Introduction: setting the table -- Governance, or, How to solve the grain problem? -- Production -- Consumption, or, The Perestroika of the quotidian -- Nature -- Conclusion: vulnerabilities.

Food has been crucial to the functioning and survival of governments and regimes since the emergence of early states. Yet, only in a few countries is the connection between food and politics as pronounced as in Russia. Since the 1917 Revolution, virtually every significant development in Russian and Soviet history has been either directly driven by or closely associated with the question of food and access to it. In fact, food shortages played a critical role in the collapse of both the Russian Empire and the USSR. Under Putin's watch, Russia moved from heavily relying on grain imports to feed the population to being one of the world's leading food exporters. In Bread and Autocracy, Janetta Azarieva, Yitzhak M. Brudny, and Eugene Finkel focus on this crucial yet widely overlooked transformation, as well as its causes and consequences for Russia's domestic and foreign politics. The authors argue that Russia's food independence agenda is an outcome of a deliberate, decades-long policy to better prepare the country for a confrontation with the West. Moreover, they show that for the Kremlin, nutritional self-sufficiency and domestic food production is a crucial pillar of state security and regime survival. Azarieva, Brudny, and Finkel also make the case that Russia's focus on food independence also sets the country apart from almost all modern autocracies. While many authoritarian regimes have adopted industrial import-substitution policies, in Putin's Russia it is the substitution of food imports with domestically produced crops that is crucial for regime survival. As food reemerges as a key global issue and nations increasingly turn inwards, Bread and Autocracy provides a timely and comprehensive look into Russia's experience in building a nutritionally autarkic dictatorship.

Examines how black intermediaries in colonial Spanish America influenced written portrayals of virtuous and beautiful blackness.

This introductory book to the six volume series includes an introduction defining the critical zone for mankind that extends from tree canopy and the lower atmosphere to water table and unweathered rock. Soils play a crucial role through the functions and the services that they provide to mankind. The spatial and temporal variability of soils is represented by information systems whose importance, recent evolutions and increasingly performing applications in France and in the world must be underlined. The soil functions, discussed in this book, focus on the regulation of the water cycle, biophysicochemical cycles and the habitat role of biodiversity. The main services presented are those related to the provision of agricultural, fodder and forest products, energy, as well as materials and the role of soil as infrastructure support. They also include the different cultural dimensions of soils, their representations being often linked to myths and rites, as well as their values of environmental and archaeological records. Finally, the issue is raised of an off-ground world.

This book deals with the sustainability of agriculture on the Black Earth by drawing on data from long-term field experiments. It emphasises the opportunities for greater food and water security at local and regional levels. The Black Earth, Chernozem in Russian, is the best arable soil in the world and the breadbasket of Europe and North America. It was the focus of scientific study at the very beginnings of soil science in the late 19th century—as a world in itself, created by the roots of the steppe grasses building a water-stable granular structure that holds plentiful water, allows rapid infiltration of rain and snow melt, and free drainage of any surplus. Under the onslaught of industrial farming, Chernozem have undergone profound but largely unnoticed changes with far-reaching consequences—to the point that agriculture on Chernozem is no longer sustainable. The effects of agricultural practices on global warming, the diversion of rainfall away from replenishment of water resources to destructive runoff, and the pollution of streams and groundwater are all pressing issues. Sustainability absolutely requires that these consequences be arrested.

An in-depth exploration of Ukraine through encounters with the many different people who live there. “Will someone pay for the spilled blood? No. Nobody.” Mikhail Bulgakov composed this ominous and prophetic phrase in Kiev amid the turmoil of the Russian civil war. Since then, Ukrainian borders have shifted constantly, and its people have suffered numerous military foreign interventions. Ukraine has only existed as an independent state since 1991, and what exactly it was before then is controversial among its people as well as its European neighbors. In Black Earth: A Journey through the Ukraine, journalist and celebrated travel writer Jens Mühling takes readers across the country amid the ousting of former president Viktor Yanukovych and the Russian annexation of Crimea. Mühling delves deep into daily life in Ukraine, narrating his encounters with Ukrainian nationalists and old communists, Crimean Tatars and Cossacks, smugglers, and soldiers. Black Earth connects all these stories to convey an unconventional and unfiltered view of Ukraine, a country at the crossroads of Europe and Asia and the center of countless conflicts. In this paperback edition, a new preface is included that takes into account recent developments up to the 2022 war between Russia and Ukraine.

