Editor's Note: In a 1999 Kyiv Post Classic, former Kyiv Post staff writer Vitaly Sych (now chief editor of New Times magazine) and former Kyiv Post chief editor Greg Bloom square off over the cultural differences between Ukrainians and Americans regarding food labels.
Vitaly Sych writes:
Hey Yankee, why waste your time reading that label? You’re fat anyway.
Sometimes I wonder, who is that person in the supermarket, hunched over with his or her reading glasses, meticulously studying the contents of a package of food?
Is it a biochemist perceiving a product on the molecular level? Or perhaps a slim model who’s worried about packing on a few extra calories before the big fashion show? It could be. But most likely it is an American, scrutinizing the label to determine if the fat and cholesterol level is low enough to fit into his or her ‘healthy food’ category. Heaven forbid the fat-level of that milk slightly exceeds the minimum level recommended by the American Health Organization!
Last summer I was in a supermarket in Prague and noticed an American woman berating a clerk. She was horrified that one of the store’s products contained excessive levels of some death-causing substance. The irony was that she was by far the fattest person in the supermarket. I do agree that being reasonably selective in your consumer choice is a good idea. But Americans cross the line. They are thrilled when a Ukrainian forgets to thoroughly wipe the mayonnaise off his or her Big Mac at McDonald’s. They don’t eat varenyky with smetana, because both are greasy.
An American friend of mine was genuinely insulted when I offered her a sandwich with butter. She thought it was a plot to poison her. I admit, chomping on fried pork and a huge huge piece of salo while simultaneously smoking a couple butts is bad for you.
But what the hell is wrong with butter? Americans constantly make fun of salo, yet they eat bacon, essentially a fried version of the Ukrainian vice. A vodka shot is taboo. Yet a study conducted by American scientists revealed that people who consume a moderate amount (equivalent to 20 mg of spirit, or a glass of dry wine) of alcohol daily have a lower risk of contracting a whole array of diseases.
Meanwhile, Americans are famous for devouring tons of junk food — pizzas, burgers and yogurts with preservatives. On the other side of the spectrum, there are the macrobiotics, and those on the no-carbohydrate Atkins diet.
The latest discovery to hit America is that bread inflates you like a balloon. So thousands of Americans are now horrified to even touch bread. Oh! But what a surprise!
According to the statistics, America is one of the fattest countries in the world. Can somebody tell me why?
Greg Bloom writes:
Because I come from a civilized society, you dumb twit.
It would be easy to sit back and invoke low-life expectancies, fat grandmas and other drawn-out stereotypes about Ukrainians and beat my young opponent in this debate into literary submission.
But I will abstain from such crude tactics and instead ground my argument in a sober mixture of science and law that should more than prove my point without offending the few elephantine babushkas that loyally read the Post.
It’s true that Ukrainians rarely look at ingredients.
There are several reasons for this:
a) In Soviet times, artificial ingredients presumably did not exist, so there was no need to look at ingredients. Today, foreign food is here but most Ukrainians eat the same old stuff.
b) Even had artificial ingredients been prevalent in Soviet times, the authorities never would have told you about it, comrades. On the other hand, they would have had no qualms about secretly loading up your food with deleterious toxins, then testing how long it took for liver cancer to set in.
c) Partially because they were lied to for 70 years, Ukrainians put absolutely no trust in food labels anyway — even foreign-food labels — and hence don’t read them.
Thus, it’s only natural that Ukrainians think it’s queer that we read and believe in labels. But in our country there is something called transparency. They tell us what’s in our food. They tell it right. And we are left free to decide if we want to eat junk.
Our logic for reading labels is simple. One of the nasty side-effects of having made some economic progress in the 20th century is that our packaged food is usually loaded up with all sorts of ominous-sounding additives.
Let’s take a glance at our neighborhood potato-chip bag. We have smoked dextrose. And thereХs soya protein hydrolysate. And look kids! It’s the dreaded monosodium glutamate and dysodium guanylate!
In the short term, those additives ring of irregular bowel movements.
In the long term, they ring of early death.
Perhaps they sound appetizing to you, Mr. Sych?
Of course, with most Ukrainian food there’s no need to write out what’s in the product. We know that vodka contains alcohol and H2O. We know that salo contains polysaturated fat. We know that the piece of pork festering on Mr. Meat Man’s table on a hot summer day at Volodymyrsky Rynok most likely contains salmonella.
In short, once food-processing, medicine, hygiene and transparency advance in this country, you’ll be reading labels too.
Greg Bloom
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