DIScrepancy

I was shopping for food the other day with a friend. We were contemplating the broccoli and salad offerings. I asked her what she thought of the choices; and she said, 'I don't know, I am not much of a vegetable person'.

In the U.S., you hear statements like this all the time. I am not a vegetable person. I am not a fruit person. I am a meat person. They puzzled me at first because at home in Russia, saying something like that would be borderline ridiculous - like claiming that you are not much into breathing air. Fruit and vegetables are a staple part of everyone's diet; ubiqitous, cheap, grown on small farms or in people's own gardens and orchards. In the U.S., eating vegetables is not the cheapest option; you are better off saving pennies eating high calory junk foods.

Seasonal abundance of fruit and vegetables in Russia leads to another oddity, this time from the U.S. perspective. When I was little, I remember my family buying 50 kilos (100 lb) of apples in one go in September to last through the winter. At the dinner table with several families present, you would hear them discussing stockpiling potatoes for the winter. You would buy them in 50 kg (100lb) sacks - sometimes as many as half a dozen if you had a big family. And in early summer you stock up on sugar (sold in the same size sacks). That way you could make preserves and jams when the fruit arrives. By the end of the summer, the shelves in pantries and cellars are lined up with jars of pickles, marinated tomatoes and peppers, apple jam, and strawberry preserves.

My grandmother bakes a lot; she used to buy flour by the sack. A friend of mine had a sack of sugar under the kitchen table (hard to find a good spot in a small apartment for the monster bag). She noticed that her two fox terriers looked tipsy half the time. It turned out they bit through the sack and were getting high sucking sugar.

Oklahoma is having an unusually cold spell. Several days below freezing point with ice and snow on the ground. When the northern wind batters the windows of my apartment, they creak and hiss with a passing draught. The window frames are made of aluminum; on the coldest nights there is slithers of ice on the inside of the frames.

Our apartment is pretty typical for Oklahoma. It is no better or worse than most others, yet built very differently from the ones I am used to back home in Russia.

First, the insulation. Plywood walls patched with Tyvek, and wooden beams in floors and ceilings, for Oklahoma. Concrete or brick walls, plus plaster and wall paper, and concrete floors and ceilings (sometimes with a hardwood floor on top) in Russia. In my area in the South, it is customary to build walls one and a half bricks thick - i.e. their thickness equals the length of one and a half bricks. That is approximately 40cm, or 15 inches. In my mom's hometown near Moscow, 2 bricks is the norm (conveniently, that also means you can have a fairly wide window sill - wide enough to put a flower pot on, or even sit with your legs stretched out along the frame looking out the window).

Heating systems are vastly different, too. Most American homes are heated with air. Warm air is blown in through the vents into the rooms when the thermostat detects a temperature drop. The heater itself is often located in the central part of the building; that is why the air ducts don't stretch all the way to the outer walls. In our apartment, all air vents are on the internal walls, that naturally stay warmer anyway. If that wasn't enough, the vents are mounted on the ceiling. Hot air goes up; if it is released near the ceiling, it is not going to naturally flow downward. Unlike American homes, Russian homes generally have central heating with water radiators. Thick pig iron radiators are mounted right underneath the windows. They are heavy and hold lots of heat. Together with thick walls, they provide a good barrier to cold air outside. They work continuously, don't make any noise, and even provide a means of communication (nothing sends a neighbour a signal quicker than banging on the radiator with a monkey wrench).

Finally, there is windows. Even up North, American windows are often single pane. One sheet of glass and a thin frame. Russian windows are almost always double panes with thick wooden frames. Lately, they are often plastic frames with vacuum sealed double - or even triple - panes in them.

Heat loss from heating buildings is a major source of environmental pollution and global warming. Sitting at my desk in Oklahoma and feeling the frigid waves coming from the window, it is easy to see why that is the case.

My earliest independent shopping memories are of going to the local store to buy bread and milk. Back then in the Soviet Union (early 1980s), milk was sold in glass bottles, half a liter each. They were made of clear glass with a silver foil cap that had the name of the product and the day of production stamped on it (Kefir was sold with a green lid and cream with a pink one). You could return the bottles and get back half of what you spent on the milk purchase. So you often had to carry heavy empty bottles to the store and return with heavier bottles full of milk.

The best packaging was the triangular version - a half liter of milk packaged in a light carton the shape of a tetrahedron(the so-called Tetra Classic package). It would come to the store in hexagonal plastic carts.

Nowadays, you generally get milk in two kinds of packaging: one liter plastic bags (they sort of look like air pockets used for packaging in the U.S., only non-transparent). These are cheap to make (and higly prone to leaking), and are usually reserved for fresh milk that needs to be refrigerated and quickly consumed. Alternatively, you can get a one-liter TetraPak carton - either a tall square one, or a fatter one. These can be stored without refrigeration for a much longer time. In agricultural areas, you can also buy milk from farmers - generally sold in re-used plastic bottles from soft drinks, or old style 3 liter glass jars (if you want the latter, be prepared to take a clean jar with a lid from home, to exchange for a full jar at the market).

In the U.S., milk is generally sold in larger containters - half a gallon and a full gallon being the most common size. It probably reflects two things: it is a family product; it is consumed daily with the morning cereal. If you want smaller quantities, you are often restricted to buying half and half (a richer milk, almost as thick as cream). Thanks to a strange twist of marketing history, you won't find a product labelled "cream" in American stores - it goes from milk to half and half to heavy whipping cream.

That's it for the first discrepancy - stay tuned for more. So much for writing short entries - sadly, I have more to say about milk than cultural theory.