Even some Kremlin allies are expressing shock at the idea of “food crematoria”, while one Russian Orthodox priest has denounced the campaign, which officially began on Thursday, as sinful.

As of Thursday, more than 265,000 Russians had signed an online petition on website Change.org calling for seized food to be given away to the needy, a sign that the crackdown on contraband food may have struck a nerve.

In one instance in southern Russian Federation, workers fed 114 tonnes of pork into an incinerator, while 73 tonnes of peaches labelled as Turkish reached the end of the road on a highway west of Moscow.

Aleksei Alekseyenko, a spokesman for Russia’s agricultural safety regulator, said: “Meat and dairy products can be used as raw materials for high-protein flour that is added to food for livestock”.

As The Guardian reports, the order from President Vladimir Putin includes a requirement that the food “must be destroyed in front of witnesses, and the act should be captured on video, to preclude corruption”.

Russian government plans for mass destruction of banned Western food imports have provoked outrage in a country where poverty rates are soaring and memories remain of starvation during Soviet times.

Russian television showed officials dumping truckloads of round bright orange cheeses on a patch of wasteland and then driving over them with a steamroller in the Belgorod region bordering Ukraine.

In this photo taken on Wednesday, July 15, 2015, waiters of prestigious and expensive “Bosco Cafe” wait for customers in Moscow’s Red Square, with the Spasskaya Tower in the background, Russia. Andrei Prozorov, a leading expert at Infowatch, one of Russia’s leading IT security companies, said that the widespread ban on the use of Western technology would not be effective and would result an outflow of high-tech information technologies from Russian Federation.

The European Union has extended for a year a series of measures to help EU farmers cope with a Russian ban on their produce.

The ban on commercial food imports has hurt both sides. Food brought into to the country for personal consumption is still permitted. After all, Russian Federation doesn’t need to destroy food, there are other options.

“Destroying the products only creates another expenditure on the state budget, while the redistribution of goods can be handled by charitable organisations without any drain on Russia’s budget”, the authors add. “We are prepared to create a public commission which will decide what to do with sanctioned products and it will organise their redistribution”.

Putin has praised the import ban, saying it was spurring agricultural growth.

“In most regions, most of the affected sectors have been able to find alternative markets, either within the EU or beyond”, it said in a statement. The list also contained finished products, such as cheese and cottage cheese based on vegetable fats.

Thanks to mutual sanctions between Russian Federation and Europe, a no-tolerance policy has been placed on imported “Western” foodstuffs.