often experienced by Russians as stresses. “I don’t like haggling with them [market merchants],” declares Lena. “It’s their job and I’m not very good at it.” The physician Valentina, in a philosophical and somber conversation about the changes of the post-Soviet period, remarked that Russian health is most affected by the post-Soviet stress of “uncertainty.” Perhaps, she mused, one gets used to instability and uncertainty; perhaps the Russian youth of today will not be adversely affected by these things. But she fears that anyone who can remember “how it was” will always experience things like price fluctuations as stressful—“psychologically, emotionally, and, in the end, physically.”

Though outwardly similar in appearance, the farmers’ markets that are held throughout the city on specific days of the week are entirely different cultural experiences. Whether true or not, many urban Russians believe that most of the vendors at these farmers’ markets are real farmers—or at least that they are people who live in the Russian countryside. The line between these two types of markets is increasingly blurred; I realized by talking with vendors that some farmers hire professional vendors. But even the hired vendors at the market nearest my apartment look like farmers. As opposed to the vendors at city markets, who represent a panoply of ethnicities, most of the farmers’ market vendors appear to be white and ethnically Russian. Whereas the city market vendors tend to be younger, in the age range of 19-45, most of the farmers’ market vendors tend to be older, in the age range of 30-70.

Though age and ethnicity are significant factors in the way Russian consumers interpret these two different kinds of vendors, also important, I posit, is the distinction between merchant and farmer. [11] Whereas a merchant must make money by buying low and selling high (but does not produce anything him/herself), a farmer actually produces something of value. Unlike a merchant, a farmer engages in what Russians call “trud,” or “real labor.” [12] While we were in a city market surrounded by young male vendors from the Caucasus, the university student Lena (who said she does not like to haggle) confided that she prefers farmers’ markets. If she overpays, “I’d rather overpay a poor babushka than one of these sleazy guys.” From whom a food comes is a factor in determining an acceptable price for Lena. In Lena’s opinion and that of many of my informants, remunerating a farmer for labor is fair, while contributing to the profits of a merchant is just being duped.

From whom—not from where—does my food come?: the importance of personal relationships and exchange networks in Russian life

Even beyond price, many Russians make judgments about the nutritional status and desirability of a food according to its human source. In the Russian context, it makes a great deal of sense that more emphasis would be placed on who produced the food than from where it came. Most Russians are well used to acquiring just about everything, including food, through their connections to other people, or what social scientists call “informal exchange networks” (Ledeneva 1998; Humphrey 2002; Yang 1994). They are also used to judging the quality of consumer goods and food by its source; goods and services obtained through networks are generally thought of as more reliable and of higher quality than goods obtained some other way (Ledeneva 1998:30). Even when goods are readily available in stores, many Russians prefer to turn to their networks of people.Food is no exception.

Economists, historians, and anthropologists have written extensively about why these informal exchange networks, also called a “second” or “shadow economy,” flourished under Soviet rule. The usual argument is that they became necessary because the official economy did not provide adequately for people’s needs. As Geoffrey Hosking writes, “The Soviet economy is in effect a huge institutionalized sellers’ market, run for the benefit of those who operate it, not of those who have to use its products” (1990:16). Because worker incentives were directed more at fulfilling grandiose production goals than at producing innovative, functional products, goods in stores were often shoddy and unusable. Worse, during World War II and again in the 1980s, goods were hardly available at all (Verdery 1996).

So, as numerous scholars have shown, informal exchange relationships filled the gap (Grossman 1977; Ledeneva 1998). For instance, a butcher might give the best cuts of meat to acquaintances “whereas people in the queue had to pay the same price for bones and fat” or a worker at a shoe factory might trade well-made shoes for tickets to the opera (Ledeneva 1998:28; personal observation 1990). Markku Lonkila (1997) points out that it was not only goods that were hard to get, but also information about goods. The result, according to the researcher Ilja Srubar, is that

