Of Apples, Soup, and Grain, Or What Climate Activists and Polish Farmers Have in Common
Back in my hotel room in Berlin on September 24, 2021, I was reading the news to learn that a massive Fridays for Future rally had just ended in front of the Reichstag building, with Greta Thunberg as the key speaker. That week I was too busy with my trip, more interested in exploring the German capital’s historic heritage than current events, so I missed the announcements of the demonstration, or simply took no notice of them.
I spent that whole Friday in Potsdam, a city just outside of Berlin, known for its magnificent 18th-century Sanssouci Palace with a huge park, as well as Cecilienhof Palace where the Potsdam Conference took place in 1945. I actually witnessed a smaller climate rally that evening in the city’s Old Market Square, although I just quickly passed by. And that wasn’t my first encounter with environmental activists that day, either.
In the morning, at the railway station a group of young people were handing out leaflets in support of Annalena Baerbock and The Greens for the federal elections to be held that Sunday. The leaflets were stuffed in small bags (unless my memory is playing tricks on me, I believe those were plastic bags, which I found a little weird for a green party), and I heard something like “Nehmen Sie bitte ein kleines Frühstück mit,” that is,“Please take a little breakfast.”
I was baffled to find, along with the leaflets, a small green apple inside. Baffled, because here in Ukraine handing out food is a widespread way of bribing voters, “electoral buckwheat” being the most infamous example. But perhaps in Germany, where this phenomenon does not exist, a tiny apple the color of the party is but a shtick, an art performance, a symbolic gesture, which shouldn’t be interpreted literally.
This makes me think of the connection between food, climate change, and art. Climate change affects harvest patterns and food production, usually in a negative way. A generalized and stereotyped view is that a society creates most art when food is abundant. After all, according to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, people turn to beauty and self-actualization when they are fed and safe. However, that is contrasted with actual biographies of many artists and writers who struggled to buy lunch while producing masterpieces. Anyway, it’s hard to deny that creating art is much more pleasant when you don’t have to worry about your next meal.
In the early 20th century, suffragettes in Britain vandalized renowned works of art, most notably the Rokeby Venus by Velázquez at the National Gallery in 1914, to draw attention to their cause. Symbolically, two activists of the Just Stop Oil group smashed the glass of the Rokeby Venus in November 2023. In several other attacks, climate activists hurled food at famous art pieces. Van Gogh’s Sunflowers at London’s National Gallery and Claude Monet’s Grainstacks at Potsdam’s Museum Barberini got a portion of tomato soup and mashed potatoes, respectively, in October 2022. And Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa at the Louvre in Paris was attacked with cake in May 2022 and pumpkin soup in January 2024.
“What is more important, art or life?” ask climate activists today, echoing the suffragettes of the past century. Although the answer seems obvious, there is no reason for the either/or choice here. Mindless consumption versus life would make a better pair, and shopping malls or gas stations would be more suitable places for protests than museums and art galleries. The protesters gluing themselves to roads to block traffic made more sense in this respect.
Ironically, the choice of the Louvre and the National Gallery instead of a Walmart store or a Shell gas station demonstrates consumption goods’ low long-time value and attention-grabbing potential in comparison to great works of art. (Granted, Just Stop Oil and related groups did attack stores, but this received much less media coverage and public outcry.) There is only one original Mona Lisa (theories of other versions aside), but there are millions of Tefal pans and Taylor Swift T-shirts manufactured every year. Your Ford or even your Tesla will be worthless one hundred years from now, but the Mona Lisa remains priceless five centuries after its creation. And speaking of life, art allows its mortal authors to achieve partial, non-physical immortality. Moreover, it can tell us about long-extinct cultures and civilizations.
While I wholeheartedly support the environmental movement and non-violent radical acts, there are reasons why I cannot relate to the use of either art or food as a means to promulgate the cause.
