On Eating Meat

People who survived the Soviet satellites of the former Iron Curtain, socialist countries run by their respective Communist Parties, can attest to the lack of food and especially meat they were subjected to daily.

One person who recently talked about his experience with food in Poland brought back painful memories. It was common for hungry kids to bully or beat up weaker kids for their sandwich, he said; their parents were members of the Communist Party and thus had access to healthy food. He reminisced about his mom buying a sliver of meat to flavor the soup or stew she was making. Drago was so shocked when he was first offered a piece of steak in the U.S. He thought it was the food ration for the month.

My mom bought bones with which she flavored our soups and potato stews. She could not have bought even a sliver of good meat if she wanted to because it was not available or it would have been too expensive for our meager budget to buy it on the black market. At best, she could have bartered something, but she had nothing of value to exchange for meat.

Such was food rationing on coupons under tyrannical regimes – empty stores and long lines for bread and other necessities that were always in short supply.

I visited Dachau’s Nazi concentration camp 31 years ago and I saw a list in German with the food rations for the camp’s prisoners. They received every morning 350 g of bread and half a liter of ersatz coffee, 3 liters of soup for lunch each week, one noodle soup and other two liters white cabbage soup, and for evening meals four times a week 20-30 g of sausage or cheese and ¾ liter of tea. No wonder the prisoners who survived were skeletal. Meat was almost non-existent in their nutrition; they were starved on purpose.

I watched my mom kill a chicken sometimes and grandpa slaughter at Christmas the pig he raised; it kept many in the family alive throughout the year. In retrospect, it did not look like a humane killing and the pig knew what was happening to him but we needed meat in order to survive and stay somewhat healthy and functioning.

I also remember grandpa burying a pig one year in the back yard because the village vet tech told him that it had trichinosis, and it was not fit for human consumption. But some villagers did eat their sick pigs and died or survived through treatment. A few of my childhood friends died of parasitic infections - they were not lucky to be close to a free medical clinic for treatment.

Some village kids drowned in the creek or in the Proava River when it rained a lot, and the muddy brown water concealed their bodies until the level dropped. Nobody knew how to swim. I never learned until I was almost 21 and living in the U.S.

My aunt Nuta used to take me and my best friend Steluta to the Prahova River - the water was clear and so cold, coming down from the mountains. There were pockets between large boulders where the water was deeper, and the fish were trapped in. We bathed with fishes swimming around us. We were hungry all the time, but it never occurred to us to try to catch the fish. We were afraid that someone would report us to the communist government, and we would go to jail.

Finding abundant meat to eat in the U.S. reminds us of the reality that every day we live, a creature dies to keep us alive. We just do not realize how much killing we do because someone else does the killing for us.

I am obsessed with the show ALONE for several reasons. One is the killing of animals in a survival setting where they are truly alone and must find meat protein, clean water, build a good shelter, and provide heat. Part of finding food is not just picking berries or edible plants which can be boiled and turned into soup. They must hunt and catch wild animals; unless trained, we lost that skill a long time ago. Most of us today would not know how to humanely trap and kill an animal to eat. We do eat meat but are squeamish about the actual killing.

A lady survivalist snared a squirrel, and the momma squirrel came and was trying to revive her baby and she was making all these crying sounds. It was heartbreaking to hear - animals are sentient beings.

A survivalist from West Virginia who hunted and killed with his bow and arrow a beaver in Labrador, Canada, contracted giardiasis, a parasitical infection from the beaver meat - he called it ‘beaver fever.’ Worse still, he had to undress down to his underwear and swim in the freezing river water to retrieve the dead beaver which was floating in the middle.

He got so sick after eating undercooked meat and fat from this beaver that he had to tap out to seek medical help. This was the revenge of the beaver for killing him and leaving his mate alone for life.

But we know that in the circle of life animals eat other animals and maul humans as well if they are in their habitat or vicinity, and they happen to be hungry. Some even slaughter humans for the sport even when not hungry.

Meat has been part of the human diet for 2.6 million years despite the modern time push for vegetarianism. We are lucky in the U.S. that we have such a supply of meat, enough to trade with other nations.

Only in Florida

On our recent five-day adventure in South Florida, we packed all the fun activities we could drive to without being killed or seriously injured on the roads and interstates crisscrossing Broward County and Miami-Dade. And we found ourselves time and time again repeating the phrase, “only in Florida.”

