Thursday was fish day in the USSR

https://www.rbth.com/russian-kitchen/333856-thursday-fish-day-ussr

by Stratoscope • 5 years ago

52 49 5 years ago

adrianmonk• 5 years ago

At first I wondered why bother. If there's a famine or a meat shortage, wouldn't people turn to other foods on their own? So it seemed unnecessary and superfluous.

But I suppose there's another possible reason. If you can't give people what they want (meat), give them something else (fish) and try to convince them they do want it. If you can actually pull that off, then maybe it makes you look better and/or makes them feel better.

veltas• 5 years ago

If there's a famine or a meat shortage, wouldn't people turn to other foods on their own? So it seemed unnecessary and superfluous.

No, what will happen is some people will get meat for the week in their shop, and some will get none.

Imagine meat is like toilet roll, one day a family turns up late to get their food from the store and there is no meat left for them.

It's better to avoid situations like this by trying to convince households to eat more alternatives, than to leave some households with no meat at all or let meat queues start etc.

gtm1260• 5 years ago

Ok but if you turn up at the meat shop and can't get any, wouldn't you then go to __x food shop down the street__ and get something else instead?

nanis2• 5 years ago

If there's a famine or a meat shortage, wouldn't people turn to other foods on their own?

Maybe, just maybe, I am really going out on a limb here, the USSR did not have prices for things that reflected the relative scarcity of items.

vodkapump2• 5 years ago

Could also be for the same reason my family made sure we had at least 1 (fatty) fish meal every week.

We live far north in Norway, sunlight is relatively scarce through the year, which means Vitamin D deficiency is a concern.

But what is also a good source of Vitamin D? Fish!

tuukkah4• 5 years ago

Good point. Did the USSR leaders know about the positive health effects of fish (vitamin D, fatty acids etc.) though, and if they did, why didn't they use that as an argument to convince people?

teachingassist• 5 years ago

If there's a famine or a meat shortage, wouldn't people turn to other foods on their own?

Encouraging weekly fish-eating habits is also a mechanism to ensure that you have a healthy national fish industry, that you can dial up as soon as you need it.

This is something that modern [especially European] nations seem to have institutionally neglected or forgotten.

By importing all necessities and instead focusing on exporting services, you put your nation and people at risk from any such crisis.

zokier• 5 years ago

Note that fish day applied mostly to "commercial" kitchens:

This prompted Mikoyan to issue an order on the “introduction of a fish day at public catering establishments.” It didn't have to be Thursday, but from that moment on, factory and other canteens began to serve fish one day a week

(emphasis mine)

rsynnott• 5 years ago

At first I wondered why bother. If there's a famine or a meat shortage, wouldn't people turn to other foods on their own?

In the early months of the Covid pandemic, most developed countries saw a toilet paper shortage. Not due to supply, but due to consumer behaviour.

If anything, a real or perceived shortage tends to cause consumers to behave less rationally, not more. Markets don’t self-regulate well in these circumstances.

tuukkah4• 5 years ago

I wonder if they got the idea of devoting a day of the week to a specific food item from the long and continuing custom of their Nordic neighbours: "Consumption of pea soup in Sweden and Finland dates back to at least the 13th century, and is traditionally served on Thursdays." https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pea_soup

mustafa_pasi• 5 years ago

It was much more likely meant to mock the Christian tradition of eating fish (actually the point is, not eating meat, but then people naturally turned to fish) on Fridays (and for the hardcore ones also on Wednesdays). This same Christian tradition has become a bit of a joke nowadays since fish is now more of a luxury and is more expensive and less accessible than meat, which is now super common and much cheaper.

larsiusprime• 5 years ago

What you're describing is the modern post-vatican II Catholic fasting tradition. If one follows specifically the Russian Orthodox fasting rules strictly, you'd be approximately vegan for half of the year (every wednesday and friday, as well as lent, apostle's fast, dormition fast, nativity fast, a few others sprinkled in, etc). On a conventional strict fast day (other than e.g. Clean Monday in lent where you eat nothing at all) you'd eat no meat, dairy, wine, or oil. Some of these fasting days (such as when a feast day happens to align on what would otherwise be a fast day) are loosened to be "fish days" when you are allowed to have fish (but not meat).