In 2003, then, when stores (including food stores) are bursting with goods, one might expect informal exchange networks to have disappeared or declined in importance. In fact, Russian life continues to be densely filled with elaborate exchange networks. Lonkila (1997) found that Russians continue to use connections in the post-Soviet period, on average, several times a day, significantly more than her comparison group in Finland. A growing number of ethnographies address some of the political and economic reasons that this is so (Caldwell 2003; Humphrey 2002; Patico 2003). Certainly, poverty is one powerful reason. However, as Humphrey writes, “poverty alone cannot explain the present Russian attitudes towards consumption” (2002:41). Indeed, I witnessed or was involved in innumerable exchanges, especially food exchanges, that could not be explained either by lack of money or by deficits in nearby shops. The deep mistrust of merchants and fears about food quality that are starting to be documented offer new ways to make sense of enduring informal exchange networks.

Informal exchange networks are “good for your health”

Examining such networks specifically in relation to food highlights the inextricable intertwining of social, economic, and medical conceptions and realities. Most investigations of informal exchange networks prominently feature examples of food, medicine, and health care as objects of exchange. These are usually treated no differently than other objects, such as clothing, house repairs, or automobiles. However, I propose that the acquisition and provisioning of food and health care is actually a foundational raison d’être of many networks in the post-Soviet period. In other words, the way that many Russians imagine individual and social health coincides with the way they imagine proper relations between people. Network exchanges make cultural sense (or what some might call “symbolic” sense) because they express proper human relationships, which are not supposed to be based on a profit motive. [13] Health, too, is considered to be “beyond” economics—something that cannot be bought, but must be carefully cultivated. Food and medicine, in this worldview, naturally belong within friendly networks of people, not within the depersonalized global market.

As Mary Douglas (1989) notes, our ideas about the “proper” ways to nourish our physical bodies are inextricably connected to our notions about the proper ways to nourish our social and political bodies. Fears that food found in grocery stores and city markets is, at best, depleted of vitamins and, at worst, a polluting, disease-causing agent, are wrapped up in ideas about proper associations between people. Food produced for a profit (as is all imported Western food) and food sold by merchants for a profit represent undesirable, diseased human relationships. The food cannot be trusted because the people selling the food cannot be trusted. Food produced on one’s own land, by friends or relatives, or by rural people just trying to make an honest living can be trusted because the people involved can be trusted. The words “ecologically clean,” in this sense, ideally mean that the people involved in the food’s production are more interested in your health than in your money.

Marx called the invisibility of the human labor and person(s) who create a for-profit product “commodity fetishism.” [14] Russians are especially sensitive to and critical of commodity fetishism when they see it in food production and medical care. One of Alena Ledeneva’s interviewees explains why personalized service is inherently better and many of her examples are from the medical sphere:

My informant Lena makes her criticism of financially based motivations in health care more explicitly:

Informal exchange networks operate in many spheres of life to different purposes; for instance, some exchanges are straightforwardly about obtaining difficult-to-find or fashionable objects or to get a good price. In the sphere of food and medicine, however, rendering human relationships visible (and thereby more pleasant and trustworthy) is sometimes important in and of itself.

No time to “just sit” for tea: the effect on health of loss of time

Clearly, Russians are concerned that market economic practices are interfering with their health, causing all sorts of minor and major problems. Loss of health is blamed on poor food quality, but it is also blamed on the changing sense of time that is accompanying new economic practices. These complaints are not unconnected. Russians from all walks of life are keenly aware that their daily and seasonal rhythms have been disrupted by the economic and political upheaval of post-socialism. In the new Russian economy, there is not enough time for many Russians to go to a banya regularly, [15] to grow vegetables in the countryside, to make preserves and canned food, or to cook healthy meals. Concomitantly, there is no longer enough time to nurture and nourish proper relationships between people. This “loss” of time is often symbolized by the lament, “We no longer have time to just sit together.”

