I am cooking breakfast this morning and as the smell of oven-baked bacon is wafting through the house, memories flood in from my childhood spent with my grandparents in the country.
As a child, I did not realize at the time how much hard work
they were putting in every day to keep their family alive in the socialist
economy disastrously run by the Communist Party.
The smell of bacon conjures up grandma’s numerous jars of
lard, carefully stored on shelves in the damp and cool cellar, arranged next to
jars filled with tomato sauce, cooked in the large iron pot over the fire in
the yard as the tomato crop came in by the bushels and nothing was left to
waste or rot.
The tomato jars and bottles were sealed with tar. Finding
convenient Mason jars, wax, and other canning supplies easily found on the
shelves in America, was unheard of in communist Romania. The villagers used whatever
they could find or repurpose. These jars of lard were the source of flavorful
cooking and frying many dishes through the winter and spring when food was
scarce.
Sunflower oil was hard to find and, when available, was distributed
in long lines to citizens fighting over that day’s delivery, with rationing
cards in hand, distributed specifically for oil, sugar, flour, rice, and other
basic cooking ingredients.
When sunflower oil was in short supply, the state decided to
produce rapeseed oil, a dark yellow, thick, and peculiarly smelling oil that
nobody cared much for but bought it when nothing else was available. You will
be surprised what you can eat when food is hard to find. The centralized socialist
government ruled by the communist party was not particularly adept at planning
for the food supply properly. The economy was always in shambles and the proletariat’s
standard of living was probably the worst in Europe, save for Albania.
We did not have bacon per say, it was just home-smoked pork
fat which we used in cut cubes to eat with bread, mustard, and paprika for
breakfast. When grandma rendered pork fat into bacon so that she could fry
things with lard throughout the year, the house smelled like heavenly fried
bacon. A few small pieces of fried meat were left behind, and grandma would let
me eat one or two as a treat when she cooked. I enjoyed hanging onto her skirt
or grandpas to learn everything.
I never realized how fortunate I was when compared to the
proletariat (read even poorer people) in the city who were at the mercy of the inept
socialist government for their food supply.
Grandma and grandpa always raised chickens and a pig to
slaughter at Christmas and had a large garden of tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers,
okra, onions, garlic, potatoes, and egg plants. The proletariat did not have
the luxury to grow a garden, they relied only on their factory labor and on poorly
run state stores.
My late uncle Tache, a wiry and thin man all his life, still
had a large garden as late as 2016 when I last saw him. He was putting away the
potato and green pepper harvest. He was in his late seventies, still strong as
an ox and active, a man who worked tirelessly to feed his family even though
now they had plenty of food in grocery stores decades after the demise of the communist
state in 1989.
My children and American generations since the baby boomers,
have never really had to survive each day with scraps of food, watery soup, no
meat, no fruits, fresh vegetables, canned and frozen everything, and other
basic fresh food they so take for granted that fill grocery shelves in America.
No entitled millennial who has the gall to call survivors of
communism like me white-privileged, can fathom not finding their favorite food
in so many varieties and brands, much less standing in line for hours each day in
order to eat or buy milk, bread, and toilet paper.
The latest angry and violent generations of Americans, I
call them Generation BC, Brainwashed Communists, will be so surprised when the socialist
paradise they envision and demand, will not deliver them all the free stuff
they were promised and believed they will receive.
The biggest surprise of the free paradise they are being
promised by the Socialist Democrat Party is that their gluten-free bread and food
will not be available at all. They will be lucky to have food to eat much less
foo-foo coffee from Starbucks, spit and chewed by some bird high up in the
Andes mountains.
By the time the reality of “free” and rationed socialist goods
will set in, it will be hard if not extremely unlikely to switch back to the abundance
of capitalist goods and services, to the best standard of living and healthcare
anywhere in the world.
