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Cold War Turned Flavor War: on European Food Disparity, from East to West ‹ Literary Hub 1/8/2021 Cold War Turned Flavor War: On European Food Disparity, From East to West ‹ Literary Hub L I T E R A R Y H U B VIA PENGUIN BOOKS Cold War Turned Flavor War: On European Food Disparity, From East to West Slavenka Drakulic on How Capitalism Impacts Quality in Post- Communist Countries https://lithub.com/cold-war-turned-flavor-war-on-european-food-disparity-from-east-to-west/ 1/11 1/8/2021 Cold War Turned Flavor War: On European Food Disparity, From East to West ‹ Literary Hub By Slavenka Drakulic January 6, 2021 One morning at breakfast, while cutting a slice of dark bread and spreading butter on it, I was transported back to the 1950s, to our old kitchen in the former Yugoslavia. I was eating the very same breakfast from childhood, a slice of dark bread and butter with a spoon of jam on top. ere wasn’t much else to eat back then except three kinds of bread: black, half-white and white. No fancy cornakes, no croissants or Danish pastries. e whole family drank either coee made of barley or chicory, with milk, or a cup of so-called black Russian tea. It was while visiting relatives in Italy in the mid-1960s that I tried a chocolate spread called Nutella for the rst time; it was the nest thing I had ever tasted. Having it for breakfast was a true feast for me. is is why, when my friend Marta from Bratislava visited me in Vienna with her six-year-old grandson, Tomasz, I served him Nutella for breakfast. He ate with great gusto, chocolate covering his ngers and a little bit on his nose. “Grandma,” Tomasz said suddenly, “why does chocolate in Vienna taste better than the same one at home?” To my surprise, Marta nodded. VIDEO FROM LIT HUB: Douglas Stuart at the Hay Festival Winter Weekend Douglas Stuart at the Hay Festival Winter Weekend https://lithub.com/cold-war-turned-flavor-war-on-european-food-disparity-from-east-to-west/ 2/11 1/8/2021 Cold War Turned Flavor War: On European Food Disparity, From East to West ‹ Literary Hub “You are right,” she said. “Many things taste better here because, although they look the same, they are better. ey are not the same as at home. See this strawberry yogurt from the supermarket here? I think it has more strawberries in it than the same brand of yogurt I buy at home.” But the jars were just the same, he protested, how could the yogurt be dierent? Tomasz is a curious boy and, having tasted the dierence but knowing nothing about food production and distribution in the European Union, he asked the logical question. is brought us to the heart of a recent controversy about dierences between food products in Eastern and Western Europe. e labels are the same but the content is dierent! Not much dierent, but still. is yogurt has 40 percent more strawberries here, Marta explained. Really? Now it was my turn to be surprised: Are you sure you are not imagining that? But no, this is not a new thing. Many of us Slovaks, especially from Bratislava, cross the border in order to shop in a nearby town some thirty or forty kilometers away. Not only because of the prices, but because of dierences like this. People just sensed that the products were not the same, but now we have proof that they are not identical. Take Iglo sh sticks, one of Tomasz’s favorite foods, something that in fact I planned to serve him for dinner. If you buy them here they contain more sh. Of course they will taste better, just like Nescafe, Coca-Cola or Milka chocolate. I wondered if there was an end to that list. https://lithub.com/cold-war-turned-flavor-war-on-european-food-disparity-from-east-to-west/ 3/11 1/8/2021 Cold War Turned Flavor War: On European Food Disparity, From East to West ‹ Literary Hub After people complained to consumer protection agencies or in the local media, various agencies compared the products and discovered considerable dierences. Not just in Slovakia, but in other Eastern European countries as well. Just when we believed that we nally have the same as them. Remember how after ’89 we visited the rst big new supermarket near my apartment together, hardly believing what we saw on the shelves there? Back then, imported goods were a form of symbolic conrmation of the successful transition to a capitalist economy. Indeed, I remembered that the supermarket had been a big sensation compared with the small sad neighborhood shops, where it was hard to get bread if you did not get up early enough, and where cabbage and potatoes were just about the only vegetables available. But