Mother Russia, with wheat still at the center of the world

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When on January 1, 2006, Putin's Russia cut gas supplies to neighboring Ukraine, the world suddenly remembered that energy resources can be used to control people's lives and pull the sometimes invisible strings of international relations.

Just four years later, the Russia led by the Putin–Medvedev diarchy was once again the loom on which the fabric of globalization was being woven.

• The export ban affair

A scorching summer, the hottest recorded in over a century, caused wheat production to collapse — Russia being the world's third-largest producer — triggering a generalized rise in the prices of numerous consumer goods and foodstuffs. The government responded by imposing an export ban, in the hope of containing the widespread rise in the cost of living.

The rationing policy chosen by the Russian government, however, seemed to overlook the fact that 80% of the world's wheat production takes place in the planet's Northern Hemisphere, and is therefore harvested during the summer season, while production in the Southern Hemisphere is residual and seasonally inverted, with the harvest concentrated in January and February.

Two years after the 2008 speculative bubble in commodities, the Russian drought, together with the export ban policy, meant a drastic drop in the global supply of wheat in the second half of 2010, remediable only with the following season's harvest.

Prices thus began to rise sharply again, and the increase hit particularly hard in the traditional reference markets of Russian exports, North Africa. The increase in foodstuffs sent by EU countries compensated only minimally for the void left by the Russian shortfall.

Thus, what had begun as simple "cost-of-living riots" in North Africa soon took on the character of rebellions on a much larger scale, which today we call the "Arab Spring".

Three years after those events, the Russian government itself has tacitly acknowledged the export ban policy as a mistake, wisely avoiding a repeat following the meager 2012 harvest season.

• The political power of raw materials

While in percentage terms these variations in production may seem sustainable, in absolute terms they are gigantic (30–40 million fewer tonnes of wheat), capable of influencing price dynamics worldwide along the entire food supply chain. The rise in wheat prices in 2010 in fact caused a consequent and almost immediate increase in the price of American and Brazilian pork and beef, which soon spread to a vast range of products and basic necessities.

Because of the export ban, Russian agricultural producers were unable to benefit from the rise in wheat prices, with the result that investments in productivity, necessary to expand the modest production capacity of post-Soviet agriculture, were largely postponed, leaving to the following agricultural year the hope that the situation would return to normal.

After the collapse of the Soviet regime, collectivist-style production, based on very large, low-productivity holdings, was partly overhauled in favor of small and medium-sized farms, following a philosophy that seems close to the "little ownership society" theory promoted in the early 2000s by the Bush presidency in the USA.

With a population still concentrated, for more than half, in a modest portion of territory west of the Urals, known as European Russia, and an essentially flat territory cultivable across more than three quarters of its total surface, post-Soviet Russian governments saw in agri-food production and the exploitation of raw materials two powerful tools for stemming the gigantic river of the unemployed, who, in the days of planned production, had worked in the steel and manufacturing sectors, today heavily downsized.

On the one hand, then, a hasty revolution in ownership structures, with botched attempts to divest the enormous collective farms in order to guarantee at least a modest income to a wide swath of the population; on the other, the consequent lack of the resources needed to carry out the mechanization and production modernization processes that would increase the competitiveness of Russian agriculture.

Weighing on all of this is the climate factor, which considerably limits production diversification. Alongside the enormous cereal production, the few widely grown crops are beets, turnips and cabbages — typically extensive crops resistant to low temperatures.

• Russian gastronomy, a child of the climate

The cuisine, consequently, has in turn been strongly influenced by the climate factor.

The four meals traditionally eaten over the course of the day are all characterized by a very marked intake of carbohydrates, complex proteins and fats, mainly of animal origin.

The widespread use of salted and smoked meats, combined with the limited consumption of fresh fruit and vegetables, is certainly one of the main triggering factors behind the rise in the number of overweight people and in cardiovascular diseases, according to the Russian Academy for Medical Science.

The 5-hour queue at the 1989 opening of the first Mc Donald's in a Moscow still the capital of the Soviet Union suggests an alarming lack of regard for Health on the part of the Russian population.

Confirmation seems to come from a recent prevention campaign conducted by the Russian Ministry for Health Protection in an attempt to promote a reduction in sodium and sugar consumption in schools. Without even the emergence of overt forms of protest, families began equipping their children with salt shakers and sweets to take to school, to make up for what were mistakenly perceived as economic cuts disguised with health-related justifications.

In post-Soviet Russian society, a lifestyle based on excess is considered a status symbol, and the immoderate consumption of alcohol and tobacco, which characterizes above all metropolitan life in Moscow and Saint Petersburg, seems to confirm it.

