On social networks and on entertainment sites you can find a text attributed to actor Alexander Shirvindt, which says that fashionable foreign delicacies are actually the food of the poor. We decided to check the authorship of this text.

On social networks, an essay attributed to Alexander Shirvindt is most often distribute entitled “What is the vaunted French cuisine.” At the very beginning of this text we are talking about French dishes: “I was sitting one day, eating kebab and thinking about everything. What is the vaunted French cuisine? And this is a kitchen of hunger and despair. Frog legs, snails, mussels, moldy or dried cheese, onion soup, artichokes... This is when, due to the lack of normal foods, everything that can be chewed is eaten. A cuisine of real poverty, which marketers wrapped in a beautiful shell of supposed sophistication.” This passage is followed by reflections on the origins of sushi, fondue, and the American tradition of cooking turkey for Thanksgiving. Then the author concludes: “And all this is looked at by those living in a country where boiled pork, pies, pancakes with caviar, sterlet and a twelve-layer meat pie, balyk, kulebyaka with four edges and four meats. They look and are shocked. Because all of the above suddenly turned out to be unprestigious - because it’s all foreign.” And at the very end - several aphorisms that, at first glance, are not related to the above. Users have been posting this text on their pages for several years now. Facebook, LiveJournal, Instagram, Pikabu and other sites. And a new surge in popularity occurred after the death of Alexander Shirvindt on March 15, 2024.

“Checked” was unable to find the text under the code name “What is vaunted French cuisine” either in Shirvindt’s books or in published interviews with the actor. For the last few years, it has been circulating on social networks exclusively under the artist’s signature, but individual fragments of this essay appeared earlier and independently of each other.

The first part (about the vaunted French cuisine) has been circulating since at least 2014. The earliest mention Verified found was fast in LiveJournal dated June 5, 2014, which contains a comment with the following text. In 2015, a fragment mentioned with a link to the humorous site "Bashorg", closed in 2022.

The second part (about arugula, sushi, fondue and other European culinary traditions) is fast blogger and IT specialist Ruslana Karmanova, also first published on LiveJournal. The text was written in 2016 as a response to an article on the website Lenta.ru, dedicated to the gradual reduction in the number of foreign products in Russia.

Finally, the third part consists of jokes and aphorisms taken from the same “Bashorg” and other entertainment resources. For example, the phrase “If you have been unfairly offended, come back and deserve it” appeared on the Internet no later than 2013, when it was uploaded to demotivators website.

They began signing this text with Shirvindt’s name no earlier than mid-2023. The text itself in its current form (that is, collected together from several pieces) appeared in June 2023 on the website “Crimean truth" And already from August 2023 to forums and on social networks it began to diverge from the authorship of the actor.

Thus, the text attributed to Shirvindt has nothing to do with the actor and is compiled from several posts published on various blogs in the mid-2010s.

Cover photo: Wikimedia Commons