Slovakia was not that bad, Poland and Bulgaria were much worse o. ere, in the late 1980s, the shelves were still lined with jars of pickled vegetables and cans of compote; milk was not easy to nd in Soa. When the very rst private supermarket opened in Bucharest in the early 1990s, I watched people walking along the shelves, marveling at the products. But these times are long gone. Now every village has supermarkets full of foreign products, from cheeses to salami, from chocolate to milk products, from sh to ne vegetables wrapped in plastic. Is this not a picture of a consumer paradise that reveals the main reason people hated communism? Back then, imported goods were a form of symbolic conrmation of the successful transition to a capitalist economy. When we entered the EU, we believed it to be a community in which all citizens enjoyed an equal right to freedom; it did not occur to us that Coke and Nutella would not be of the same quality. e fact that there was no money to buy such ne food was less important, at least back then. https://lithub.com/cold-war-turned-flavor-war-on-european-food-disparity-from-east-to-west/ 4/11 1/8/2021 Cold War Turned Flavor War: On European Food Disparity, From East to West ‹ Literary Hub Someone once told me that Coca-Cola is sweeter in Slovenia. When I tasted it in order to check, it was really so. Is the company cheating us? I wondered, but dismissed such a thought as paranoid. I remember how we collected the bottles and cans when someone brought Coke from abroad and kept them as decorations. Why would the adored Coca-Cola cheat us? Nescafé somehow tasted better in Vienna too, but perhaps that was a side eect of the city’s baroque beauty. My hairdresser in the small town in Croatia where I spend my summers tried to bring me to my senses. Once a month she drives to the rst supermarket across the Italian border for a big shopping trip. It is not so much about saving money, she told me, although many products are cheaper there. It is about the dierence in quality, she explained. So I buy everything, from canned tomatoes and frozen food to Coke. But I really go for washing liquids, Ariel and Persil. I have to wash a lot of towels every day and I can tell the dierence if I wash them in Ariel produced in Eastern Europe or somewhere in the West. I did not comment but thought how our people are never satised with what they get. Only yesterday they had nothing to buy—and now they are disappointed by a dierence in quality! It looked as if she and the other people I heard telling such stories were right, but I preferred to live in denial. Admitting that we are second- class consumers would lead me straight in the direction of George Orwell’s novel Animal Farm, which describes a society in which all members are equal, but some are more equal than others. I would lose my trust in the Union, perhaps in the free market economy too. First to take action, insisting on research and investigation in 2013, were two EU parliamentarians, Biljana Borzan from Croatia and Olga Sehnalova from the Czech Republic. In 2017, Slovakia’s consumer association tested a selection of food from supermarkets in eight EU member states: Germany, Austria, the Czech Republic, Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria. In some products they found small dierences—in any case, the products were not identical— but there were much bigger dierences in others. ey tasted dierent and the content was dierent as well, from Knorr soup to Iglo sh sticks (the latter had 58 percent sh instead of 65 percent). Slovakia’s Ministry of Agriculture drew similar conclusions https://lithub.com/cold-war-turned-flavor-war-on-european-food-disparity-from-east-to-west/ 5/11 1/8/2021 Cold War Turned Flavor War: On European Food Disparity, From East to West ‹ Literary Hub when comparing twenty-two same-brand products bought in Bratislava and in two Austrian towns across the border. Half of them tasted and looked dierent and had dierent compositions. For instance, a German orange drink purchased in Bratislava contained no actual juice, unlike the same product sold in Austria, which had some amount of juice. When other countries followed suit, they found roughly the same dierences. Hungary’s food safety authority examined twenty-four products sold in both Hungary and Austria. It found, among other things, that the domestic version of Manner wafers was less crunchy (and crunchiness is just about the most important “ingredient” they oer!), and the local Nutella not as creamy as the Austrian one.
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