Socialism

So it turns out this is actually super hard to analyse by modern standards (I am also coming at it from another country with different guidelines again, which complicates it a bit) so take all of what I'm saying with a pretty hefty grain of salt.

We don't group foods together like this any more, but it seems to have been the done thing back in the '80s-'90s so I'm a bit out of my depth. These days potatoes wouldn't be lumped in with grain / carbohydrates, they'd count as vegetables. Likewise eggs wouldn't go with dairy, they'd go with meat and fish as protein.

Calorie intake depends heavily on demographics; age, sex, physical activity level, etc, so it's really hard to assess for huge populations like this and there's fuck all information about the USSR in that area from this time. Generally speaking though, NHS recommends 2000cal/day for women and 2500 for men. So, they're both way over on that, but the USA is over by more. WHO recommends no more than 10% daily energy from sugar. Again, they're both over on that, but the USA is over by a lot more. Fats are recommended to be 20%-35% of daily energy; this article doesn't account for fats from dairy or meat so the numbers quoted here are low, and impossible to separate out. I did, however, find a journal article from 1985 while trying to work all this out. This one puts men aged 40-59 at 2567cal/day in the USSR and 2554cal/day in USA; a 13 calorie difference (that's about half an ounce of apple) with USSR higher, but a lot closer to modern NHS guidelines for both. For the USSR; 38% from fat vs. 40% from fat in USA. Again, both over, but USA over by more.

In conclusion, this data is badly categorised, way too high-level, and too over-generalised to really draw much of value from, but speaking really broadly, yeah. About the same amount of food. Neither is ideal, but the Soviet diet is probably slightly better. I'd really, really like to see the sources they used.