Verdery (1996) discusses the experience of time during late socialism in Romania. She points out that ordering the experience of time is an act of power. The socialist state bolstered its own power and authority by “seizing” time from its citizens. Individuals were deprived of the power and autonomy to make certain decisions about the use of their time. Everything from when one could do a load of laundry to when couples could have sexual intercourse was at least partially controlled or affected by state power. (The state decided when to turn water on and off; the state decided whether and what kinds of birth control were available.) But most famously, the state controlled access to and availability of consumer goods and foodstuffs in stores. “Wasting” citizens’ time in queues was a profound statement about state power that functioned on at least two levels. Queues both demonstrated the state’s ability to order citizen time and prevented citizens from spending time in other, potentially revolutionary activities.

Though this perspective is, indeed, a useful lens through which to view Soviet power, it is not the full story. Not all time was seized by the state; Russian citizens did some “time seizing” of their own, often at the expense of their state-run workplaces. It is, indeed, true that Russians (or Romanians) could not easily assemble in large groups independently of the state (because of lack of time, laws against large assemblies, and fear of repercussion), but it was simultaneously true that small, intimate gatherings were a hallmark of Soviet life. Dissidents shared illegal poetry and samizdat literature, [16] along with endless cups of tea and vodka, at such gatherings in Russian kitchens (Arbatova 1998). [17] But these tête-à-têtes were not only for revolutionary purposes; they happened every day at state workplaces. Life at a Soviet workplace seemed to revolve around the tea kettle (or samovar). Long tea breaks were part of the average workday.

In Russia, tea is considered a particularly healthy drink. But when pressed, the Russians I asked about tea almost always waxed poetic about the social bonds that “sitting together” forges. Dale Pesmen notes that “drinking tea...creates (or defies, or claims to negate) time” (1995:65). The ritual of sitting together to drink tea or alcohol is so culturally important that it is “linked to feeling human” (Pesmen 2000:175). At work and at home, no matter what time of day, no meeting of friends or colleagues is complete without an obligatory cup (or two or three) of tea. I argue that this ritual helps to cement the social bonds (Pesmen calls it “intimacy and genre of communication”) between Russians who must count on each other for help and support in the informal exchange networks I have described above (2000:171). Beyond the relationships forged, tea-drinking rituals themselves also offer an implicit critique of market relationships. Pesmen points out that hosts and hostesses in Russia generally display their worthiness as human beings by offering everything they have to guests at their table (2000:159). Time is no exception.

The experience and order of time has always been a focal point of analyses of capitalism (and far less so of analyses of socialism, with exceptions such as Verdery already noted). Many working class struggles have been over time: the right to weekend leisure, eight-hour workdays, and bathroom and rest breaks during work shifts, for example. Reducing the required input of time into the production process is one important way that capitalists can reap greater profits. David Harvey (1989) argues that from the 1970s onward the whole world, but especially the Western capitalist world, has experienced a shift to what many call “late” or “flexible” capitalism. This shift is characterized by a drive to speed up work processes and consumer demand (and otherwise speed up elements of production and distribution) to solve an unavoidable problem of capitalism: overaccumulation. He maintains, with extensive examples, that aesthetic and social ideas about time and space (especially as represented in architecture, literature, art, and film) have changed because of the “conditions of flexible accumulation” (Harvey 1989:302).

Indeed, time is a highly charged, volatile subject these days in many parts of Russia. I find the impassioned speeches and laments of Russian friends and acquaintances regarding their perception that they are losing time to parallel in significant ways changes in the Russian economy. If the state was responsible for seizing citizen time under socialism, the time-space compression of late capitalism is more often blamed these days. However, unlike in Western capitalist nations such as the United States, this time-space compression is felt by many Russians more deeply in the sphere of consumption than production.

Here, I will briefly point out an important distinction between Russian post-socialist production and consumption patterns. Russian companies and labor patterns, by and large, do not follow the logic of Harvey’s international “flexible” capitalism, even if they are deeply enmeshed in and dependent on global capitalism. [18] Managing the vagaries and caprices of Russian business often seems to steal time, but this seems to me to be qualitatively different than capitalist work speed-ups. Russian consumption, on the other hand, especially consumer desire and demand for consumer products, is heavily influenced by the speeding up of marketing and fashion trends. In this article, I have focused on a widespread tendency in Russia to reject Western food products; however, as I suggest, food and medicine are particular niches that deserve careful and independent analysis. Clothes, cigarettes, computers, video games, music, cell phones, and other consumer products are a different story altogether. The “time-space compression” that Harvey describes is certainly felt in the consumption and desire of these products (Patico, personal communication).

