In the perestroika times, the USSR opened itself to the information from abroad and its market to private capital. Soviet people began getting used to the Western lifestyle and food customs.
They say, in the beginning of the 1990s McDonald??s and its hamburgers were a huge hit in Moscow. People would wait in queues for hours in the raging cold wind to try the American hamburger. It is not surprising that after such hardships the food would seem delicious, and people would feel happy.
The joint project of Russian McDonald??s was originally started by its Canadian branch in cooperation with the Soviet government. The sales and turnover were naturally in roubles, not dollars, and thus the money could not be taken out of the country. That is why the Soviet government agreed to sell whitefish caught in its Pacific waters to Canada at a low price, and Canada was to pay with roubles it earned from the McDonald??s operations.
?Recently whitefish fries have become one of the most popular foods on the McDonald??s menu. Compared to meat, it has fewer calories and seems healthier, so Americans prefer it to other burgers. Nonetheless, it is a common misunderstanding. Fillet-o-fish is very high in calories (404 kcal), second to only Big Mac with its 609 kcal.
The Soviet government did not sell such high-calorie food rich in natural protein to its own citizens, but abroad in attempt to gain bigger profits. Most of caviar and king crabs, the pride of Russia, was consumed not in the USSR but in Japan. On the other hand, Japan exported to the Soviet Union artificial crabmeat and caviar. Japanese people were shocked to find out that those products were extremely popular with Soviet consumers.
It would be unfair to omit the fact that in Japan, too, canned artificial crabmeat sold well because it was tasty and saved much time in cooking. It was a big market with about a hundred producers and a turnover of 29 billion yen in 1984. Nobody could have guessed in the beginning that artificial food would gain such popularity from the USSR to Japan to the States. However, if you think that Soviet people never tried real crabmeat or caviar, you could not help feeling sad.
We, Japanese people, who are considered gourmets, must remember such historical facts.
