Global Food Crisis 

Lilya Chavaga | Kyiv, Ukraine 

From Kyiv, Ukraine, Lilya Chavaga was moved by her experience of the war to look for images of food in the Stewart-Swift Research Center archive. “The first hours after Russian missile strikes in Ukraine, queues lined up in all the country’s stores. Millions of people stand in long lines for food. The war has begun.” She found a 1900 photograph in the archive of R. S. Benedict’s Store at 5 Merchants Row in the Battell Block which shows how the community purchased goods at the turn of the century. An advertisement for the store in the November 25, 1904 issue of the Middlebury Register reads “A woman will buy her Thanksgiving Day delicacies anywhere she pleases, but every woman in Middlebury would come straight to Benedict’s Store if they but knew of the great assortment and superiority of the good things for the table to be found there.” Chavaga juxtaposes a photograph of Benedict’s Store with that of a modern grocery store. She writes, “In my work, I think about everyday cultural practices such as shopping. I contrasted Sheldon’s archive pictures of the store with a modern supermarket. Shopping is an important part of social cultural practice and it was the only social possibility during lockdown.” Today, one can complete a trip to the supermarket without speaking to another human being. That wasn’t the case a century ago. Unlike modern grocery stores where shoppers moved around with a cart and selected items off a shelf, at these early groceries, one approached a counter and requested items from a staff person. The experience was fundamentally social, part of being in the community. The 1904 advertisement for Benedict’s store tells us about the range of foodstuffs avail - able to the community. “Our new canned goods have arrived, and we have fresh Canned Soups (Campbell’s and Franco-American), New Nuts, Dates, Figs, Cranberries, Crisp Malaga Grapes, Florida Oranges, Cluster Table Raisins, Shoreham Cheese, Ileinz’s Pickles in glass or by the quart, fine line of Confectionery, Nabisco Sugar Wafers, Festino’s, etc. Notice our Worcester Salt Fire Place, and drink ‘Ulike’ coffee if you want the very best.” This early 20th century abundance of food options contrasts with Chavaga’s concerns about the impact Russia’s war with Ukraine will have on global food supplies. “The modern world that has learned to grow artificial meat in laboratories and order food using one click on the phone, is threatened by a global food crisis, because Ukraine has the largest agricultural resources and cannot sell its crops due to the blocking ports by Russians. This war will touch every person in the world.”