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vdupras

7 months ago

The article has a link to a video showing a soviet groceries, presenting it as if it was horrible, but if you ignore the bleak lighting, it kind of looks like... any "discount" american grocery? A good part of the american population can't afford the prices of "fancy" groceries, so it's kind of their life right now.

mopsi

7 months ago

The one seen in the video is a fancy store. There were far worse ones that had literally nothing for sale, just empty shelves, with employees sitting on their asses all day long, staring blankly out the window and waiting for their shift to end. Even if you were the Soviet equivalent of an Apple engineer, you still needed a small patch of land somewhere to grow vegetables and barter with others, otherwise you'd starve. An insane level of poverty by Western standards.

vdupras

7 months ago

Maybe, but I still find it interesting to see a media outlet use this "fancy soviet grocery" as an example. That example is supposed to be a home run in terms of showing american superiority, when in fact it shows how America has declined since 1989.

alganet

7 months ago

A lot of cultures have some sort of starving relic.

Maybe a simple national dish made with very cheap ingredients, or an old story around a very important staple crop. Some deep, deep memory that persists for a long time.

These are the opposite of thanksgiving, or other harvest and abundance cultural relics.

I don't think the USA has that starving myth. This cold war episode is as close as they get, and it is from the perspective of "the other". Maybe the dust bowl?

Cinema is not shy exploring ideas adjacent to this concept (Wall-E, Idiocracy, Demolition Man, Interstellar, to name a few). It, somehow, self-acknowledges that absense of a starving myth by reversing what their abundance means. Almost as if it wanted to have it, and it's ashamed of being spoiled.

churchill

7 months ago

It's arguable that the US Thanksgiving tradition is itself a starvation myth, given that the 1629-21 winter killed off half the Plymouth pilgrims.

From Wikipedia...

>Squanto taught the Pilgrims how to catch eel and grow corn and served as an interpreter for them until he too succumbed to disease a year later. The Wampanoag leader Massasoit also gave food to the colonists when supplies brought from England proved insufficient. Having brought in a good harvest, the Pilgrims celebrated at Plymouth for three days in the autumn of 1621.

Another episode: Out of the 500 settlers at the Jamestown outpost, roughly 440 (88%) starved to death through the winter of 1609, and survivors had to resort to eating rats, mice, snakes, dogs, shoe leather, and belts, and even some cannibalism.

And that's before you get to the Great Depression and Dust Bowl era that gave us The Grapes of Wrath, migrant agricultural workers eating boiled weeds or flour mixed with lard, Hoover Stew, etc.

Not quite on the scale of Ukraine's Holodomor or Ireland's Great Famine, but it's interesting how the narrative around Thanksgiving has developed over time.

alganet

7 months ago

I don't consider Thanksgiving a starving myth because it has coalesced in a ritual that celebrates abundance.

There's something about a simple dish made with simple cheap ingredients that makes it require no Wikipedia to pass on memory. You know what it is all about immediately. People starved, came up with clever ways to survive, and made those into culture. Poisonous plants that require arduous processing (like cassava or lupin beans), then make into crops, also carry that memory.

> And that's before you get to the Great Depression and Dust Bowl era that gave us The Grapes of Wrath, migrant agricultural workers eating boiled weeds or flour mixed with lard, Hoover Stew, etc.

That's more likely. I had never heard of these.