Edition: U.S. / Global

The World: Eating Disorder; Lean Times at the Russian Dinner Table

Published: December 6, 1998

THEY sell bread on the streets in Russia, from the windows of little roadside kiosks identified by signs proclaiming a single beloved word: bread. White bread, black bread, delicious Georgian bread laced with cheese, braided loaves and loaves baked in the shape of big brown domes, and much more. The average Russian's consumption of baked goods rose 5 percent from 1990 to 1995. In 1996 he ate 143 pounds of bread -- 6.4 ounces every day, 365 days a year. Russians even have a saying: ''Bread is the beginning of everything.''

So why have they begun lately to eat less bread? The answer says a lot about the state of Russia and its people. What it says most is ''chaos.'' And not just bread, either: The entire Russian diet is lurching through a perestroika that mirrors the bust-and-boom, future-versus-past nature of the nation's economy and mentality.

Like the country itself, Russian cuisine is a messy scene. Russia today is a society caught somewhere between tiny torts exquisitely topped with kiwi and a predominant national dessert, the deep-fried apple. It is a place where subway vendors hawk cases of Pringles to a population whose principal source of protein is real potatoes, lifted fresh from the ground.

Russia wavers today between Tyson chicken, the pricey pinnacle of frozen fowl displayed in better markets, and the plate of hot sausage of indeterminate origin that was free when Leonid Brezhnev was in charge. At the moment, sausage, boiled potato and fried apple are in the ascendancy. Nationalism may be part of it; Russians are bridling at Western influence over their culture and sovereignty.

But to the experts, the overwhelming factor is money. Russia and Russians are broke, and prices are rising. The ruble lost two-thirds of its value in a single week in August. Bread costs more -- 10 percent of the average Russian's food bill, compared to 4 percent just a few years ago. It is enough to make some Russians long for Mr. Brezhnev's steady socialist hand on the tiller, at least until they remember the iron grip that came with it.

''The difference between today and the 80's,'' said Aleksandr K. Baturin, deputy director of the Institute of Nutrition at the Russian Academy of Medical Sciences, ''is that then the shelves were empty, but people who could buy a bit of fish were satisfied. It was enough. Today you can find almost everything in every store. The question is whether people can afford it.''

A relative few can. In prosperous Moscow, two Western-style supermarkets stocking both Russian and European brands opened last month alone. Given enough money, you can now buy Haagen-Dazs and Tony's frozen pizza in Moscow. In a few places, one can even find a real luxury -- fresh milk, from Finnish cows.

But Muscovites are less than 10 percent of Russians. The rest of the country briefly flirted with lowfat milk and skinned chicken breasts and ugli fruit, now found even in parts of Siberia. But it sleeps with traditional Russian cuisine, the comfort food that saw it through Brezhnev and Gorbachev and, now, the lean years of Boris Yeltsin.

THIS means fatty fried meats, fried potatoes, fried apples, pancakes, cabbage soup topped with mayonnaise, fermented cabbage, butter and dense black bread. And tea. Without milk, but perhaps with a little jam. Preferably bought in bazaar-style markets, from stalls crawling with live crawdads and dripping with cattle blood and groaning with produce, none of it freshness-dated or shrink-wrapped by clerks with plastic gloves. To a lot of Western palates, this tastes, well, heavy and greasy. Heavy and greasy is the norm in a climate better suited to reindeer than humans.

Sometimes greasy is good: glorious onion-and-hamburger-filled pancakes, or blinis, that surely were lifted from White Castle recipe banks; tasty vinaigrette salads of cabbage and carrots and oil; a good borscht. The key word here is sometimes. The downside of Russian cuisine is that it is not especially healthy; three daily helpings of sausage is bad for the heart. Three daily helpings of potatoes and bread can lead to obesity, and half of all Russian adults are overweight.

Nor does freedom from Communist shackles seem to have helped much. Post-Communist Russia has been flooded with Western meats and groceries -- up to half of all food sales -- yet a recent study by one expert concluded that the vitamin content of Russian diets has not appreciably improved. Virtually every Russian suffers from vitamin deficiency. Among Russian children, half of whom do not regularly drink milk, the shortage of B vitamins, which promote bone growth, is catastrophic, Mr. Baturin says.

''Our way of life is a violation of the norms from the very beginning,'' said Yuna P. Popova, an administrator at the Government's premier center for treating food-related disorders.

This is not to say that Russians ate better when the Kremlin played mama, ordering its subjects to eat what was put in front of them or go hungry. But turning the Russian diet over to the market has been a mixed bag. There is, for instance, the free, hot lunch. Under Soviet rule, virtually every factory and office worker got one, either free or nearly so, as part of the state's cradle-to-grave package of social benefits. In modern Russia, there is no such thing as a free lunch -- and many people simply do not eat as a result. Most Russians eat twice a day -- morning and late evening, Ms. Popova said.

SKIPPING a meal could be seen as a good thing. A few years ago, the average Russian packed away 3,000 calories a day by some measures, a quarter more than is recommended. And the calorie intake has dropped during the 1990's. But the dropped calories came largely from costlier foods that are important to a healthy diet. Mr. Baturin's institute periodically asks thousands of Russians about their eating habits, and some conclusions are disturbing. Fruit consumption dropped one-third between 1990 and 1995; meat, one-quarter; vegetables, a fifth. Fish consumption was halved.

On one hand, less meat means less fat -- and some Russian doctors point to that to explain a slow decline in heart ailments that began in 1994. But it also has immediately led to an increase in iron deficiencies among women; a third of pregnant women lack enough iron. The decline in fruit consumption now means that 20 percent of Russians are critically low in vitamin C -- so low they risk getting rickets.

Cost is one factor, Mr. Baturin said, but another is inertia. Most fruits and vegetables have never grown well in Russia; cabbage is the primary source of vitamin C. People eat what they know. Just as western Russians eschew one southern appetizer -- donkey-meat jerky traditionally cured by several weeks beneath the saddle of a sweaty horse (it tastes like a Slim Jim) -- others are repelled by sweet peppers. Or artichokes. Or pears.

But not everyone. Mr. Baturin tells of coming across a report of Russian family that loved pears, despite living in a remote Siberian town where pears were uncommon. Delighted by their healthy eating habits, he decided to find out what led them to add fruit to their diet. The answer was simple and telling. The husband was jobless; the wife worked but had not been paid in months. To survive, they unloaded fruit trucks -- and were paid part of their salary in castoff pears.

Photos: BREAKFAST: a glass of kefir, a bowl of kasha, a kielbasa sandwich and tea. LUNCH: borscht, black bread, beef and vegetable cutlets, boiled potatoes and tea. DINNER: black bread, beef and vegetable cutlets, fried potatoes, pickle and tea. (Jacqueline Mia Foster for The New York Times) Chart ''A Moscow Diet'' lists typical meals for a Muscovite, with approximate calories. (pg. 6)