8 July 2005John Feffer
Soviet food was lousy. I'm not talking Russian cooking, which has always had its tasty dishes. I'm also not talking about the meals that people would serve you at home in the Soviet Union, prepared from ingredients that they managed to pull from who knew where. No, I mean the food served in Soviet restaurants. From the flashiest hotel to the lowliest cafeteria, it was just plain bad.
Up until the 1990s, restaurants in Mainland China suffered from the same problem. You could get great Chinese food in Hong Kong, in Taipei, in New York. But with the exception of some street food, Beijing was a bummer. Centralized planning and good food just did not seem to go together.
So what, you might say. It was never the aim of communism to create a dictatorship of gourmets. The communist movements that emerged in the primarily agrarian societies of Russia and China - rather than the advanced industrialized countries that Marx and Engels imagined for communism's debut - had more pressing issues than the quality of restaurants. Civil war, starvation, endemic poverty, and social injustice all took precedence over matters of taste. A communist Michelin guide would just have to wait.
But even when these pressing issues became less so, communist food did not improve. True, in the 1970s, the Soviet Union imported more grain to feed more livestock and put more meat on people's plates. Centralized planning could handle the quantity side. Quality was always the challenge.
And then, along came reform. Hungary was the first to experiment with the market. It was no accident, as Marxists like to say, that the country's economic change was called "goulash communism." This was socialism with human taste buds. Budapest was a great restaurant city in the 1980s, from fish soup Szeged style as a starter to Gundel palacsinta for dessert.
By the 1990s, when Gorbachev's Soviet Union finally launched its own perestroika, the "cooperatives" (euphemism for a private restaurant) were springing up all over Moscow and other big cities. Eating out certainly improved during this period, though the prices kept the experience from the vast majority of the population. China went through a similar process in the 1990s as farmers began to diversify crops, imports became more affordable, and great chefs came out of hiding.
The latest participant in this Red restaurant renaissance is North Korea. In the last couple years, after a 2002 economic "adjustment," the number of restaurants in Pyongyang has increased by as much as a thousand-fold. Korean barbecue restaurants feature seafood, pork, even octopus. You can get excellent sushi, the famous Pyongyang cold noodles and even a hamburger made of pork and topped by a fried egg. More so even than in the go-go days of Yeltsin's kleptocratic Russia, North Korea's economic changes are benefiting the wealthy. The majority of the country remains dependent on humanitarian aid, which is meager fare. Of course, North Korea no longer pretends to be a communist country. A class of "red capitalists," who are trading in their political chits for economic privileges, is setting up the new businesses, including restaurants.
Is the emergence of good restaurants in North Korea a good thing since it indicates a welcome opening up of society? Or should it be condemned as a sign of socio-economic polarization and an unholy alliance of corrupt bureaucrats and closet neo-liberals? Tough question, that. I'm certainly no fan of unjust economic reforms. But North Korean society is so tightly controlled that virtually any loosening of regulations deserves praise. The bottom line is: North Korea needs diversity.
Both centralized planning and monopoly capitalism have always had a problem with diversity. This is the "convergence theory" that sociologists used to talk about in the 1970s, a vanishing point on the horizon toward which both capitalism and communism aimed. I experienced this convergence first-hand as a student in Moscow in 1985. After six weeks of a steady diet of tasteless meat and potatoes, our academic group returned to Helsinki for our first "Western" meal. Where did all these diversity-deprived students go? A salad bar? A vegetarian pizza joint? A Finnish restaurant for blueberry soup and smoked salmon? A large number went to McDonald's where they got - duh - tasteless meat and potatoes.
Diversity, whether placed against the totalizing state or the totalizing global market, is a virtue we must champion. Good food, whether haute cuisine or honest peasant fare, depends on such diversity. And this food depends on the market. Not the bond market, the futures market, or the secondary debt market. The farmer's market: where cultures swirl together and people exchange a great deal more than just goods.
The foodie revolution that has seemingly supplanted the communist revolution is not simply the triumph of culture over politics, yuppies over radicals, or narcissism over solidarity. Just as the counterculture's concern with natural foods was embedded in a political worldview - see Warren Belasco's excellent Appetite for Change - today's "slow food" enthusiasts ground their preferences in a critique of existing economic relations. And that applies to systems that produce uniformly bad food under the watchful eye of Marshal Stalin or Colonel Sanders.
Good food and good politics can go hand in hand. Economic justice should not require Pepto-Bismol. To paraphrase Emma Goldman, if I can't eat a good paella, I don't want to be part of your revolution.
John Feffer (www.johnfeffer.com) is writing a book on the global politics of food.
