Borscht, a Ukrainian hug in a mug

Photo by Anshu A on Unsplash

Once upon a time, Lemsip and Cup-a-Soup were battling each other for the right to advertise themselves as a “hug in a mug.” In May 2013, that was settled by a British trademark adjudicator, who ruled that the two products could co-exist happily with similar slogans because they are sold separately in shops and for different purposes.

I’m not sure what the slogan would be in Ukrainian but their borscht battles are about winning recognition as originators of the famous soup.

The Financial Times’ (FT) recent piece (paywall) on what borscht means to Ukraine features “Ukraine’s Jamie Oliver”, a chef called Ievgen Klopotenko, who has been trying to get Unesco to recognise borscht’s Ukraine-ness. The FT piece says that “for Klopotenko, the question of the Ukrainianness of borscht was ‘the same question of why we are at war’. The Russian claim to borscht was just another example of cultural appropriation.”

Apparently, even during the ongoing real war, begun by the Feb…