Raw and Salty: Ilya Ehrenburg in the Fight for a Healthy Diet

One of the most unusual chapters of the seventh book “People, Years, Life” is devoted to the story of Ilya Ehrenburg’s persistent attempts to introduce winter salad “witloof” into the menu of Soviet citizens. The motives that prompted the writer to begin a long-term struggle for spreading witloof go far beyond his personal gastronomic preferences. For Ehrenburg witloof is an attribute of Parisian life, which gives the writer a reason to contrast western and soviet lifestyles. Ehrenburg demonstrates their cardinal difference by contrasting “western” witloof with “soviet” sauerkraut. The mention of witloof almost always involves the use of the epithet “fresh,” while sauerkraut (fermented cabbage) symbolically represents Soviet and Russian conservatism, which blocks all attempts at dynamic development of the country. The social and political views leading to stagnation (“rotting”) correlate with the idea of fermentation as the process of controlled rotting. The allegorical meaning of events is explained by the author using a French expression (“big vegetables” in French for “responsible officials” in Russian). Ehrenburg attributes conservative views exclusively to top Soviet functionaries. The party nomenclature is opposed by a hero with an emblematic name and profession – Ivan Ivanovich, the watchman. His first reaction to witloof is purely “protective”, with a distinct mythopoetic tinge. He is strongly opposed to any innovations in the gastronomic field. However, ten years of service at Ehrenburg's dacha turned Ivan Ivanovich into a real European. On a national scale, all attempts to introduce witloof have been unsuccessful. Ehrenburg used this specific example to reveal the mechanism leading to the collapse of any Russian reforms.