The story of the cooks of Chernobyl, 40 years later

When Raya heard of a nuclear power plant accident, she turned to Ukraine’s Rivne Nuclear Power Plant close by: “We looked at our gherkin barrels — that’s what we call our power plant chimneys — and we could see there was nothing wrong with them.” But then the truth emerged: The accident was at their sister plant in Chernobyl, 180 miles east, and Raya had to go there to cook.

It has been 40 years since the world’s worst nuclear disaster and so much has been written and filmed about Chernobyl. But Polish writer Witold Szablowski found a little-known story for his book What’s Cooking in the Kremlin, a history of Russia through food. Szablowski knew how, even in the worst disasters, those working to save the situation had to eat, so someone had to cook for them. He found seven women alive, out of a group of 15 sent from Rivne after the disaster.

All the women suffered health issues, though not being in the actual plant spared them a bit. Dosimeters, to measure radiation, were placed at the entrance of the canteen, and when clean-up workers came from the plant, their buzzing became frantic and continuous. “It was a dreadful sound,” recalled Valentina, the head of the group.

“We heard it from morning to evening, with two-hour breaks when we were cleaning the canteen.”

Finally, the dosimeters were removed. Why remind people about radiation, when nothing could be done? The countryside around Chernobyl was abandoned. Raya recalled cows “mooing pitifully, because the people had been taken away and there was no one to milk them”. The canteen had also been abandoned. An earlier group of cooks were so terrified, they fled through the forest. That act had probably sealed their death warrants since Chernobyl’s forest was one of the worstaffected areas.

Food shortages were the norm in the latter days of the Soviet Union, but a guilty state ensured Chernobyl’s workers were given the best meats, dairy and fruit from across the country. “There was a whole sea of produce there,” Luba, another cook, recalled. “Little cubes of butter, full-fat cream — it sounds funny, but in those days, under Gorbachev, that was a real delicacy.” Workers had to drink glasses of cream, perhaps in the hope that its calcium would counter the depletion in their bones.

Yet this food, which would normally have been the stuff of fantasies for people, was mostly wasted. Workers just wanted fruit juices and vodka. “They were burning up Witold. Burning up from inside,” Olga said. It was hard for the cooks to see such food disregarded. By habit, Luba would tell workers to take chocolate and give it to a kid, if they didn’t want it for themselves. Then she realised the food was contaminated by just being there, and no kid should have it.

Inevitably, some food was smuggled out. In Nobel Prize winner Svetlana Alexievich’s Voices from Chernobyl , one woman tells her how, in the months of fear afterwards, she only bought the most expensive meats to be safe: “Then we found out it was the expensive salami that they mixed contaminated meat into, thinking, well, since it was expensive, fewer people would buy it.” It is almost grimly comic how quickly the usual compromises and corruptions of life reasserted themselves.

Decades later, Valentina is fighting for the special pensions they were promised. An agent says she’ll arrange it for a thousand dollars — and tells an outraged Valentina that it’s a discount: “She charged those who hadn’t been in Chernobyl several thousand.”

Chernobyl’s 40th anniversary has been marked by articles lamenting how it set back nuclear power for decades. Sam Dumitriu, a British policy analyst, notes with some puzzlement that polls show women are far less likely to support nuclear power than men. Perhaps the cooks of Chernobyl, who both saw the disaster and lived with the scars afterwards, could tell him why.