______________________________
On Tuesday, RIA-Novosti reported that Dr Gennady Onishchenko, RF Chief State Sanitary Doctor {head public health official in the RF, the Russian analogue of the US Surgeon General: editor}, urged Russians to eat healthier by exercising “food patriotism”, eating “traditional” dishes instead of dining on “exotic oddities” such as McDonalds and sushi bars. Onishchenko urged caution with raw and cultured fish dishes, saying that no additional public health inspections of sushi restaurants are planned for the coming months, saying, “We continue to be vigilant about sushi-bars from a cultural point-of-view, but we aren’t instituting special measures to monitor them”. Last June, Onishchenko warned about the dangers of “gastrointestinal adventures”, stating, “We are a people with established traditions in food, and we mustn’t be seduced by exotic types of food, particularly, a diet of raw fish, when it isn’t prepared by Japanese people“.
26 June 2013
Voice of Russia World Service
http://english.ruvr.ru/news/2013_06_26/Russia-urges-food-patriotism-over-sushi-McDonalds-1926/
Editor’s Note:
Dr Onishchenko isn’t saying that sushi’s bad… he’s saying that sushi prepared by cooks not trained in traditional Japanese cuisine under Japanese masters are apt to get things wrong, and there’s no margin for error with raw fish. He’s also right in saying that you can upset your tummy with too much unfamiliar food. In any case, most Russians are quite content with kasha, shchi, pelmeni, and kolbasa… that sounds like good eats to me, too…
BMD
Voices from Russia 
23 January 2013. Sergei Yolkin’s World. Vinous Negotiations
Tags: cartoons, diplomacy, diplomatic relations, editorial cartoons, Gennady Onishchenko, Georgia, Georgian wine, Moscow, political commentary, politics, Russia, Russian, Russian diplomacy, Sergei Yolkin
Vinous Negotiations
Sergei Yolkin
2013
******
The RIA translator gets a Big Green Weenie Award for messing up the caricature’s title and the text in the cartoon. It’s not, “I hope you have serious intentions”, it’s more like, “If you’re serious about this, get involved in the negotiations…”. It’s NOT a plea, it’s a demand. Besides that, it destroys the in vino veritas effect that Yolkin was reaching for. Onishchenko wasn’t being tentative, he was being a Dutch Uncle, and he was urging the Georgians to “get down”. Talking Over Wine is poor… Vinous Negotiations conveys more of Yolkin’s intent, which is that Onishchenko has had a few, and he’s coming out with what he truly feels. It’s obvious that a non-native-speaker translated this…
BMD
______________________________
On Monday, Dr Gennady Onishchenko, the head of Rospotrebnadzor and Russia’s head physician, privately met with the members of a Georgian delegation that travelled to Moscow for talks. In his view, if the Georgian government were willing to participate in the negotiations over wines and mineral water, it’d point up Georgia’s seriousness of intent. Russia, the main importer of Georgia’s produce up to 2008, closed its borders to Georgian wines over the producers’ alleged failure to meet food safety standards, in particular with regard to wine containing pesticides and heavy metals.
21 January 2012
Sergei Yolkin
RIA-Novosti
http://ria.ru/caricature/20130121/919033448.html
http://en.rian.ru/cartoons/20130122/178942282/Talking-Over-Wine.html