Olena Braichenko: "Culinary Diplomacy Won't Stop Putin's War on Ukraine, but Stories About Our Rich Culinary Heritage and Sustainable Food Culture Are Worth Telling"

A year after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, over 8 million Ukrainian refugees have been registered across Europe. According to UNHCR, the vast majority of civilians who have fled the war are women over 35 with one or more children. Men aged between 18-60 are not permitted to leave (except under special circumstances).

This week, instead of the regular fashion angles, I’m bringing you this very personal conversation with Olena Braichenko, a Ukrainian refugee who, with her six-year-old daughter, is currently staying with my best friends in London. When I go to visit them, they joke that I never want to leave. How must it feel when you can’t?

Finding refuge in a new country is obviously a wonderful thing - and we acknowledge the many millions who aren’t so lucky - but what’s it like to try to make your way somewhere far from home, with strangers? To have to learn a new language? When your husband, parents and many of your friends are back home, and you’re watching the war on the news? When your life, as Olena puts it, feels “on pause”?

This is also a story about sustainability and food culture, Ukraine’s famous černozëm black soil, long traditions of foraging, pickling, small family farms and growing your own veggies. It's a story about home, what we love, and how we live.

Olena is a food writer, publisher and academic, who with her husband, Artem, founded Yizhakultura – a project dedicated to Ukrainian cuisine, where scholars, chefs, food critics, and food anthropologists discuss its history, culture and heritage. She believes in the power of culinary diplomacy, to help get beyond the single story. War is devastating, but people, she reminds us, are more than their experiences of displacement. “I am firmly convinced that everyone who has survived occupation needs to be seen not as a victim, but first and foremost as a person.”

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