MOSCOW — The cheeses are spotted with mold. The sausages are ominously gray. Slime is beginning to overtake the chicken.
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. Elderly retirees mass and push before spreads of lukewarm yogurt and moldering fish. Business has never been better, the steely-eyed manager says.
Theoretically, selling expired foodstuffs is a crime punishable by fine under Russian law. 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 chaotic 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 a tub of cottage cheese she bought for 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 who has carefully painted her lips pink before venturing forth into the world. Her overcoat is grimy and her flat 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 in Moscow. 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 far northern suburbs out by the railroad tracks 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.