Only in Florida people drive 100 MPH, crossing lanes faster than NASCAR drivers, chasing each other in sleek and expensive cars, like disappearing banshees and people react as if it is the norm.

Only in Florida we see no police officers giving tickets to speeders and bad drivers. Florida car owners, with and without driving licenses, are in a class by themselves when it comes to speeding. Driving rules and road safety are just ordinary and laughable suggestions to them.

Only in Florida highly confident women of all shapes and sizes go out dressed like other people do when doing hot yoga, showing as much skin as possible without being nude – after all, the beach and the ocean are not that far away. A tiny string bikini with a see-through cover or not, is good enough to wear grocery shopping, strolling, or to the mall. The idea that clothes are made to cover the body for reasons of public decency seems to escape them. Fluttering their butterfly or tarantula eyelashes, with perfectly coiffed hair and full makeup at the beach, men adore them for their “easy on the eye” beauty.

In Florida, only foreign visitors and cruise goers speak English. If you speak English, that is too bad because South Floridians are not going to help you. Without Spanish or Spanglish, you must bring a translator in tow.

Only in Florida the culture is so Hispanic-diverse that Broward County and Miami-Dade areas might as well be granted to Cuba, El Salvador, Puerto Rico, Colombia, or Jamaica. Non-Hispanic Americans are only tolerated so long as they spend money on Cuban food and tip generously on top of the automatic 18% service fee.

Only in Florida the sun shines for five straight days, the sky is bright blue, and no airplanes spray the sky with chemicals, turning it into a milky grey mass, covering the sun to mitigate global warming. Those of us unlucky to live elsewhere in America forgot how beautiful the real sky used to be.

Only in Florida can you find Ed’s Castle, an out of this world creation of a Latvian man who built his coral rock castle with primitive tools, imagination, and a labor of unrequited love, in hope that someday the love of his life, who rejected his marriage proposal before he left Latvia, would someday show up and visit his castle.

Only in Florida does a Muscovy duck build her nest next to the entrance of a remarkably busy hotel, unafraid, and incubates seven eggs and guards them like a good and caring momma.

Only in Florida a restaurant takes a yummy red snapper, fries it too long in lard to an unchewable crisp shape which the chef (I use the term loosely) then decorates it (the remaining skeleton) with wilted onion strips, two tomato slices, 2 lemon wedges, and undercooked and inedible rice, all for the price of $67. And tourists pay because other locals recommend the place and the dish as the height of Cuban cuisine.

Only in Florida you find iguanas, an invasive species released into the wild by bored people who dumped their exotic pets outdoors when they tired of them or they grew too big; or possibly proliferated from the Miami Zoo after it was torn up by hurricane Andrew which released all species from its collection into nature where they exploded in population. With their orange, green, and grey skin, iguanas of all sizes appear in the most unlikely places, falling from trees in wintertime in a hibernating and catatonic state.

Only in verdant and colorful south Florida diverse ethnicities have their own delicious cuisines but Cuban food is the king everywhere.

Only in south Florida women of all ages, young and old, dress up like teenagers going to a party.

Only in south Florida air boat tours on the Everglades display as the main attraction a few exemplars of the 200,000 gators, old relatives of dinosaurs who are a nuisance elsewhere in Florida, in swimming pools, in ponds, and on golf courses.

Only in Florida the air wafting from every corner, car, park, boardwalk, and even the beach stinks of marijuana, the unmistakable and unpleasant odor of skunk.

Only in Florida can you drive on the lonely alligator alley and find the occasional gator catching the sun’s rays on the side of the road, unafraid of the cars zipping by.

Only in Florida there is such paradise on earth, the sandy white beaches, the teal blue ocean water, the surfing waves, and the verdant flora and dinosaurian fauna, so amazing and beautiful that you want to go back as soon as you board the plane to go home.

 

The Traditions and the Families We Take for Granted

As far as I can remember, Christmas and New Year’s Eve celebrations were depressing for kids unless it snowed heavily and they could go sledding, ice skating in the streets, and having snowball fights with all the children residing in the apartment complex. Being stuck in a cold apartment, layered to the hilt to stay warm, with nothing to do except read, was really miserable for most kids. We wanted to be outdoors.

