History of Food Archives

by Mary Neuburger

It seemed like a bad idea at the time, but I did it anyway. Maybe, just maybe, there was hope that the little museum in the Bulgarian mountain village of Yasna Polyana would be open. Established in 1998, the museum contained the intellectual remnants of the Bulgarian Tolstoyan community, who had created an agricultural commune in the village of Alan Kayryak in 1906-07. They renamed the village “Yasna Polyana” (clear meadow) after Leo Tolstoy’s famous estate, Yasnaya Polyana.

I had visited Bulgaria’s Yasna Polyana–with its shortened adjective form “yasna” (instead of “yasnaya”) before. Two summers ago I had made the long trip, braving the bumpy windy roads of the Bulgarian Strandja—a mountainous region on the SW coast of Bulgaria where the village is perched. But that summer my efforts had been in vain. The museum was closed and locked “for renovation.” As I peeked through the dusty windows in frustration, huge storks looked down on me from their nests on the nearby utility poles. They seemed to laugh at my American optimism, until I finally gave up.

And yet I returned this summer, without confirming that they were open; I could find no phone number or email online. This time google maps betrayed me, sending me down what seemed to be a sheep trail in my rental car. Still, I made it through intact and, as luck would have it, the wonderful curator of the museum was there! She generously allowed me to peruse their collection of crumbling old newspapers, carefully stacked in a back cupboard. As I gleefully thumbed through the materials, snapping pictures on my iphone, the fascinating world of the Bulgarian Tolstoyans opened up to me.

Museum pamphlet “Bulgarian Yasna Polyana” showing key members of the the movement with Tolstoy hovering above them (via Mary Neuburger)

Tolstoy was a figure of global importance in this period. It was not just his famous novels—like War and Peace and Anna Karenina—that brought him fame. He became a towering figure in global exchanges about the moral and ethical concerns of the day. His essays and other writings made him into an intellectual leader and model on a range of philosophical, spiritual, and social questions. Tolstoy cultivated contacts with like-minded people from around the world, though he never approved of the idea of a “Tolstoyan” movement.

And yet one emerged. Before and after his death in 1910, Tolstoyan communes mushroomed around the world, from the US to South Africa—where Mahatma Gandhi set up an ashram named the “Tolstoy colony” near Johannesburg. At the same time, many of the Bulgarian movement’s leaders made the pilgrimage to Tolstoy’s estate in Russia’s Tula province. Khristo Dosev, for example, spent a number of years in residence there and became extremely close to Tolstoy and his inner circle. Dosev became a direct line of contact between Tolstoy and his followers back in Bulgaria. They translated, published, and made every effort to popularize the ideas of Tolstoy in Bulgaria.

By 1907 Bulgarian Tolstoyans had broken ground on their own agricultural commune in Yasna Polyana. Its adherents established a number of agricultural communes across Bulgaria in the years that followed, but Yasna Polyana remained the movement’s epicenter. Its members set up their own printing press for its many publications, which stressed “Tolstoyan” ideas like non-violence, but also temperance, and vegetarianism. The ties to Tolstoy were so strong that many claim that he was headed to Bulgaria in his final days—when he famously left his family estate and headed south. Alas he died along the way. But if anything the Tolstoyan movement gained in strength after his death, especially in the aftermath of World War I. The massive human casualties of the war brought an even greater urgency to the Bulgarian (and global) Tolstoyan project.

Stefan Andreichin (via Mary Neuburger)

In the Bulgarian Tolstoyan museum on that hot July day, I was most interested in the vegetarian strand of the commune’s intellectual and organizational work. I focused my reading (and scanning) on the Bulgarian Tolstoyan newspaper Vegetarian Review (Vegetarianski Pregled), edited by an important member of the movement, Stefan Andreichin. The history of vegetarianism in Bulgaria will be featured in my book on the history of food in Bulgaria. In a chapter that focuses on meat, I will explore the making of a modern meat-eating culture, but also on the vegetarian counter culture that hotly opposed this transition.

This story is best told in global context, and meat was one of the most hotly debated food sources in history—in the past as today. Is eating meat a human instinct, or a learned behavior? Is it the gold standard of fortification or will it kill us? Even if it is good for the human body, what about the ethics of killing animals, the implications of modern methods, or the environmental impacts of meat-eating?

These questions and many more were debated on the pages of Vegetarian Review, in the years between the World Wars. For philosophical grounding, its contributors looked to ideas on vegetarianism that Tolstoy’s famous 1892 essay, “The First Step,” linked to non-violence and Christian ethics (along with a range of other spiritual traditions). Bulgarian Tolstoyans also sought intellectual scaffolding for their vegetarian convictions in famous ancient, medieval and modern vegetarians—from Pythagoras to Buddha, and Henry George to George Bernard Shaw. In addition, the journal featured articles on vegetarian strictures embedded within movements of local origin–namely the Thracian worshippers of the poet, musician, and prophet Orpheus and the eleventh-century dualist Christian sect, the Bogomils.