Despite this caveat about the relative absence of large, capitalist-style businesses, it is worth noting a phenomenon that many of my Russian friends mention and that I experienced in person. In a significant change from the socialist past, some younger, more Western-oriented businesspeople are less likely to invite visitors for a cup of tea during a visit to their place of business. This practice is in stark contrast to the usual situation of visiting friends and acquaintances at their workplaces—especially (but not exclusively) state-run workplaces. When I call on people I know at the psychology department of a university, a polyclinic, the local association of medical workers, a local gym, a grocery store, or even at a car repair shop, I am immediately invited to share tea and whatever sweets are available. Not serving tea to friends and acquaintances is a sharp reminder that one has entered a non-Russian-oriented business space. This business is making a conscious choice to adopt Western principles, not only in space and design (the places where I am not served tea are invariably decorated in the “European” style), but also in adherence to concern about time, productivity, and proper business relationships.

Yet even workers in state-run or less visibly “European” workplaces feel that they have less time in 2003 than they used to have under the Soviet system. As contradictory as it may seem, Verdery’s argument that the Soviet state “seized” citizen time does not always ring true—at least in memory. It is the “new economy”—variously defined—that is often experienced as “seizing” citizen time, preventing them from attending to their social and physical health. Mark, the businessman with whom I opened this article, runs his own successful company. Running a business exhausts him and has taken a toll on his health. He is especially frustrated that what little time he has left over from business must be spent “worrying.” Like Lena, the university student who experienced price fluctuations in the food marketplace as stressful, Mark explains his stress—and his physical symptoms—in terms of market instability:

He attributes a whole range of physical symptoms to this combination of stress and lack of time:

“Loss” of time, accompanied by or caused by business and market instability, the stress of global capitalist forces, and other radical political and economic changes (for instance, the ruble’s devaluation of 1998), is felt by many Russians as disastrous for their own—and for the nation’s—health. Time is not only seized by capitalist-style work conditions, but also by the conditions of poverty unleashed by the collapse of the Soviet state. Just “getting by”—much less keeping up with the West—requires more time and energy than it once did.

Most obviously, there is not enough time to spend on one’s diet. There are no extra hours for planting, watering, weeding, harvesting, canning, preserving, and cooking healthy food. But more subtly, there is the problem of not enough time to invest in one’s social relationships. Whereas many Russians believe they will get the best health care and medical attention if they access the health system through a friend or acquaintance, such an introduction can require the investment of too much time and energy these days. In Lonkila’s study, for instance, a teacher tells the story of how she finds dental care through the parents of a student—a much more time-consuming process than just going to a state dentist. Activating one’s informal exchange network for such purposes, though culturally highly desirable, is not efficient. It requires time and effort, not only at the time of activation, but in the months, weeks, and years of building up solid, trusted relationships with a variety of people. This is exactly what many Russians do not have time for in post-socialism. As a result, not only do they experience their time as shortened, but they also experience their health as weakened.

Conclusion

As I have shown in this article, Russians are worried that the state of their health has declined dramatically since the collapse of the Soviet Union. But their explanations for—and attempts to mitigate and improve—this situation are strikingly different from those explanations that most often guide United States foreign policy and the policies made within the IMF, WHO, and even, sadly, Russia. As I have noted, Western journalists, economists, and aid workers who grapple with health issues in Russia tend to emphasize internal, domestically produced problems (including undefined “cultural” problems that interfere with the acceptance and implementation of recommended Western practices) (Massey 2002; Helsing et al. 2002). [19] I argue that such ethnocentric accounts reflect the general tendency in Western biomedicine to see the mind, body, and spirit separately and to treat “social” issues as separate from, not constitutive of and inextricable from, health issues (Leslie 2001). [20]