It was depressing to watch our parents struggle to find food to cook a special meal for Christmas, for the New Year, and to make ends meet on small state salaries. We were too young, but we understood the word “no” and the phrase, “we can’t afford it.” There was more food in the stores provided for the masses, but the lines were still endless.

Dad always found a small Christmas tree which brought into our small apartment the fragrant essence of fir, bright, shiny colors, and cheer. The kitchen smelled like roasted chicken and pork chops, potatoes, fried sausages made by grandpa, mamaliga (polenta made with yellow corn meal), and mom’s special cornulete (little horns) baked with walnuts, cocoa, sunflower oil, and powdered sugar.

When mom could find beef, she made us a special salad called salata de Boeuf, boiled chopped beef, boiled and chopped potatoes, green peas, and mixed with homemade mayonnaise. The job of mixing the eggs until the mayo took shape was mine on account of my young hands and arms which did not get tired and achy as quickly. We did not have a mixer and frankly, I had never seen one until I came to the United States as an adult. I had never seen any other kitchen appliance or vacuums that most people in the West took for granted.

Mom also made a special Christmas bread, cozonac, with Turkish delights and chopped walnuts folded in cocoa. The loaf was drizzled with a mixture of egg and butter, and it smelled divine while baking in the gas oven.

We were not drinkers, but dad brought home for the holidays two bottles of wine and some plum brandy or rum. It was a tradition to toast the New Year with a full glass of wine in hopes that life in the coming year would be easier and good health and luck would prevail.

We went to grandma’s Orthodox Church in the village on Christmas Eve. When the mass ended, the congregation circled the church three times with burning candles in celebration of Jesus’s birth. The church was empty throughout the year, save for the older ladies in the village who attended regular services, but during Christmas and Easter the church was always full. Those who mustered the courage to attend came to church to praise the birth of Jesus and to pray for a better life.

People shared their extra holiday food with the less fortunate, those alone, sick, widowed, or left without any family.

Christmas time was for families to be home with their loved ones and New Year’s Eve was the time to have a party with the extended family, usually in the country where food and drink was more plentiful. People had gardens and canned a lot, and some raised pigs to feed many at Christmas. It was the time of the year when we had the most protein and everyone shared in the bounty.

Holidays became more sedate as the years flew by and we got older. We have plenty of food now but fewer and fewer people to share it with. The Christmas tree seems lonely without the laughter of children. There is no Bogart to drink the tree water and to sleep under the low hanging ornaments and the twinkling lights. He crossed the Rainbow Bridge five years ago.

Mom died a year and a half ago and her loss changed our lives fundamentally. She was our matriarch, the super glue that kept our small family together. Her happy spirit is always with us. She is finally reunited with my dad in Heaven.

Our people have scattered around the world, with their own families, unable to visit their loved ones. Many passed away. Gone are the times when the children remained in the same village or even the same town with their parents. They have dispersed everywhere for better opportunities and to build their own homes, seldom returning to the place they were born in or spent their formative years.

It is true, you can never go back home, you will not find what you were looking for because life has moved on, but the Christmas traditions we once took for granted will endure no matter where we are, and so will the memories.

Survival and Respect for Our Food Sources

I am obsessed with the show ALONE for several reasons. Number one is the killing of animals which I could not do. I do eat chicken and fish and I know how and where that meat comes from.

I watched my mom kill chickens and saw her holding its head while the body was dancing in the grass, dying. She then submerged the whole thing in boiling water to make it easier to pluck its feathers. I always left the tiny apartment because the smell made me sick to my stomach.

When I was growing up, I knew grandpa slaughtered a pig every year for the extended family during the Christmas feast, The red blood splattered in the white snow remains in my memory to this day. In retrospect, it did not look like a humane killing and the pig knew what was happening to him.

I remember grandpa burying a pig one year, far in the woods, because the village vet tech told him that it had trichinosis worms, and it was not fit for human consumption. 

A few of my childhood friends died of parasitic infestations, the result of living off the land, just like these contestants on ALONE. The children who died were not lucky to be live close to a medical clinic that could have treated them. There was no doctor assigned to the village even though it was only 10 km from a large city. The bus ran twice a day, but people had little money to travel.

