*This is a fictional story for the food science class about the Prague food system in a parallel universe.
At exactly noon on the first Wednesday of every month, the air raid sirens would echo across the skies of the Czech Republic. In every city and every village across the country, on every street and alley, grey loudspeakers could be seen, carefully placed in selected spots. Once the alarm went off, if you happened to be standing under one of them, it would be difficult—if not impossible—to continue your conversation. The piercing alarm would sound for about two minutes, then the volume would gradually decrease. Before that, a voice from the speaker would say, “Zkouška sirén, zkouška sirén, zkouška sirén. Za několik minut proběhne zkouška sirén. (Test of sirens, test of sirens, test of sirens. Test of sirens will continue within several minutes). ”
On May 7th, 2025, Yejin was developing film in the school’s darkroom. This was her fifth month in the Czech Republic, and she had already gotten used to this sound. She was studying photography at the New York University in Prague, and the darkroom in the Blue Building was like a second home to her. It was so dark inside, you couldn’t tell if it was day or night. Turning off her phone and focusing on the photographs, the smell of disinfectant emanating from the developer reassured her. She’d been here all morning, forgetting she hadn’t had breakfast. She hummed a song, even if the alarms were blaring.
She thought to herself, “I really wish I could stay here all day. Hopefully, the campus security won’t come and tell me to leave.”
But this time, the alarm sounded much longer than usual—even longer than the time it took him to triple-expose his film. And this time, along with the siren, came a stern voice: “This is not a test.” The red lights above his head started flashing.
Yejin started running. She remembered there was a fallout shelter nearby—Folimanka Fallout Shelter, near the Pod Karlovem tram stop. But right now, she trusted her own feet more than public transport. Run. People were fleeing in all directions; the city center had turned into utter chaos, a stew of panicked crowds and stalled cars. She summoned every ounce of strength, pushing herself through cobblestone alleys and over tram tracks, brushing past buses as she ran. She made it.
After several hours of noisy waiting in the fallout shelter, the alarm was lifted.
“What’s going on?” she asked the person next to her.
“Someone released a biological weapon in Eastern Europe, but it hasn’t reached the Czech yet,” a middle-aged woman said as she turned to leave. She gave Yejin a quick once-over, hesitated for a moment, and with what seemed like a touch of sympathy, added,
“You’d better stock up on food.”
After the sirens, Yejin thought things would return to normal. But as the days passed, it seemed like things were slowly changing.
Yejin stood dumbfounded in front of an empty Albert.
The food supplies from the embassy and the school were still on the way—an uncertain promise in these difficult times. A lone international student in a foreign land, she had no local connections or privileges to rely on. Nor did she have enough influence or resources back home to be among the first to board a charter flight back to her country. She knew she couldn’t sit around waiting for help; she had to take matters into her own hands. “If I can’t buy anything,” she thought, “I’ll just chew on the community gardening.”
The globalization of food is a process that began thousands of years ago. Barley was introduced to Europe from the Middle East around 6000 B.C. through the Neolithic Agricultural Revolution, laying the foundation for the Czech beer tradition. In the Middle Ages, German monasteries brought hops to Czech Pilsen, where the world’s first golden lager was brewed in 1842. In the 19th century, Austro-Hungarian rule brought Central European food culture into Czech daily life: Viennese schnitzel and Hungarian beef stew became commonplace in Prague, and around the year 2000, the Czech Republic joined the European Union, opening up its borders and its mindset. More and more Czechs went abroad — to work in the UK, to study in the US – and when they returned, they brought back not only English, but also a new sense of taste. Western food culture was brought back along with English menus, and Italian restaurants, Japanese bento and American-style breakfast places began to appear on the streets of Prague. People tried their hand at homemade exotic dishes, which started out as a taste and gradually became a part of their lives.
Now it seems that everything is back to the original point.
Yejin wonders if she will ever be able to cook Korean bibimbap again. The first to fall were supermarkets like kshop and susu asian market, which relied heavily on overseas supply chains, and she can no longer buy her favorite kimchi and soju. In the large local supermarket chains, canned goods, storage-resistant foods like spaghetti, rice, and flour were the first to disappear, and what to do with the loss of rice? There was no staple food that could replace rice for her, and she was a person who also ate rice in the morning in a spine soup. Imported fruits from the tropics like bananas are also gone, they make up 30% of the fruit import quota. There were a few frozen chicken breasts left in the freezer section, but she’d heard that the power had been out for a few days, and she didn’t dare let her stomach be a laboratory.
The only thing left in the supermarket was mostly local ingredients, spring crops were just starting to grow, one of the most food-deficit periods. Cheese and yogurt were still available, and the Czech Republic, with its vast pastures and a long history of dairy, goat, and sheep farming, had a steady supply of milk. yejin picked up Tvarůžky, one of the most classic Czech cheeses, from the Olomouc region of Moravia. She closes her eyes and remembers her train ride through beautiful Czech fields, with a few cows wagging their tails and looking at her, and before she could take a picture, the train whizzed by and then entered the Moravian forest, with its lush oaks and beeches intertwined.
Opening his eyes, yejin has to deal with another tricky shortage of ingredients. There were still some onions left from the winter storage, and a stock of eggs, as spring is the time of year when animals produce the most, but with a limit of one carton per person because of the small quantities, and with prices doubling and doubling, there was only barely enough to go around.