This preoccupation with historical precursors was coupled with a pointed critique of the industrial machine of modern animal slaughter and meat processing. In Vegetarian Review, “civilization” was derided for turning people into pleasure seeking “machines,” that could “swallow muscles and gnaw on bones” of poor innocent animals. The Chicago stockyards—since the late nineteenth century the epicenter of modern meat production–were seen as a kind of mass death camp. As an article on the pages of Vegetarian Review alleged, “In just one world city, Chicago, 54 million animals, cows, lamb, sheep, pigs and others are killed a year, with enough blood flowing from them to fill a huge reservoir.”

Cover of the Vegetarian Review (via Mary Neuburger)

This clear ambivalence towards “progress,” however, did not preclude the Tolstoyans from formulating a vision of the future. Indeed, far from retreating into the past, Tolstoyan authors advocated change, a “new life,” which they claimed was only possible without “the remains of death in our teeth.” Keeping up with the times, the Bulgarian Tolstoyans enlisted new streams of thought in nutritional science, economics, and ecology in their effort to convince a mass audience beyond its narrow circles. Vegetarianism was offered as a solution to a range of social ills, including the pervasive violence and self-destruction that seemed to be bringing the modern world to the brink of extinction.

Many—though perhaps not all—of their arguments still ring true today. And yet, after a day of reading in the museum, I have to admit that I could not forgo a heaping plate of grilled kebabche — spiced meat patties — to accompany my glass of wine at a restaurant in nearby Sozopol. This region of Thrace, after all, was the ancient home to the cults of Orpheus and Bacchus. And as a historian and enthusiast of food, I had to partake of the local cuisine. And let’s not forget, that I was raised amidst the American cult of meat, in which meat was both seen as necessary protein source and the height of pleasure and leisure—just pull that burger off the barbeque and enjoy. This cult had clear (although distinct) echoes—my research had shown—behind the Iron Curtain. And yet, in both contexts—as globally—there were very locally situated anti-meat schools of thought. In this region those ideas and practices went back to ancient times, but were articulated most powerfully by the interwar Tolstoyans.

Also by Mary Neuburger on Not Even Past:

The Prague Spring Archive Project
Tobacco & Smoking in Bulgaria
The Museum of Sour Milk: History Lessons on Bulgarian Yoghurt
Cold War Smoke: Cigarettes Across Borders
Notes from the Field: From Feasts to Feats (or Feet) on the Coals

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by Mary Neuburger

One evening this summer, I found myself careening down a country road at breakneck speed to the town of Studen Izvor on the Bulgarian border with Serbia. Stunning scenery enveloped a string of thinly populated towns, some peppered with socialist-era industrial ruins that somehow added to the charm. Edit, the wife of my friend and colleague Kiril, drove like a bat out of hell. The trip, after all, was Edit’s bright idea. She knew I was interested in the history of food in Bulgaria and so planned this little day trip for the three of us. But we were running late and there was no way that we were going to make it to the yogurt museum before closing time. We had lingered too long over a meal in a traditionally themed restaurant on the edge of Sofia, the Bulgarian capital, where I had ordered a rather salty filet of “brain” in the interest of culinary adventure. Clearly agitated, Kiril put in a call to the museum from the speeding car, pleading with the museum staff to stay open late for the “visitor who had come all the way from America.” Of course, they waited.

The Museum of Bulgarian Yoghurt in Studen Izvor, near the western border of Bulgaria (via author).

Finally we pulled into museum’s small gravel parking lot with a dramatic spray of pebbles. As we ascended into the sleepy mountain village with our Sofia license plate, the few elderly inhabitants followed us with their gaze from their courtyard perches. A Bulgarian woman, with a few family members in tow, warmly greeted us and we profusely apologized as they led the “American visitor” and her Sofia entourage into the small freshly painted rooms of their brand new museum. The yogurt museum is one in a string of small food museums—along with one for honey, and beans—that are scattered across rural Bulgaria. Created with EU funds, they are part of larger effort to develop “sustainable tourism” through local attractions that are depicted on the freshly published tourist maps of Bulgaria available in any Sofia kiosk. While the tourist draw is…well, still minimal, for me the museum of yogurt or “kiselo mliako” (literally, sour milk) was pure inspiration! A starting point to dig deeper into the history of this critical ingredient in the Bulgarian (and now global) diet.

