OK let me just preface this by saying that I’m writing this on an empty stomach, and it physically pains me.
During my first few months here in Ukraine, I gained somewhere between 25 and 30 pounds. No joke. Ukrainians take their food seriously. I’ve mentioned it before, but if you’re not familiar with Ukrainian history, there’s a backstory. In the first half of the 1900’s, Joseph Stalin forced Ukraine into a manmade famine called the Holodomor. Millions of people died, and it changed Ukraine’s outlook on food as a whole. Because of the Holodomor, Ukraine prioritizes food like nobody’s business. This country has a super interesting cultural relationship to food that I find absolutely fascinating.