So maybe it was intended to mock the Christian tradition of eating fish ... but like... unless the Thursday was during Lent or another major fasting period, if you weren't a monk you could already eat Fish that day? It doesn't seem too much like the Discordian tradition of eating Hot Dogs on Friday, as an attempt to roll up as many possible religious taboos at once (Halal, Kosher, Catholicism, and Bougies who are grossed out by hotdogs)

FanaHOVA• 5 years ago

In Rome, we say gnocchi on Thursday, fish on Friday. I think the fish is related to religion (no meat on Friday), but the gnocchi is a bit random :)

aaronchall2• 5 years ago

Collectivization and aggressive food taxes on the peasantry had led to a pig breeding crisis, a reduction in livestock and, ultimately, mass famine in 1930-33.

Ah, the malicious incompetence of Soviet ideology is why they had "fish day."

I remember a joke from visiting Ukraine. "A sausage is the best fish."

They had a lot of wonderful sausages too...

nine_k2• 5 years ago

Collectivization was about crushing the independent peasantry, which was created about 15 years before, when the Bolsheviks confiscated land from large landowners hand handed it to landless peasants. It created a class which was too pro-capitalist and too economically independent for the later Bolsheviks' taste. So the land was effectively taken back again.

But the aggressive food taxes were not incompetence, but a calculated sacrifice.

Food was one of the very few items the young USSR was able to export. It was paid in gold, because the Bretton Woods system was still in force, and real currencies were backed with gold. Yes, the USSR exported a lot of food right at the time its own citizens were dying from famine.

The USSR then paid that gold for technology, in particular, for buying entire factories from the US. American firms built a number of large car, truck, and tractor factories, and taught the workers the then-current advanced manufacturing technologies. These factories were later converted to produce military trucks and tanks, which played a key role in WWII.

BTW the Soviets were shrewd and bold, and of course cheated: they did not pay the last tranche of the gold once the last factory was completed according to the contract. In a few years, WWII started, and the point became moot for decades.

baybal23• 5 years ago

That's what the urban legend tells. Yes, USSR splashed gold left, and right on fancy things from the West, including the Moscow metro, but it wasn't US factories which played anything in USSR's WW2 preparations, or anything.

USSR wasn't any kind of industrial giant by the time WW2 started. That's a purest propaganda myth. Stalin was terrible in running the economy, probably even more than any subsequent USSR's ruler. Sputnik was possible mostly thanks to post-war short growth spurt resulting from undoing Stalin's biggest economic blunders.

pydry• 5 years ago

It was less about ideology and more about Stalin's desire to industrialize so that they didn't get overrun in the next war.

Under a capitalist system with similar paranoia about the defence of their exposed western border they probably would have faced something similar.

Ireland's 1850 famine was another example of a grain exporting region being milked into famine during a bad harvest by an absent ruler.

mapgrep2• 5 years ago

until the death of Stalin, black and red caviar was very inexpensive and accessible. Actively farmed in the Caspian Sea, it was one of the country’s top exports.

What? Why would the death of Stalin impact the price and availability of caviar?

Maybe someone else knows the history here? Perhaps the elites, previously held in check by fear of Stalin, began hoarding for themselves and exporting for hard currency?

cromka• 5 years ago

What? Why would the death of Stalin impact the price and availability of caviar?

Because it wasn't free economy, but a centrally regulated one. So if Stalin wanted caviar to be cheap for whatever reason, he'd make that happen.

aaronchall2• 5 years ago

Not that you'd actually be able to buy it unless you were quite privileged...

inkyoto• 5 years ago

What? Why would the death of Stalin impact the price and availability of caviar?
Maybe someone else knows the history here? Perhaps the elites, previously held in check by fear of Stalin, began hoarding for themselves and exporting for hard currency?

I think it is a pure coincidence caused by the rise of the population and the overfishing of the sturgeon in the Caspian sea.

