Desperate Russians turn to spoiled food

But the stooped and slow clientele who crowd this pungent stretch of market stalls in the southern fringes of the Russian capital don't seem bothered. Retirees mass and push before spreads of lukewarm yogurt and moldering fish. Business has never been better, the manager says.

Theoretically, selling expired foodstuffs is a crime punishable by fine. But the climbing prices, falling salaries, and withering demand of Russia's economy appear to be driving a surge in the sale of past-their-prime goods.

Trafficking in spoiled food, a familiar racket during the collapse of the Soviet Union, is making a comeback in both markets and wholesale Internet shopping. A semi-underground enterprise, it is difficult to trace. But consumer groups, shoppers, and anecdotal evidence all indicate its ascendance.

"If you lower the price to pennies, people will buy it even at the risk of being poisoned," says Irina Vinogradova, director of the Russian Institute of Consumer Evaluation. "This crisis has led some people into a situation where they have absolutely no money to survive on."

Outside the market, known as the Moskvoretskoye, Galina Abrosimova shows off a tub of cottage cheese she bought for the equivalent of about 30 cents. The cheese is tepid; the date on the lid shows it expired two weeks ago. "So what?" she says, tucking it shyly back into a dirt-smeared shopping bag. "If I don't like the taste, I'll just use it for pancakes."

Abrosimova, 82, is a retired construction engineer. Her coat is grimy and her shoes scuffed, but she has draped a lace scarf around her throat and covered her white hair with a brunet wig.

She lists the cheapest places she has found to scrounge for spoiled food. The Moskvoretskoye is the market for dairy, she says. Fruit and vegetables are cheapest at a market near her house, where one aisle is set aside for expired goods.

Abrosimova can't afford meat, but she knows a canning factory in the northern suburbs that unloads lightly rotten fish for pennies. "They sell some horrible stuff there," she says. "It makes you sorry to see it."

But she goes every week, scavenging several days' worth of fish for about $1.20.

Like many of the shoppers here, Abrosimova had been buying spoiled food even before the crisis hit. Supermarkets are an impossible dream for many retirees. They spend their days shuffling from one corner of Moscow to the next, hunting bargains.

Most Russians still haven't been forced to buy spoiled food. But these days, Abrosimova shrugs, she's competing with bigger crowds. You have to arrive early. And you have to understand how to handle the food, shoppers warn, to discern between slightly spoiled and potentially sickening.

"You have to be careful with meat," says Nikolai Terekhov, 69. "The part that looks weather-beaten has to be cut off and boiled or roasted for a very long time."

In the middle of the market, a group of men clusters around a metal table, swapping newspaper sections, and running eyes over their domain. They wear suits or leather; they look tough and wary, as if they were sent over from a "Sopranos" casting call. When they notice a foreign reporter wandering from stand to stand, they send over a pair of security guards to hover along.

"What are you doing? You can't take photographs here," one guard says, although the only camera is in a bag, out of sight.

The men at the metal table fan out to the market stalls and, one after the next, shutters crash to the floor, hiding the foodstuffs.

The elderly shoppers blink around in confusion. The market isn't supposed to close for hours.

The manager's name is Pyotr Aksyonov. As the shutters close, he comes strolling over. "Let me put it this way," he says of the expired food. "Some deviations are found everywhere, and here is no exception."