She heard rumors that the government might soon reinstate a rationing system. During the Nazi occupation of the Czech lands, a strict rationing regime was enforced—especially for food staples like flour, sugar, meat, and oil. Residents had to use ration coupons (potravinové lístky) to purchase certain goods. In the socialist era, when Czechoslovakia was part of the Soviet bloc, rationing wasn’t constant but was implemented intermittently to deal with shortages. The government used fixed quotas and controlled distribution to manage the market. There were even special shops like Tuzex, where people could buy foreign goods unavailable in regular stores, but only with foreign currency or special vouchers. Yejin felt overwhelmed. Would she eventually have to turn to the black market, paying an outrageous price just to taste something from home?
There were still a few strawberry-flavored macarons on the shelf, ones no one wanted. She didn’t even like that cloyingly sweet taste, but at least they could keep her alive if her blood sugar crashed. Given the collapsing purchasing power of the currency, maybe she could do barter trade later— so swap the strawberry with coconut flavour, the one she actually liked. Over in the pet food aisle, a few bags of hamster pellets remained. Anyway, it was edible, so she didn’t think twice about taking it and going to the checkout.
Yejin stepped into the checkout line. The locals, having gotten wind of things through the grapevine, had already queued up early. But as a foreigner, even when she strained her ears, she couldn’t understand a word of Czech. All she could do was silently pray.
Back in the kitchen, she tore open the 500g bag of “Zdravá směs pro křečky”—Healthy Mix for Hamsters—and scattered some across the cutting board, mentally piecing together a recipe. Her eyes scanned the ingredient list slowly—wheat, barley, oats, millet, cornflakes, flaxseeds… The variety of grains was more impressive than some breakfast cereals. Dried carrots, beets, parsley, rose petals… well, at least that made up for missing out on vegetables during the rush. It even gave off the vibe of a rustic French soup. And finally, tucked at the end of the list, were dried shrimp, gammarus, and mealworms—at least there was some protein. “It really is healthy,” she thought. But healthy things usually don’t taste good.
She carefully picked out the animal proteins to soak them in water, then selected the plumpest grains and mixed them with calendula petals and dried parsley. A splash of water, a handful of flour—probably wheat or corn—and she stirred the odd mixture slowly with chopsticks.
The pan began to heat up. A sizzle broke the silence as the strange batter spread gently. Wait—onions! she thought. A must-have in Korean pancakes. But there was no salt left in the dorm. She dug into the fridge and unearthed a leftover chunk of Tvarůžky—perhaps it could lend a bit of saltiness. The ingredients crackled in the hot pan, sending up whiffs of foreign herbs and a stubborn, cheesy tang.
As she neared the end, she thought about drizzling some sauce on top to make the dish look a bit more appetizing. She grabbed the nearest bottle—soy sauce—and poured it over the pancake. The moment the sauce hit the pan, a salty aroma filled the room. Oh no! she thought, suddenly realizing the dish might now be way too salty.
The heat from the stove was uneven, causing one side of the pancake to cook through completely—soy sauce forming hardened, cracked patterns like dried earth—while the other side remained a stirrable, gooey batter.
The sizzling gradually faded. The oil was gone, and the smell of something slightly burnt began to rise. She hesitated for a long time, but eventually decided not to waste the ingredients. “Maybe the crispy burnt bits will taste good,” but the moment she took a bite, she immediately spat it out.
She decided to do a good deed for once and return the hamster feed to the rats. She placed the food in a bowl downstairs. Days passed. The food remained untouched. Even the rats wouldn’t eat what she cooked.
She decided to buy some beer and drink herself into a stupor that night. If she got drunk and fell asleep, she wouldn’t feel hungry anymore.
It had been a few days since she’d had a good meal, and she’d lost her appetite for exquisite cuisine. Before it would be exquisite to take pictures in the restaurant in a ceremonial manner, laugh and chat, and take your time to enjoy the food. Now with the border blockade and the lack of food supply, fine dining restaurants are closed. Only fast food restaurants remain and people seem to have lost the patience to chew slowly, be silent, eat quickly and leave. All that is required of a restaurant is; just eat, don’t starve. It’s been a long time since I’ve smelled freshly baked bread downstairs, and stone dry bread is gradually replacing the soft version because it has a longer shelf life. At the same time, bakeries even began to offer compressed bread, which tastes as flat as its size, and you have to put your nose up to the bread to get a hint of it. …Bageterie Boulevard’s salmon sandwiches are spreading more and more sauce and less and less fish, tasting salty and monotonous as if you were in the ocean with kissing a fish carcass, while at the same time it claims to be adding more sauce to keep people’s calorie intake down.
“Eating the sauce is like not eating it!” she complained heartily. Even if the calories are equal, sauce and meat cannot be equated; they do not bring the same feeling of satiety.
Her hypothalamus, the “control center” for regulating satiety, seemed a bit confused. When was the last meal? She couldn’t quite remember—maybe she hadn’t eaten? Or maybe she had? Why did she still feel hungry?
“Tap-tap”, the security guard knocked on the door, and she suddenly jolted awake. She had fallen asleep in the dark room. Looking up, it was six o’clock in the evening—school was about to close.
She opened the door. Blinding sunlight flooded in, and her stomach rumbled at an inconvenient time. That’s when she realized she hadn’t eaten all day.
Sighing in relief, she decided to head to the K-shop to buy her favourite soju and spicy perilla leaves. Tonight, she’d make a delicious Korean meal.