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.My childhood grocery store in 2015
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?
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