b'Natalya Atuchina, a retired teacher in the Siberian city of Omsk, makes a special pot of borscht every other month to tabulate her husbands Borscht Index.Photo: Sergei SapotskyMs. Atuchinas soup is the benchmark for the Borscht Index, a metric her husband Sergei Komarovskikh devised a little over a year ago to track food costs in their Siberian city. Since then, the borschts price has risen 49.5%, evidence of the real-life sting of inflation in Russia.Borscht is a very objective indicator, says Mr. Komarovskikh, a 66-year-old retired journalist. In a recent report for local news agency OmskInform, he wrote: The borscht cant lie.The reason the borscht cant lie is because it is served up with a combi-nation of conviviality and tradition, working its magic on multiple levels at oncethe visceral, the nutritional, the cultural. Deconstruct it economically and add its components back up, and you dont get borscht. Which doesnt mean we must completely reject the idea of a Borscht Index. Might be a welcome addition to the morning news. Todays Borscht Index is up 47 rubles. Everyone knows that numbers can lie. Yet most of us seem all too prone to forget that even the most objective of indicators are subject to interpretation. 63'