Moo Cow Juice

A "modern" Russian Food Market

Long time back, while the USSR was still the USSR, I was staying for extended periods in Moscow and by necessity, had to do some shopping in local "super" markets.  There were some issues.  Markets sometimes carried just one thing...the orange market, the bread market, etc., or if there were multiple food selections planned for, they only had one thing....hard to explain but if I tried to explain the check-out system to you, well you'd think I was making it up.

Vlad Putin, the big cheese there, yesterday banned food imports on certain items coming in from the US and most of the European Union. Among other things; no milk products.  Well Moo Cow. It amounts to a billion bucks a year from us to them...or about 8am to 2pm on one day of the year in consumer spending on food in the US. We throw away that much in waste every week.

These crippling sanctions will bite him in the leg.  The only people he hurts are Russian consumers and store owners who have grown accustomed to the luxury of fresh anything and are now watching that stuff drying up on the shelves, ever slow to return.  It reminds me of the old Stalin story:

Stalin purged his officers in the 1930s and as a result had a lot of generals who were pretty inept when war broke out with Germany.  Poorly led troops were simply massacred.  So the story goes, to teach his Generals a lesson, he had them all line up on a hillside and below him he had 1,000 soldiers shot.  He then went to his Generals and said "See!  Your leadership has been so poor that you waste good men.  I can waste good men too. Anyone can punish the good men.  You are doing no better".