Borscht enters the UNESCO list, and the reason is not culinary

On 1 July 2022, under its emergency procedure, UNESCO inscribed the culture of Ukrainian borscht cooking on the list of intangible cultural heritage in need of urgent safeguarding.

I have heard people call this trivial. I disagree, and I would put the argument in commercial terms, which is the language I know best. Intangible heritage is not a recipe. It is the practice around it: who cooks it, how it is taught, the regional variants, the households and communities that keep it going, the growers who supply it. Displacement breaks exactly those chains.

What an inscription actually does

The urgent safeguarding list is not an honours board. It is a mechanism that obliges documentation, opens funding for safeguarding measures, and records that a living practice is at risk — the same instrument used for endangered crafts and languages anywhere in the world.

Twenty years here and I have eaten a great deal of borscht, in a great many versions, in offices and construction canteens and family kitchens. Each one was slightly different and each cook was certain theirs was correct. That is precisely the thing the listing is meant to protect.