I remember when Mom’s youngest sister used to take me and my best friend Steluta to the Prahova River. The water had the clarity of crystal and was so cold, coming down from the mountains. There were natural pockets between large boulders where the water was deeper, and large fish were trapped.

Prahova River

We played in the water with fishes swimming around us. We were hungry all the time, but it never occurred to us to try to catch any. We were afraid that someone would report us to the communist government, and we would go to jail. Technically everything belonged to the party, including the river, and we did not have their permission to fish.

The ALONE survival show brings to life for me the reality that every day we live, some creatures die to keep us alive. We just do not realize how much killing we do indirectly because someone else does the killing for us.

The reality show’s participants have revealed survival skills, gathering, hunting, fire building, shelter building, bow hunting, primitive survival, endurance in the face of starvation, standing up to large predatory animals, basket weaving, tool-carving, and other skills. They all have shown respect and gratitude for what they fished, hunted, and killed to eat. It was not pretty, but it was life.

Survivalists knew what plants to collect to supplement their food and which have medicinal properties. In our modern world, we are entirely removed from such knowledge, and from our meat sources if we consume meat.

Urbanites, who often are vegetarians, do not have gardens and have no idea how to plant, grow, and harvest vegetables and legumes; they are just as far removed from their food sources as meat eaters are.

A lady survivalist snared a squirrel. Momma squirrel came immediately, trying to revive her baby, and she was making all these crying sounds and chittering loudly. It was heartbreaking!

A survivalist from West Virginia who hunted and killed with his bow and arrow a beaver in Labrador, Canada, contracted giardiasis, a parasitical infection from the beaver meat - he called it ‘beaver fever.’

He had to undress down to his underwear and swim in the freezing water to retrieve the dead beaver’s body which was floating in the middle of the river. Hunger was stronger than the potential for hypothermia.

Within hours of consuming the undercooked beaver meat and fat, he got so sick that he had to tap out to seek medical attention. Was it the revenge of the beaver for killing him/her and leaving his/her mate alone for life? I have empathy for both the man and the poor beavers. But then larger animals maul humans all the time as well if they are in their habitat or vicinity, and they happen to be hungry.

Joe Keller wrote about his haunting hunting encounter. “I shot a deer once. Never again. There were two of them that jumped over a stone wall in the woods. The first was a doe and the second was a spike buck, three-four years old. I shot the buck, and it dropped on the spot. The doe was about 30 yards away and turned around. I called for my brothers-in-law, and they came running. We were all bent over the dead buck and the doe, its mother, stuck her head in-between us and tried to get the buck to stand up by nuzzling it a few times. She looked at us, as if we could help her. After a couple of minutes her eyes got watery, her head drooped, and she slowly plodded herself way away from us. I have not killed as much as n insect since that day. It still haunts me.”

The worst health scare in the Alaska wilderness of this reality show was the case of a young man who contracted trichinosis and it attacked major organs so severely that he was hours from death. His former 32-year-old heart resembled the heart of an 87-year-old. It took him months to recover from the damage to his organs and he suffered from debilitating congestive heart failure.

Watching these survivalists choke down roasted crickets, worms, and other bugs convinced me even more that the globalist plan to destroy our food sources and supply and replace them with farmed bugs in the name of saving the planet from an invented global warming is not for me.

 

Farming Practices, Food, and Shortages Caused by Inept Governments

I was watching with fascination a documentary about monastic farm practices in Tudor England.  A historian and two archeologists introduced the viewers and the visitors to farming methods, tools, food, clothing, and customs from 500 years ago by actually tilling the soil, planting crops, harvesting them, building tools from that period, cooking, burning crockery, churning butter, raising sheep, pigs, and chicken, hunting, fishing, and living, at least on screen, like the monks had done during the fifteenth century. What Life Was Like In The Tudor Era | Tudor Monastery | Absolute History - Bing video

What was fascinating to me was the fact that many of the implements and practices from the Tudor period looked familiar because I had seen, experienced, and used them on my grandfather’s “private” small farm as a child growing up in socialist Romania.

The wooden butter churn was quite recognizable and so was the wooden plow pulled by oxen. Grandpa used to cut hay by hand with a scythe, gather the hay in piles with a home-made wooden rake, and then used a wooden pitchfork to move the hay unto a cart and then to the dry loft for use during the winter.

