The Real drug of the Russian South.

The south of Russia is rich with fruit and vegetables, they are all over the place and if you are travelling through this region by car in the depth of Summer you are bound to see the spectacle of beautiful, bright, vivid, colourful fields on both side of the road. They stretch for miles and miles as far as the eye can see. This yellow is the brighest yellow you will ever experience. So what is it? Well these are sunflowers and in this region people use them, and have been using them for decades, to make sunflower oil which is used all of Russia. Additionally the seed is used to eat! 

(First I wrote this paragraph by myself, but then ask my English teacher to correct my sentences to be "more English" :-)))

  

In the South of Russia we eat fried seeds by ton. We buy them raw and fry them with salt and garlic at home. People have their own recipes almost in every house. We buy them packed, we bye them from old ladies on the street and in the market. We eat seeds at home in the evening sitting in front of the TV set, and in the street or sitting on a bench talking with friends. 

Seeds are like a cigarette or a beer, just to kill time, but much cheaper. Usually sold by the glass, seeds cost about 1 euro or even less.

The worst thing about seeds are the shell and the need to peel them. In the street young people spit them out on the ground and the shells become a pile of rubbish, where they stay for ages and look horrible and displeasing to the eye.

I asked some of my friends about seeds and most of them told me that they do not eat them regularly. Those who are native from the South for sure used to fry them with their parents or grandparents when they were children. 

Some ladies do not eat black seeds from sunflowers because they don’t want to spoil their manicure and prefer the white ones from pumpkins. 

"Therapeutic pumpkin"

Some men told me that they regard eating seeds as something done by lumpens, marginals and teenagers.  They don’t want to appear uncultured. But I’m a hundred percent sure that if I invited them to my house and put a full bowl of fried salty seeds in front of them it would be very difficult for them to stop nibbling. It concerns only my friends from the South, but not from Moscow or from the North. They do not understand this kind of drug – they have their own.

It is written "Fresh harvest" - means that the harvest was croped in the autumn ( it is winter 2013now)

БЫКИ - means BULLS - it is a sotr of seeds

P.S. I asked about 20 people using my facebook account. My “southern” friends replied at once with long descriptions of their “pros and cons”. The “Northern” ones were very much surprised to get such a strange question from me.