Of course, the activists know that paintings in museums are protected by glass and a bowl of soup won’t do them any harm. The attacks are symbolical, but symbols can be interpreted differently depending on context, time, place, and the person who interprets them. For some people a healthy vegan dish hurled at a painting is an outrageous waste of food. I’m sure that even in Paris, let alone Africa or Gaza, there are those whom that bowl of soup would have saved from hunger.
A week ago, 20 Days in Mariupol won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature, having reminded the world that the war in Ukraine is grinding on. However, the horrors documented in the film only show the first three weeks of the war. During the next two months, the situation in the besieged city became much worse. Residents starved to death as food supplies couldn’t break through the Russian lines. Stories were reported of people hunting pigeons. They definitely could have found a better use for pumpkin soup.
Even though none of my ancestors lived in Soviet Ukraine before 1939, the Ukrainians here in Eastern Galicia felt strong affinity with those living under the Bolshevik rule. They knew of the famine provoked by Stalin’s policies in 1932–33 and told their children and grandchildren about it, no matter how hard the Soviets tried to suppress that knowledge after the annexation of western Ukraine at the end of the Second World War. The Holodomor, as the famine is known, has become part of the national memory of all Ukrainians.
Besides, I remember my childhood in the hungry nineties. As a result of the economic crisis that followed the disintegration of the Soviet Union, many people, especially factory workers, weren’t getting paid and had to borrow food or money to buy food, grow food in improvised garden plots on no man’s land hoping it won’t be stolen by fellow sufferers, or steal the food others were growing. To me and many other Ukrainians wasting food is no fun at all.
As far as art is concerned, Russia has repeatedly attacked Ukrainian museums and other heritage objects. For example, about a dozen paintings of Maria Prymachenko, an iconic Ukrainian 20th-century artist, burned down when her museum near Kyiv was destroyed as a result of Russian strikes. If an artist’s soul metaphorically lives on in their oeuvre, then such acts of state-level vandalism bring them closer to oblivion. And if the artist is a prominent part of a nation’s cultural heritage, of a national myth, then such attacks cut directly at national identity.
It is less tragic than the loss of a human life, at least in my view, but still it’s a great loss. In other words, the works of Leonardo da Vinci are a crucial part of the world’s cultural heritage, but if there is a fire at the Louvre, I won’t sacrifice my life, or anyone’s life, to save the Mona Lisa. I’m sure there are people who feel otherwise, and it’s exactly the people whose conscience the protesters tried to target. And yet attacking artworks with food — symbolically, I repeat, as the attackers know they can’t be damaged — is tactless in the time of identity-suppressing wars and famine and demonstrates lack of understanding of possible symbolical implications.
European farmers, or at least some of them, seem to be the climate activists’ ideological opponents as they protest the EU Green Deal, even though, in the long run, it is aimed at alleviating climate change, including the effects on the same farmers’ crops. They also protest the imports of agricultural goods from outside the EU. Polish farmers in particular block the border traffic with Ukraine, a war-torn country whose GDP heavily relies on agriculture. Goaded by Russian narratives and, frequently, xenophobia, some got particularly aggressive, to the point of spilling Ukrainian grain from trucks and train wagons. Meanwhile back in January their French colleagues dumped on road and destroyed Belgian cauliflower, Spanish wine, and Polish chicken, none of it being from outside the EU.
Destroying food is never a good idea, but destroying food you haven’t produced or paid for is downright outrageous. However, it wasn’t a mere sabotage; it was part of a protest. Protest actions are always loaded with significance, and thus the public is entitled to interpret them, looking for hints, hidden implications, and symbolism. On the level of national memory, Ukrainian grain is akin to Irish potatoes. Destroying a truck of potatoes in the face of the Irish would be seen as mockery, offense, or — if the offender is ignorant of history — indiscreet stupidity. Destroying Ukrainian grain is perceived in the same way by Ukrainians.
Clearly, the scale, damage, motivations, and context of the actions of the Polish farmers and the climate activists are incompatible. However, both groups demonstrate lack of tact and ignore the context, implications, and interpretations of their behavior.