The family planted the garden in straight rows with deep separation ditches between the seed line (the seeds were spaced out enough to allow for plant growth) to enable water flooding from the creek when rain was scarce, and irrigation became necessary to keep the plants alive.

When the Colorado beetles started devouring every plant in their small gardens, they used powdered DDT to kill them as directed by the government that sold it. No amount of picking the bugs off the plants made any difference in the infestation. The fruit trees were attacked by fruit flies. There were so many open outhouses in the village.

The dirt had to be prepared by hand, using a metal hoe and hard labor to cut the hard-crusted topsoil and make it crumble enough for seeding. All this backbreaking work had to be done in their spare time as each villager owed a certain number of work hours per week to the cooperative farm “owned” collectively by the villagers.

Each peasant home raised a pig for slaughter at Christmas, chickens, ducks, geese, and the occasional rabbits. Some even had a milking cow, and many had sheep. The village shepherd, an actual paid position in the kolkhoz, took the cooperative farm’s cows each day to graze outside the village and returned them in the evening. These cows had either been confiscated by the cooperative farm or were in the ownership of a specific peasant who still had to make produce donations to make up for the cow that they were allowed to keep.

Inhabitants were forced to toil and put in the crops and harvest them. They had no choice as the Bolsheviks confiscated most of their lands and forced them into a collective farm. This collective farm or kolkhoz as the Russians called it, had to be tended to collectively by all villagers. They were left with enough land for the home they lived in, a yard, and a plot for a small garden.

The peasants in the kolkhoz were paid as salaried employees based on quality and quantity of labor contributed. The left describes the kolkhoz as a voluntary union of peasants, but it was hardly voluntary when their land was confiscated by the state authorities in power and, to survive and eat, they had to work for the state-controlled kolkhoz.

Land had been expropriated from the peasants in 1929 in the Soviet Union and later in Romania (there were state farms as early as 1945), after the king abdicated and the monarchy ended in 1948. The royal family’s thousands of acres of agricultural land, forests, several castles, and palaces were confiscated by the communist regime. A king’s inheritance: The properties of the Romanian royal family | Romania Insider (romania-insider.com)

According to Romanian agricultural sources, 75 percent of all arable land belonged to cooperative farms and 17 percent were state farms which were formed as early as 1945. The rest (8%) were small private farms which brought their harvest to the government-sanctioned markets for sale. In mountainous regions where cooperative farms were not feasible to organize, locals grew food for their own extended families.

State farms were a socialist enterprise. They received the best land from the state and were allowed to use the state’s machines, chemicals, and irrigation water. Such advantage increased their crop yield when compared to cooperative farms. The communist government told the state farms how to operate, peasants were paid a fixed wage for their labor and had no rights to a private plot of land for their own gardens.

Cooperative farms also took their production orders from the socialist government, but they technically “owned” the land and basic equipment. “The cooperatives were told what crops to grow, how to grow them, and how much to deliver to the state.” The peasants were forced to work at least 300 days per year on the cooperative and, if the cooperative had no work for them, they could be transferred to other farms or to construction and lumber work sites. These cooperative “farmers” earned an income of only 60 percent when compared to others and had much smaller pensions. It is safe to say that income equality meant misery for some. 

“In the late 1980s, the systematization program aimed to subordinate privately owned land and private plots on cooperative farms to the regional agro-industrial councils and thereby tighten central control of private farming. Systematization would eliminate many of the plots, as villages were levelled to create vast fields for socialized farming. This policy directly contradicted the government's mandate in the 1980s that the population feed itself by cultivating small plots (even lawns and public parks had been converted to vegetable gardens) and breeding poultry and rabbits.” Romania - AGRICULTURE (countrystudies.us)

This period coincided with a period when the Communist Party told all citizens how many calories they were allowed consume per day according to their profession, how much they should weigh, and the shortages of food were quite severe.

The ruling Soviet-style state maintained operational control via “elected” chairmen and political units in the machine-tractor stations which furnished heavy equipment in return for payments of agricultural produce. And the terms were never favorable to the peasants, only to the ruling regime. Often these tractors were not operational for lack of parts or lack of people who could fix them.

