Where the Russian Grocery Store Means Abundance
The Soviet history hiding in plain sight at Toronto’s Yummy Market
When I was growing up, my parents sometimes read aloud letters from my grandmothers about the endless food lines that marked their days in Leningrad and Lvov. Some 30 years later, their great-grandchildren navigate the packed aisles of the Russian grocery store Yummy Market in wonder and awe: For them, Russian food means abundance and excitement. This isn’t the world my parents envisioned when they fled the USSR in 1979.
Yummy Market opened in 2002 and now has two Toronto locations — yet the Russian market bills itself as a “European food experience” — a rebranding that’s common across “Russian” stores. If it seems natural that a Russian store would carry foods from across the USSR — which disintegrated into 15 countries in 1991 — it’s actually the product of 74 years of state control and propaganda that’s hard to fathom today. The results are served in Russian homes across the country and fill the aisles of countless Russian grocery stores. That Uzbek lamb plov is sold alongside caviar and blini gives pause to no one. But these details actually tell a unique piece of Soviet-Russian history.
For the early Bolsheviks, food was fuel. Utopia-minded futurists of the era envisioned homes without kitchens…