Cultural understandings of soil are diverse and often ambiguous. Cultural framing of soils is common worldwide and is highly consequential. The implications of what place the earth has in people's world view and everyday life can be in line with or in conflict with natural conditions, with scientific views, or with agricultural practices. The main assumption underlying this work is that soil is inescapably perceived in a cultural context by any human. This gives emergence to different significant webs of meaning influenced by religious, spiritual, or secular myths, and by a wide range of beliefs, values and ideas that people hold in all societies. These patterns and their dynamics inform the human-soil relationship and how soils are cared for, protected, or degraded. Therefore, there is need to deal inter-culturally with different sources and types of knowledge and experience regarding soil; a need to cultivate soil awareness and situationally appropriate care through inter- and intra-cultural dialogues and learning. This project focuses on the human and intangible dimensions of soil. To serve this aim, the International Union of Soil Sciences (IUSS) founded a working group on Cultural Patterns of Soil Understanding that has resulted in this book, which presents studies from almost all continents, written by soil scientists and experts from other disciplines. A major objective of this project is to promote intercultural literacy that gives readers the opportunity to appreciate soil across disciplinary and cultural boundaries in an increasingly globalized world. . .

Holistic nutritionist and highly-regarded blogger Sarah Britton presents a refreshing, straight-forward approach to balancing mind, body, and spirit through a diet made up of whole foods. Sarah Britton's approach to plant-based cuisine is about satisfaction--foods that satiate on a physical, emotional, and spiritual level. Based on her knowledge of nutrition and her love of cooking, Sarah Britton crafts recipes made from organic vegetables, fruits, whole grains, beans, lentils, nuts, and seeds. She explains how a diet based on whole foods allows the body to regulate itself, eliminating the need to count calories. My New Roots draws on the enormous appeal of Sarah Britton's blog, which strikes the perfect balance between healthy and delicious food. She is a "whole food lover," a cook who makes simple accessible plant-based meals that are a pleasure to eat and a joy to make. This book takes its cues from the rhythms of the earth, showcasing 100 seasonal recipes. Sarah simmers thinly sliced celery root until it mimics pasta for Butternut Squash Lasagna, and whips up easy raw chocolate to make homemade chocolate-nut butter candy cups. Her recipes are not about sacrifice, deprivation, or labels--they are about enjoying delicious food that's also good for you.

This Dictionary contains over 50,000 proverbs, in some 70 European languages and dialects, arranged in 2,500 sets. It is the fruits of over 40 years of collection and research, the only collection of proverbs on anything like this scale ever to be published anywhere in the world. Emanuel Strauss has trawled through innumerable collections of proverbs in all languages, from early printed books and rare items to the latest theses and journals, and grouped together many thousands of proverbs in sets of equivalent meaning. Comprehensive indexes for each language provide access to any proverb by way of its key words. A critical bibliography musters some 500 items, from incunabula to the current decade.

In the heart of Austria lies Steiermark (Styria), a rough mountain country on the eastern slope of the Alps. Its inhabitants, protected from the levelling influences of modern civilisation and cut off from that mingling with other peoples which destroys racial character, have retained their old individuality and customs longer than any other German people. Rough though the climate is, the soil stony, the struggle for existence hard, these sons of the mountains have grown stubbornly inseparable from their home; it is with difficulty that they take root in other soil-they are evermore drawn back to the place where once their cradle stood. In former centuries the Swiss soldiers in French service could not hear the home-like chime of cow-bells without a temptation to desert their colours; and time after time sons of Steiermark have been driven back to their free hills by the constraint of garrison life. The deserters were always easily caught: the sergeant in pursuit had simply to look for the culprit in his father's house. The Heimweh (other languages can hardly express the meaning of this word) is the national sickness to which all natives of the Alps driven into foreign parts are subject, and it is but the other side of that impassioned joy in the home, which finds expression in jubilant songs and shouts rising for ever from the mountains to the sky.