Among the many horrible decisions made after the Bolsheviks took power, one stands out. The “agricultural communist planners” ordered the slaughter of thousands of workhorses during the first three decades of communist rule. The horses were replaced by tractors. The number of tractors grew from 13,700 in 1950 to 168,000 in 1983. But in 1986, the regime rulers reversed their management practices through the National Council for Agriculture, Food Industry, Forestry, and Water Management and called for reducing the number of tractors in service by one-third and replace them by horse-drawn equipment. Eighteen to 25 percent of all harvesting and hauling was to be down by horse-drawn equipment by 1990. So much for 500 years of agricultural progress. Romania - AGRICULTURE (countrystudies.us)

Mechanizing agriculture raised the possibility to grow more grain and corn but there were some problems. Much of the workforce left in agriculture were elderly peasants who were not seeking better paying jobs in factories within commuting distance. The elderly did not have the expertise to fix these tractors when they broke down nor did they know how to operate them properly. Often crops rotted in the fields because there was nobody left to harvest them.

Poor crop rotation practices yielded smaller crops and droughts plagued the arable lands that were not connected to irrigation. Additionally, only 34-36 kg of fertilizer were used per acre, an inadequate amount.

“Furthermore, much of the best farmland had been severely damaged by prolonged use of outsized machinery, which had compacted the soil, by unsystematic application of agricultural chemicals, and by extensive erosion.” Romania - AGRICULTURE (countrystudies.us)

In the 1970s, the socialist regime I grew up under and its “private” farmers, still used agricultural implements that were 500 years old, the same ones used in the monastic Tudor period. Agricultural progress must be slow in socialist regimes.

Not only did a major agricultural country had very thin and gaunt people, some of whom starved to death in winter, but severe food shortages plagued the country in the 1980s while the socialist centralized planners, political and community organizers, were selling the good crops to the west for hard currency, currency which they used to support their lavish lifestyles and to develop impractical and unprofitable industries across the country.

People were employed for meager wages in factories but had to struggle every day to find food, standing in long bread and grocery lines and for other necessities.

Wallachia, the breadbasket of the country, was once a proud producer of cereals in the Bărăgan Plain, a steppe famous for its black soil, perfect for growing grain in general. On a visit in 2015, I noticed the unplanted fields, then occupied by unsightly windmills turning in the wind, none of which, I learned later from an official with the energy ministry, were connected to any power grid. The windmills had been donated by the EU and had been hurriedly placed across The Bărăgan Plain. What happened to the breadbasket of Wallachia?

According to official online sources, Romania, an EU-member since 2007, imported food from the EU in 2006 worth 2.4 billion euros, up 20 percent from the previous year. Romania exports to the EU 64 percent of agri-food products and imports from EU countries 54 percent of food. Romania imports substantial quantities of grain and 2.8 percent of the country’s GDP is derived from agricultural activity.

In the U.S., about 2.7 percent of the population are farmers who grow food and feed the rest of the country. More family farms are being sold to large agri-businesses or are being paid by the government not to farm certain crops, or to burn the yield entirely to manipulate the market price.

As we see dozens of food warehouses going up in flames recently around the U.S., one wonders, would our fast-becoming socialist country eventually starve its citizens, or might they have to fight for limited sources of food like we had to do in the 1970s and 1980s socialist Romania? I hope not.

 

 

 

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?

 

 

Snow and Food

Now that Sf. Ioan Botezatorul Orthodox traditions have ended on January 6, we are preoccupied with abundant snow and ice. The state park nearby is closed indefinitely as the damage from one foot of wet and heavy snow is too extensive and too dangerous to allow the public inside the park’s 508 acres of forested land and trails.

Humans cannot be trusted, they are too dumb to avoid uprooted trees and broken branches. I wonder how we survived for so long prior to the federal and state government daddy telling us what to do all the time?

The forecast predicts more snow and inclement weather to the delight of children and adults alike who secretly wish for more paid snow days.  Teachers, who have not taught much for the last two years, are up in arms if the schools do not close pronto.

Store deliveries of food and other necessities have come to a halt during last week’s snow emergency botched by the Virginia’s Department of Transportation. Roads were unplowed and people could not get out of their driveways, everyone was snowed in.

