by Michele Farina
Tales of heroic deeds sprout (emanating from the kitchen): serving to keep morale up and to catch a smile amidst the daily fear and terror
The Russians fire hypersonic missiles, the Ukrainians respond with pickled tomatoes. Putin bombs cities while Kiev’s grandmothers bring down invaders with poisoned cakes. If one could smile at the Ukrainian tragedy, certain news could be summed up as follows. Every people at war needs heroes, on deck and in the holds, among the commanders and among the common people, between news and legends. In the trenches as in the kitchen.
little to eat
Italian Ansa reports a story that came from the UNIAN news agency, which in turn picked up sources from the Kyiv Interior Ministry. The basis is that Russian soldiers are demoralized and have little to eat. And so an unnamed old Ukrainian lady would have brought a cake as a gift to a group of hungry invaders at an unspecified location in this vast country twice the size of Italy. Not a gesture of love, but of war: in fact, according to Ukrainian government sources, the cake was filled with zinc. Eight Russian soldiers would have been poisoned in this way.
The drone at the window
In times of war, scarce food often becomes the protagonist of more or less believable stories that feed the imagination, if not the stomach, of those affected. They encourage, bring out a smile or a satisfied grin. It applies to the grandmother of the poisoned cakes as well as to the lady from Kyiv who is said to have shot down a reconnaissance drone with an unprecedented antiaircraft attack: a jar with pickled cherry tomatoes. When the Russians use thermobaric weapons (aka vacuum bombs), they respond with vacuum bombs from Ukrainian kitchens. The story of Mrs. Elena took off on social networks a week ago and was picked up by international media such as Forbes magazine, according to which the heroine in question acted under the belief that the plane spotted outside her window was being used by saboteurs and looters vacant apartments. la guerre comme la guerre: Without thinking, Elena would use the guns she had at home and hit the buzzing intruder with a jar of pickled tomatoes.
Tomatoes or Cucumbers?
Words of satisfaction and even discussions about the true entity of the vacuum bomb have flown online: was it a jar of cherry tomatoes or pickles? Culinary treatises are a means of distraction, a distraction from terror, but they also form a small chain of knowledge and thought associations. Ditto for the angry old lady who, in the very first days of the invasion, offered sunflower seeds to a Russian soldier on a street in Henichesk, a port city on the Sea of Azov in occupied Kherson province. The first act of resistance restarted by the media of (almost) the whole world, by a country that until yesterday was a great breadbasket of the earth. Same language, opposite sides. The woman kept pressing (What are you doing here?), the soldier replied uncertainly (Don’t do that woman, don’t make the situation worse). Q: And worse than that, how could it go on? Who the hell invited you? And then the movie hit. The woman offers the soldier sunflower seeds: put them in your pocket so that when you die and are buried, at least something good will come out of your body.
seeds and words. One should not think of I girasoli, shot by Vittorio De Sica in the summer of 1969, with Marcello Mastroianni and Sofia Loren. It was the first Western film shot in the USSR after WWII during the slow thaw. And it was shot between Moscow and Ukraine, the land of (today’s) bloody sunflowers.
March 20, 2022 (change March 20, 2022 | 12:08)
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