Diet in Socialism or Capitalism

My childhood grocery store in 2015

Thanks to food additives, semi-prepared foods in grocery stores, lockdowns, a more sedentary life in front of a computer screen, larger portions of food in restaurants and burger joints, ever present sugar in every type of food consumed, and less daily walking than the average human, Americans have added more pounds to their frames.

According to most nutrition experts, who constantly push a vegan diet, vegetarian diet, salads, lots of cardboard-tasting kale, low carb diets, and many other restrictive food consumption methods, to be overweight in America is a shame and a severe health hazard.

Food has always been plentiful in relatively free societies if the government does not interfere with the economy through price controls, the supply of goods, or create severe inflation via out-of-control money printing and spending.  

Food is quite scarce in socialist societies ruled by the incompetent and evil Communist Party.

As food becomes scarcer in our stores due to the supply disruption of Covid-19-driven government rules and mandates, as your favorite ingredients to cook meals at home become more expensive due to escalating inflation caused by Biden regime’s disastrous economic policies and performance, people will be thinner. I call it the Biden diet.

I still remember the communist diet Ceausescu forced all Romanians to survive on. Some of us looked good very thin but many were gaunt and pale, far from healthy, and quite malnourished. He called this diet the “scientific diet.”

Former Ambassador to Romania (1981-1985), David Funderburk, wrote in his book, Pinstripes and Reds, “The scientific diet with little or no meat was one of the sickest jokes played on the Romanian people. When the average Romanian was doing without meat, standing in long lines day after day, and scrambling around for scarce rationed items such as cooking oil, coffee, milk, eggs, cheese products, and other foods, as well as shampoo and soap, Ceausescu warned the people of the dangers of overeating. Claiming falsely that Romania was among the world’s leaders in per capita calorie consumption, Romanians were advised to eat less meat.” (p. 78)

Romanians were told that the scarcity of food was caused by greedy black-market speculators who bought out the entire supply and sold it for profit and by other criminals in society. The truth was that there was plenty of food produced but it was sold abroad for hard currency and the Romanians were delivered scraps in stores.

In late 1984 and early 1985 shortages were even more drastic, deliveries of food reduced by 50 percent. I can attest to such shortages during our 1985 visit when for six weeks we had to struggle to find food every day, sometimes taking the bus halfway to Bucharest, stopping in several villages to purchase eggs, milk, cheese, butter, potatoes, or chicken at black market prices as the stores were empty.

Why would Ceausescu order that the food be sold as export to other countries? He wanted to industrialize the country very fast and needed the money to finance monstrous industrial projects that were a drain on the economy but created jobs for the political prisoners who were forced to dig and build Ceausescu’s massive industrial projects for free.

In 1982, Romania’s per capita meat consumption was the lowest in the Western world. At the time, a U.S. Department of Agriculture study showed that “East Germany, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary, had over three times Romania’s meat consumption. Poland, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, and the Soviet Union had roughly three times Romania’s per capita meat consumption.” Romania’s annual per capita meat consumption in 1980 was 24.2 kg (53.35 lbs.), the Soviet Union 58.3 kg, East Germany 85.9 kg, Hungary 73.0 kg, while U.S. had 112.6 kg. (The New York Times, August 25, 1981)

People stole whatever they produced in the factories they worked in and bartered it for food stolen by others in their places of employment to survive. Ceausescu dealt with his lies and the mismanagement of the economy by sentencing to death those who stole to survive and were caught.

Funderburk wrote about three workers sentenced to death for stealing meat from a packing plant in Tirgoviste in December 1983 and about peasants who stole corn, wheat, and livestock from forced co-operative farms.

People were told to eat more rabbit instead of pork, chicken, or beef. Never mind that only a few farmers raised rabbits for their own families and high-rise city dwellers did not have that luxury to raise rabbits or chicken. Apparatchiks indoctrinated people that rabbit meat was part of Ceausescu’s “scientific diet.”

Growing up in Romania and becoming an adult, I never recall eating beef at home or in my grandparents’ village at all. Our staple of meat was either chicken, pork at Christmas time, rabbit stew from grandpa’s yard, and sometimes fish from the market. To this day, beef is not in my diet.

We can all stand to lose a few pounds, but do we want to lose them through voluntary diet and exercise, by cutting back on caloric consumption, or the socialist way, because the grocery shelves are bare, and the meat is too expensive or unavailable to the masses?