Supplies had already slowed down for months now due to Biden regime’s economic policies and preposterous Corona-virus never-ending mandates, job-killing economic payouts to people to remain on unemployment and welfare, and abject fear driven non-stop into the weak-minded population who remained shut-in for fear of death.

On my almost daily trips to the grocery store, I found the shelves emptier than before, with merchandise spread out to give the impression that shelves were full; but to the trained shopper’s eye, they were at least half empty. The milk and dairy refrigerators were empty, an entire wall of nothing. Where is the abundance I saw when I first set foot in an American grocery store, shortly after arriving from a communist country?

Empty shelves bring back painful memories of starvation and standing in endless lines daily for groceries in hopes that something will be delivered and we would have food that day. We are not there yet in America, but in this part of northern Virginia, it is closer and closer. When Walmart has so many empty shelves, it is extremely worrisome.

America is socialist now and it seems bleaker than ever, as the Democrat socialist regime in power aided by RINOs at the federal level, and in many Democrat-controlled states, are driving the economy into the ground. Yet everyone seems to want socialism despite people like me telling them, be careful what you wish for because nothing is free. Every decision has an opportunity cost.

There are beautiful vineyards in Virginia, dedicated to wine making. But our grapes, fresh fruits, and vegetables in grocery stores come from California, Florida, Washington state, Chile, and other countries like Peru and Mexico. I buy grapes from Chile and, invariably, when I bring the bag home, a weak bee crawls out of the package, and sometimes a Japanese beetle or two, stowaways from a warmer climate and from another world.

When grapes are too expensive, I replace them with a box of raisins. Raisins were a real treat in my childhood when chocolate was not available. In winter time, after searching all day, my dad would bring home a rare treat, a bunch of grapes, so dried out on the vine, they were practically raisins. Thus I was introduced to raisins, nature’s sweet treat, no sugar or other preservatives added.

The type II diabetic rates in the communist country were quite low for the simple reason that nobody was fat and everybody was hungry most of the time. Extreme thinness and low type II diabetes was one silver lining to our misery. We survived in a socialist economy run by the incompetent Communist Party apparatchiks who were well fed and rotund and did not care that we were not.

                                                                    Photo: Ileana Johnson

My Story for Shark Week

In 1990 I flew to San Diego with uncle Ion who was visiting from Romania. He wanted to see an exotic place in America and San Diego fit the bill.

We went to the aquarium, to the rocks on Imperial Beach, to La Jolla, and across the border into Tijuana.

I rented a car, braved the freeway traffic which was no small feat, coming from MS where the highways are pretty much empty most of the time, took our passports to make sure we were let back in by the border officers, on account that uncle Ion was very tanned and did not look like a pale gringo by any stretch of the imagination, left the car at the border, and walked across into Mexico all the way to downtown Tijuana where there was a large cathedral.

I will not bore you with the details of flies swarming over the freshly cut pineapple in the mercado or the human excrement on the floor of a very busy outdoor restaurant that sold yummy smelling tacos and other Mexican food, or the pungent odor of urine across a bridge.

You are probably wondering what this has to do with sharks. After all, we did not dare get in the angry water and surf breaking across the rocks in Imperial Beach - neither one of us can surf or swim in such high waves.

On returning from Mexico, the border agents did examine uncle Ion’s Romanian passport with suspicion; after we drove back to San Diego, we decided to eat in a nice restaurant in an outdoor mall.

The special for the day, you guessed it, was shark steak. I ordered for him, and he enjoyed his food immensely as I did. The difference was that I knew what the tasty meat was and he didn’t, he just assumed it was some ordinary fish. He did not speak English and he trusted me.

After we left, I asked him if he enjoyed being a cannibal. I explained that, what he ate, was a special kind of seafood, it was shark meat. "You never know what this shark ate before he was caught and became your meal, uncle."

He turned rather yellow and, from then on, carried his English-Romanian dictionary with him at all times, just to be on the safe side.

Uncle Ion, now 81 years old, still remembers this memorable incident from 31 years ago, and I’m not sure he has forgiven me.

 

Psychological Hoarding and Government Induced Hoarding

The Mayo Clinic describes a hoarder as a person who survives in cluttered living spaces, moves items from one pile to another without the ability to throw anything away, acquires seemingly useless items, empty boxes, wrappers, trash, newspapers, magazines, bits of paper, discarded old toys, ratty clothes, household supplies, and spoiled food. Such a hoarder would buy, search for, and store items of little to no value.

