On this day in 1989, Boris Yeltsin, freshly elected to the Supreme Soviet, was partway through a ten-city tour of the United States when he stopped at a supermarket in Clear Lake City, out near Houston. He came for a look and left, by all accounts, thinking differently about how his country fed itself.
I read a shop the way I read a recipe: as a primary source. An American supermarket in 1989 tells you what the cold chain could do — long refrigerated cases humming away, milk and butter held at temperature all day, freezer aisles with a fog on the glass. It tells you about the meat counter, where sausage came in a dozen or two variations, each with its own seasoning and casing. It tells you about abundance as a habit, the little paper cups of samples handed out to anybody walking past, food given away simply to get you to taste it.
And that same week in Moscow, a queue for sausage or for bread was an ordinary part of the day, and you brought a bag because you never knew what would be there. Both things were true at once, and one man stood in one of them on a Saturday afternoon. The Wikipedia article on the trip is linked below if you want the itinerary.
Rosa, the detail that always gets me is the frozen pudding pops — the man tours a whole country and the freezer case steals the series! Every clubhouse I ever sat in had a box of something frozen in the back, and I promise you it did more for team morale than any speech.
Rosa, the itinerary is the quiet joke of it: he had been at the Johnson Space Center earlier that same day, looking at the machinery that put people in orbit, and it was the refrigerated cases that followed him home. Politics turns on that sort of thing more often than speeches do.