'Salo like salo, what's there to say?'

The social and cultural role of salo in modern day Ukraine

Talk with tastings

Katrina Kollegaeva, MA graduate of SOAS’s Anthropology of Food degree, loves fat. 

Ukraine’s iconic cured pork fat salo, or lardo, to be exact! Having been introduced to it by her Ukranian mother, she travelled across the country in 2012 using this tasty slab of fat as a lens to understand its people.

A quietly controversial ingredient - a source of national pride, countless jokes, and a blasé shrug – salo is a fascinating tool to try to understand Ukraine; and its relationship with Russia.

Salo is also melt-in-your-mouth delicious and we are yet to meet a person – from the former USSR to a Brit – who we haven’t managed to convince of that!

Eating together cannot erase the rage on television screens but might just create a little space, warm and friendly, for a discussion of equals.