By contrast, my Russian informants offer a far different view of their health situation; the problems of daily life in a post-socialist, semi-capitalist economic system; and even the appropriate relationship between human individual and social bodies. Rather than blame national politics and economics for their health problems, these Russians tend to discuss their health by discussing their food. They see the food available in the post-socialist period as increasingly “capitalist,” grown for a profit and not for human nourishment. Across many sorts of social divides (my informants in this chapter, for instance, include a “New Russian” businessman, a struggling university language student, Russians who identify as alternative health practitioners, and those who prefer more orthodox medicine), Russians I know identify food from known sources as the most healthy. In a cultural context in which informal exchange networks densely fill the social landscape, I understand this definition of healthy food to express concern about proper human relationships. Russians turn to their networks for all the things they need for subsistence and for sustenance, from food to information to friendships. When capitalist social and economic practices (such as an emphasis on efficiency in the workplace at the expense of time for social interaction) interfere with these networks, the Russian social body is seen to—and arguably does—suffer ill health. I suggest that the state of Russians’ physical health, described as “weakened” or even “collapsed,” will not improve without an approach that takes into account (materially as well as discursively) how concerns about food quality, stress, loss of time, and a “weakened” social body are linked to health.

Endnotes

1. The names of my Russian informants have been changed.

2. I do fear, however, that they can be quite misleading. In particular, I believe that statistics about the low birth rate in Russia are misused, especially by journalists. Though the political and economic crises of the last fifteen years have certainly impacted the birth rate, it is also true that the Russian birth rate has been declining for decades. As early as the 1950s, Soviet demographers warned of a severe decline in the birth rate at the end of the twentieth century, based solely on factors such as urbanization, increasing access to education (especially for girls and women), and industrialization (Zakharov and Ivanova 1996). A study by Tatiana Kharkova and Evgueny Andreev entitled “Did The Economic Crisis Cause the Fertility Decline in Russia: Evidence from the 1994 Microcensus” (2000) concludes quite authoritatively that it did not.

3. See Caroline Humphrey’s chapter “Creating a Culture of Disillusionment: Consumption in Moscow, a Chronicle of Changing Times” for a thorough discussion of the history and use of the terms “ours” (nash) and “other” (2002). Her observations square nicely with the argument I am making in this article. She suggests that throughout the Soviet period and into the present the term “ours” has indicated a divide not only (or not most significantly) between the national origin of goods, but also between their modes of production. “Our” products, in this sense, were made by Soviet state enterprises; anything made for a profit or sold for a profit in markets was, regardless of whether it was produced in Russia by Russians or not, “other.”

4. In July 2000, I offered to bring reading material to some Russian women who were confined to bed at the St. Petersburg roddom. They pointedly asked me to bring “our” (Russian) magazines (such as Zdorovye or Nash Malish), not the Russian-language versions of “your” (Western) magazines (such as those produced by Parents and Burda).

5. See Feschbach 1992 for an extensive discussion of environmental problems of the Soviet era. In a 1994 article in the German newspaper Die Zeit, Michael Schwellen reported that “[r]ight now, 110 million of Russia’s 147 million people have to breathe air polluted beyond legal limits...Half of Russia’s people drink water that does not meet safety guidelines, according to a new study by the German Institute for Economic Research...Industrial waste water dumped into rivers and lakes is inadequately treated—if at all.”

6. Though many physicians may recommend vitamins, they also acknowledge that foreign vitamins (such as Centrum and One-A-Day) are too expensive for most Russians. Beyond price, several of my Russian informants fear that vitamins made for American bodies would harm Russian bodies; one informant suspected that Western pharmaceutical companies are “dumping” expired or deficient vitamins on the Russian market. I only encountered two women at the maternity hospital in St. Petersburg who admitted to using Western vitamins during their pregnancy. Far more ubiquitous is the use of herbal supplements, either freshly picked and prepared oneself or store-bought as dried herbs to be made into teas. Almost every pregnant woman (86 out of 90) whom I interviewed, regardless of age, educational status, or income, used such herbal supplements. These dried herbs are easily available in almost any urban pharmacy, whereas Western vitamins are only sporadically available.