Bulgarian yogurt served in a traditional dish (via Wikimedia Commons)

While yogurt is consumed in much of the world, in Bulgaria it is a staple, often a part of breakfast, lunch, dinner, and dessert. It is used as the base of cold soups and sauces with garlic or herbs, or with honey as a simple dessert. The per capita consumption is roughly 27 kg, which is 4 times that of the US. Though most often sold and eaten plain, unlike in the US, it never says “plain” on the label. And indeed, Bulgarian yogurt is far from plain—even in its barest of forms. With choices commonly available of cow, goat, sheep, or water buffalo—the consumer is usually choosing by the distinct flavors of region, season, or animal rather than added fruit or other flavors. Much of the flavor comes from the way it is produced, in small local farms, largely in mountainous areas, with grass-fed and free-range animals. In part, what makes it so delicious is that you taste the terroir (as the French would say of wine, cheese and other products), that is the soil, air, plants and general characteristics of the locale where the product originates.

Stamen Grigorov in 1918. He served as a medical officer in the Bulgarian Army during WWI (via Wikimedia Commons).

But the cult of yogurt in Bulgaria is not just about the flavor. It is also about the health effects of its unique bacterial flora. The visit to the little museum—which stayed open just for me—revealed the details of a key chapter in the history of yogurt. The village of Studen Izvor was the hometown of Bulgarian scientist and physician, Stamen Grigorov (1878-1945) who in 1905 first discovered and viewed through a microscope the bacteria used for the fermentation of milk into yogurt. Grigorov, apparently had brought a number of ceramic urns of the “sour milk” from Bulgaria to Geneva, where he earned his PhD in medicine under famous microbiologist Dr. Léon Massol (1838–1909). With Massol’s urging Grigorov presented his findings at the famous Pasteur Institute in France in the same year. The particular variety of bacteria was named Lactobacillus bulgaricus in his honor, often followed by (Grigorov) in early scientific references.

Ilya Mechnikoff in 1908 (via Wikimedia Commons).

A number of sources wrongly credit Russian immunologist Ilya Metchnikoff (1845-1916) for the discovery, as he was at the Pasteur Institute in 1905 and shared in the general enthusiasm for Grigorov’s discovery. Mechnikoff became famous for his work on immunology and aging and was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1908. Metchnikoff, though, was intrigued by the prevalence of centenarians in Bulgaria—people who lived to be over 100 years old—and famously linked this phenomenon to the consumption of yogurt. He is also credited with popularizing yogurt in turn of the century Europe and the US.

The process of milk fermentation originated among the Turkic herding tribes of Central Asia, who brought it to the Balkans with the Ottoman advance in the fourtheenth and fifteenth centuries. Until the twentieth century, its consumption was rather limited to the geographical extent of Turkic influence and beyond to South Asia. Grigorov’s discovery and Mechnikoff’s writings created a sensation in the growing US “health food” movement in the early twentieth century. Dr. John Harvey Kellogg—the well know vegetarian and proponent of whole grain foods—jumped on the bandwagon. Kellogg advocated the regular consumption of yogurt for cleaning your colon from the “putrefaction” caused by consumption of flesh. He also gave himself regular yogurt enemas, noting that if you “balance your intestinal flora” you will “live as long as the rugged mountain men of Bulgaria.”

I read more about Grigorov and yogurt or “kiselo mliako” (literally sour milk) after returning to Sofia. In contrast to Mechnikoff, Grigorov, chose to live out most of his life as a country doctor in Studen Izvor, where he continued to conduct research. Grigorov is remembered by few people inside or outside of Bulgaria, but his name does come up frequently in histories of yogurt and probiotics—from Wikipedia to a plethora of books on the subject. The yogurt museum—though probably visited by few—is a monument to his name.

The author outside the Museum of Bulgarian Yogurt (via author).

Because I arrived late, the museum was out of the yogurt usually offered to guests for an on-site tasting. I was not disappointed, as I had come to look more than taste and there was no lack of yogurt at any and every shop or restaurant in Bulgaria. Indeed, back in Sofia, I decided to do a taste test of local yogurts sold at a specialty shop for “local and organic” dairy products. Such shops are a recent response to the inroads of companies like Dannon and the growing commercialization of dairy products in the post-socialist period. I bought three containers of plain yogurt—cow, sheep, and goat. All three were delicious with quite distinct flavors, but the sheep’s yogurt was my hands down favorite. Of course it might have been the season, the region, or who knows what else.

Read more by Mary Neuburger on Not Even Past:

Cold War Smoke: Cigarettes Across Borders

On Tobacco and Smoking in Bulgaria

From Feasts to Feats (or Feet) on the Coals

Notes From the Field: Bulgaria’s Tolstoyan Vegetarians

The Museum of Sour Milk: History Lessons on Bulgarian Yogurt

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