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The article has a link to a video showing a soviet groceries, presenting it as if it was horrible, but if you ignore the bleak lighting, it kind of looks like... any "discount" american grocery? A good part of the american population can't afford the prices of "fancy" groceries, so it's kind of their life right now.

A lot of cultures have some sort of starving relic.

Maybe a simple national dish made with very cheap ingredients, or an old story around a very important staple crop. Some deep, deep memory that persists for a long time.

These are the opposite of thanksgiving, or other harvest and abundance cultural relics.

I don't think the USA has that starving myth. This cold war episode is as close as they get, and it is from the perspective of "the other". Maybe the dust bowl?

Cinema is not shy exploring ideas adjacent to this concept (Wall-E, Idiocracy, Demolition Man, Interstellar, to name a few). It, somehow, self-acknowledges that absense of a starving myth by reversing what their abundance means. Almost as if it wanted to have it, and it's ashamed of being spoiled.

Not Clear Lake, CA