Sturgeon, that the black caviar comes from, is a large and long-lived fish that is highly prized for its flesh and has been highly sought after mostly because of that. It also «produces» large amounts of roe (i.e. the black caviar) as a «by-product». A mature sturgeon can easily dispense a bucket full of the black caviar or more. The downside is that the sturgeon takes a very long time to grow and mature. Some species can live for up 70 years.

Now, back in the Russian emperial days, the black caviar was a delicacy for the nobility because they had been taught by French teachers at home, spoke French at home and had live-in French chefs / maids that cooked almost exclusively the French haute cuisine for the family. Traditional Russian food was generally frowned upon as something lowly that only the «unwashed masses» were supposed to eat. So it was the French who have taught the Russian nobility to eat and appreaciate the black caviar. It was a popular snack that was served exclusively with the icily cold vodka, but it was also used as an ingredient for a relatively small number of dishes as well. In other news, the demand for the caviar was rather small, and there was a constant huge oversupply of the black caviar, especially in the Caspian sea area. Sturgeon meat and black caviar were supplied to the nobility and the aspiring gentry, to the emperial court, and the black caviar was exported to European markets as an exotic food that originated somewhere in uncharted lands of the Russian Empire.

Then, Russian peasants (who also happened to be fishermen) did not share the taste for the black caviar with the nobility, and, consequently, they ignored it as a food source. The oversupply of the black caviar was fed to pigs and dogs (ugh, omega-3 rich dogs, anyone?), or it was simply thrown away. Sturgeon flesh was equally prized by everyone, though.

As the population in the post-WWII years started exploding, the sturgeon has become overfished, which has led to a sharp decline in the availability of the black caviar whereas the acquired taste for it on a mass scale started driving the increasing demand resulting the black caviar becoming a cultural cliche and a meme that the Russians are trolled for today.

P.S. the red caviar, on the other hand, is an entirely different story as it comes from the fish that inhabits cold seas that have only become more or less accessible and «industrialised» in last 50-60 years. It was not as easily available back in the emperial days, I would imagine (I am afraid, I do not have much information on the subject here). The overfishing of the arctic fish had not been a problem until fairly recently, therefore large supplies of the red caviar flooded the Soviet market making it a «cheaper» and a more easily accesible substitute for the posh, expensive and hard to procure black caviar.

mapgrep2• 5 years ago

Thank you!!

malinens• 5 years ago

it is still called fish day in many places in post soviet block

drran• 5 years ago

Collectivization and aggressive food taxes on the peasantry had led to a pig breeding crisis, a reduction in livestock and, ultimately, mass famine in 1930-33.

Mass famine was planed famine with intention to kill "kulaks" class as whole. Kulaks were farmers, which used their own fist ("kulak") instead of pillow, because they were so busy with work in field that they had no time to return to home for sleep. Any food in any quantity was confiscated, even minuscule amounts of partially rotten food, according to the law called as "law about 3 spikelets". Villains were shot by armed guard when they tried to dig rotten potatoes left in the field. Houses of kulaks and sub-kulaks were confiscated or disassembled in winter, to freeze to death their families. Trains were running regularly twice a week to collect corpses and hide them somewhere at territory of Russian Federation. (Location of corpses is still top secret of RF.)

It was not a famine, it was a genocide.

bdefore• 5 years ago

There are several famine events in the history of the Soviet Union, the Ukrainian 'Holodomor' is a fascinating case. It appeared to be in the interest of both East and West at the time to deny that there was genocidal intent. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor

baryphonic• 5 years ago

Not only this, but "kulaks" had generally been peasants 15 years earlier before the Russian Revolutions. Lenin had attempted collectivization, but it was a massive failure, so instead peasant farmers were given the land. They became fairly successful and increased productivity. But this was one of those intolerable contradictions of Marxism - socialism in the cities, capitalism in the countryside -, so Stalin and the Party orchestrated this murderous rampage you describe. Truly awful.

Thursday was fish day in the USSR

Related Stories