In the Soviet era, the political joke was the first line of defense against the machinery of repression. The jokes are cropping up again, many over Vladimir Putin’s zany crackdown on European flowers and food imports, like the satirical video “Death of a Parmesan,” in which the destruction of foreign cheeses becomes a ballad about a heroic military campaign. “This song is about the unusual stupidity of today’s Russia,” reads the caption.

The crackdown began with Mr. Putin’s decree on July 29 ordering the destruction of all food brought into Russia in violation of a ban on food imports from Western countries participating in economic and travel sanctions against Russia over the annexation of Crimea. That resulted in the well-publicized destruction of mountains of meat, vegetables and cheese.

This week, the big news was a huge police raid on an “international criminal gang” peddling illicit cheese, prompting the latest round of jokes. At the same time, Russian agricultural inspectors have begun destroying piles of Dutch flowers, purportedly because they carry insects, but really to dissuade the Netherlands from pursuing an investigation into the downing of a Malaysian jetliner over Ukraine, in which most victims were Dutch.

The politicization of food is not new in Mr. Putin’s Russia: Polish meat, Georgian and Moldovan wines and Ukrainian chocolate are among the products banned at one time or another, usually under trumped-up health concerns, to score political points.