7. Vision and Herbalife (a vitamin multi-level marketing company headquartered in the United States) seem well-established in the major cities of European Russia. Though their products are quite expensive by Russian standards and their products are produced outside of Russia, they have succeeded by tapping into existing networks of Russian sellers. Each seller, in a sense, “vouches” for the vitamin products to his/her own network of friends and acquaintances. (I will discuss these networks in greater detail later in this article.) Most sales pitches for Vision vitamins emphasize that these vitamins are produced precisely for a Russian body, taking into account what vitamins and minerals are lacking in Russian food and the Russian environment.

8. Pollution, I found, was generally understood as something perpetrated by governments and corporations, not by individuals.

9. This is my own label for these markets. Russians refer to both city markets and farmers’ markets simply as “rinok” or “market,” but they make distinctions between them in other ways.

10. This particular belief coincides with a strong movement to “return” women to their “rightful place” in the home (Posadskaya 1994:168). These beliefs about the nutritional value of home-grown food and store-bought juice are not without consequences in the economic and political spheres. Defining time-consuming food preparation (such as squeezing one’s own juices from fruit or making kompot) as “healthy” is both an economic statement about purchasing imported juices and also a statement about the necessity for someone (usually a woman in the role of wife, mother, or grandmother) to have enough time to complete these health-related tasks. I will say more about the issue of time at the end of this article.

11. For more detailed attention to the issue of race, especially conflicts between ethnic minority or foreign merchants and ethnic Russians, please see Caldwell 2003 and Humphrey 2002:69-98.

12. Humphrey comments that “[t]he reaction [to the activity of trading and profit-making] that developed during the Soviet period rests...on the Marxist teaching that true value is created by labor...There simply were no legitimate people in the Soviet Union whose activity was conceptualized as creating wealth in any other way” (2002:59).

13. Humphrey comments on the symbolic value of subsistence (dacha) farming, noting that “hundreds of thousands of Muscovites...are forgoing Western consumer goods for the sake of more down-to-earth values: plots of land, dachas, or, if they have country relatives to look after them, cows, chickens, and pigs.” She goes on to say that “the produce of the plot is important to subsistence, but the dacha also has a symbolic value. It represents...‘Russianness.’” (Humphrey 2002:55-56)

14. For elaboration of this particular definition of commodity fetishism, see Harvey 1989:100-101.

15. Banyas are something like saunas, either public or private baths that cleanse through exposure to heat and usually incorporate alternating exposure to heat and cold. This ritualized form of bathing is considered to be quite health-promoting.

16. Samizdat literature was self-published, underground literature passed from person to person during Soviet times.

17. See Dale Pesmen’s book Russia and Soul (2000) for extensive examples and analysis of such gatherings “at the table” (za stolom).

18. Humphrey (2002) notes that many Russian companies see their mission as protecting and providing for their kollektiv of workers more so than making a profit for their owners. Verdery (1996) points out the aptness of describing many post-socialist economic practices as “feudal.” And David Kotz (1998) has argued that the Russian economy can best be labeled “predatory/extractive” since owners of companies are more interested in turning a quick profit but are not reinvesting any money into production processes or infrastructure (1998).

19. For instance, Helsing et al. describe the frustration of WHO officials who have tried to implement “Baby Friendly” policies, especially policies designed to encourage and support breastfeeding, in Russian health institutions. Though this study takes the important step of including the voices and opinions of new Russian mothers, it does not include the voices and opinions of health workers. Instead of asking these informants directly, the authors surmise what the problem must be: “The problem of slightly reluctant support from some health workers in the early phase of routine changes has been reported...On reflection, we conclude that hospital staff often underestimate the time and effort required physically and mentally to implement the seemingly simple requirements of the BFHI [Baby Friendly Hospital Initiative]” (Helsing et al. 2002).

20. Melissa Caldwell (2002) makes a similar point in her article “The Social Economy of Food Poverty in Russia” about the artificial separation of “society” and “economy” in literature about Russia.

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