• The "fight for caviar"

The cult of wealth and ostentation has its roots in the aristocratic cultural tradition of tsarist Russia.

The pursuit of refinement to the point of excess by the Russian boyars has been celebrated, condemned and immortalized by Russian literature itself.

The kitsch, garish taste of today's Russian oligarchs in the good graces of the rulers looks like a faded memory of refined Russian aristocratic opulence, but the psychological affinity is evident.

This social model has brought with it two notable aspects: on the one hand a scant interest in health, cutting across almost all social classes; on the other, it has fostered a cultural cross-pollination that found one of its highest expressions precisely in gastronomy.

Twice the tsars relied on Italian hands to redesign the emblems and splendors of their empire. The first time, at the height of the Italian Renaissance, by the will of Ivan III the Great, who had the walls of Moscow and entire districts of the city rebuilt; the second, at the hand of Peter the Great, who in 1703 founded the new capital, Saint Petersburg.

Along with the architects and craftsmen, artisans and merchants arrived from Italy and settled in Moscow and Saint Petersburg, importing into Russia foods and fashions such as the use of pasta made from wheat, the art of confectionery and artisanal ice cream making.

Even prestigious caviar — the sturgeon roe that the Romanovs used from 1675 onwards as a gift to curry favor with the European courts — figured among the food delicacies widespread in the Most Serene Republic of Venice and at the court of the Este family in Ferrara as early as the beginning of the 1500s.

In the name of caviar, the Papal States and the Republic of Venice fought in the mid-1700s over fishing rights on the Po delta, while around 1980 the KGB set up a tight network of controls on exports, after uncovering a scheme of bribes paid to senior regime officials through Swiss banks in exchange for shipments of caviar.

Upon ascending the throne, Peter the Great, who dreamed of transforming Russia into a modern European nation, brought French chefs to court, introducing a fashion that spread like wildfire throughout the Russian nobility. Ample traces of this culinary melting pot remain even in Italian and French gastronomy, starting with the so-called "Russian salad", a recipe celebrated around the world and born in the second half of the 1800s from the idea of the Belgian chef Lucien Olivier, owner of Moscow's most renowned restaurant: the Hermitage.

Over the course of the 1800s, the overwhelming spread in Russia of customs à-la-façon-francais stimulated the search for territories where the climate would allow the production of wine, traditionally scarce and of mediocre quality. In the district of Novyi Svit, located on the Crimean peninsula, today Ukrainian territory under the administrative control of Sevastopol, favored by an almost Mediterranean climate, Prince Golitzin launched a rich winemaking enterprise at the end of the 1800s, which expanded as far as the shores of Lake Abrau in the Krasnodar district. In the year 1900, at the Universal Exposition in Paris, it was awarded the title of the world's "best Champagne".

Remaining famous until the complete collectivization of agricultural production, the Russian Champagne label became a brand of the regime, losing in quality, under the name Sovetskoye Shampanskoye.

• Between present and future

In 1997, a then-confidential WHO report on the nutritional and health condition of the newborn Russian Federation expressed deep concern about a trend until then unknown among "developed nations", namely a reduction in average life expectancy.

In 1991, the guidelines of the USSR Ministry for Health Protection, which remained in force unchanged until the dawn of 2000, recommended protein and fat intake levels that were double those recommended by medical science in the USA and in most EU countries. This was a legacy carried through the more than 70 years of the Soviet regime, which, among its few achievements, could nevertheless boast of having nearly eradicated — at the unsustainable price of total economic planning — the age-old hunger that for centuries had characterized life in the Russian countryside.

Post-Soviet Russia has demonstrated a surprising capacity to adapt to the sudden economic changes imposed by the repeated crises that have characterized the last twenty years.

These crises have deeply marked consumption patterns in Russia, but they have not decisively affected the nutritional and anthropometric parameters of the population.

The valuable study conducted by Stillman and Thomas in 2007, based on what is perhaps the only significant nutritional study conducted in post-Soviet Russia (Russia Longitudinal Monitoring Survey), bears witness to this capacity of families and individuals to adapt to the sudden economic changes dictated by globalization, even in the presence of factors that are difficult to control, such as the availability of energy resources and the climate.

Based on the interaction between sudden changes (shot-term run) and long-term ones (long-term run), the Russian case highlights what, borrowing a word from engineering, we might call resilience. That is, the Russian population has demonstrated a capacity to respond reactively to adversity and change beyond expectations.

But even Russian resilience has a limit. The country's exposure to the fluctuations that can be triggered by financial speculation on products such as commodities would risk exceeding the population's capacity to adapt.

The position of Russian governments seems to oscillate between anti-speculation proclamations and a certain laxity in practice, understandable in light of the strategic use Russia makes of its resources as a bargaining chip in the international arena.