Pigs, planners, and potato peels: the Soviet Scheme to feed pigs with urban food waste as a waste regime under Stalin, Khrushchev, and Brezhnev

ABSTRACT

In this article, I study why and how Soviet planners organized a scheme to collect food waste from Soviet residential buildings and food service establishments in Moscow and other cities and utilize it as a feedstock for pork production. By relying on sociologist Zsuzsa Gille’s “waste regime” concept and a great variety of primary sources, I analyze the Soviet “garbage feeding scheme” as a social institution that patterned the social behavior of actors who engaged with food waste in the USSR from the early 1930s until the beginning of the 1980s. I argue that Soviet planners, informed by zootechnics, perceived garbage feeding as a way to reconcile their goal to increase meat production with the reality of continuous grain shortages. As such, they imparted food waste with the economic meaning that it could be turned into other commodities – wheat and meat. I demonstrate that the Soviet garbage feeding scheme never became a success, as the collection of food waste that laid dispersed across many locations in cities posed too big of an organizational challenge for the USSR’s centralized bureaucracy, and because planners did not succeed at integrating Soviet citizens into its scheme.

KEYWORDS:

• Soviet Union
• food waste
• waste regime
• pig farming
• circular agriculture
• garbage feeding

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. I have been able to present several versions of this article at several conferences, including the Amsterdam Symposium for Food History (February 2022), the SIEF International Ethnological Food Research Conference (September 2022), the BrIAS Closing Ceremony (April 2023) and the ASEEES Convention (December 2023). I would like to express my gratitude to the organizers of these events and everyone who joined in the discussion of my research. I am indebted to Leen Beyers, Patricia Lysagth, Alexander Etkind, Frits Heinrich, Gijs Kessler, Ilja van Damme, Troy Vetesse, Yves Segers and this journal’s two anonymous reviewers for reading draft manuscripts of my article and providing critical comments. Lastly, I would like to thank Sofia Borushkina for thinking along with me about the translation the Soviet slogan otkhody – v dokhody!

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the European University Institute and the Wilhelmina E. Jansen Fonds.