It is alleged that there are more males than females who exhibit such a disorder and 2-6% of the population exhibits hoarding disorders. Causes of hoarding may include heredity, brain damage, serotonin issues, and other medical conditions.

The primary fears of the disposophobic are losing things and disposing of useless personal possessions.

Merriam Webster dictionary defines hoarding as a psychological compulsion to continually accumulate a variety of items often considered worthless by others coupled with an inability to discard the items without great distress. Such distress affects the hoarder’s health, career, and relationships with family members and others.

A person with dementia is more likely to hoard because of the anxiety that he/she might lose something. At the same time, piles of belongings may give them comfort. Alzheimer’s patients often hide the things they hoard, forget where they put them, and then accuse family or imaginary people of having taken them – food, clothing, money, and other possessions they deem valuable.

In our society, food hoarding occurs in children for reasons of neglect, deprivation, chaotic or disrupted home environments, difficulties in schools, disordered eating, and other psychological problems. Most adults hoard and hide food due to an eating disorder.

Adults who survived food deprivation under communist regimes where food shortages and famine were common, tended to hoard food to divide it among loved ones to make sure they had something to eat even during hard times when pantry and store shelves were bare, and food could not be bought or found. The intent was to avoid starvation.

Throughout history, when governments have intervened in the smooth operation of free markets based on supply and demand, the results have been disastrous, not the least of which are hoarding and the emergence of black markets. I am not talking about the psychological problems of hoarding personal items when people have a hard time getting rid of anything they own, I am talking about reality-based hoarding, the result of fear of shortage or imminent societal collapse.

Natural disasters such as announced hurricanes or tornadoes often compel people to buy excessive food, bottled water, gasoline, a generator, milk, but especially toilet paper. Civil unrest or fear of disease such as this corona pandemic can also force people to hoard food and other necessities, including toilet paper. In a category of its own are the preppers who are ready for any end of the world, political holocaust unrest scenario. They purchase food with the shelf life of 25 years or more and build shelters/bunkers underground, in caves, or decommissioned bunkers.

Hoarding goods in excess of immediate need is caused by artificial scarcity. Artificial scarcity can be caused by unnecessary government intervention that scares people into hoarding behavior, i.e., panic driven by government forcing the closure of businesses and locking down the working population which can no longer produce necessary goods for society to function properly. Best example was the Covid-19 interference in the market. The domino effect of unintended consequences is propped up by endless money printing and government welfare distributed as direct cash payments to Americans and illegal workers, and extended unemployment.

An example from the past of government interference in the market is price controls at Valley Forge when farmers, who needed to feed their families, did not abide by the government’s price controls, and sold their produce to the British for gold while Washington’s continental army was running at near starvation mode.

Economists believe this is what happened after 1971 when President Nixon decided to experiment with price controls. The economy suffered a plague of shortages, “we ran out of nearly everything” and, after price controls ended in 1974, most of the shortages disappeared.

Monopolies and cartels such as OPEC can also cause artificial scarcity of one product/service they offer. Holding a patent for a new drug can cause shortages and high prices as a result.

The New Deal issued the Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA) which was “designed to boost agricultural prices by reducing surpluses. The government bought livestock for slaughter and paid farmers subsidies not to plant on part of their land.” This act caused artificial shortages.

Deliberate destruction of goods such as in a war situation can cause panic hoarding driven by the fear of starvation. Such items in short supply become mediums of exchange, more valuable than currency, i.e., cigarettes, bullets, chocolate, soap, women’s pantyhose, medicine, and vitamins.

Destruction of goods because there is no longer a distributor or buyer for that good can also cause hoarding. The Covid-19 action by the government in 2020 had caused farmers in Florida to destroy tons of tomatoes, squash, and other vegetables which were previously bought by restaurants. Closed by government order, restaurants were no longer buying fresh produce. Farmers also dumped thousands of gallons of milk as schools, universities, and restaurants were closed indefinitely. At the same time, a shortage of milk in grocery stores forced grocers to impose a purchase limit of one bottle or one gallon. People thus hoarded milk and canned produce whenever available.

People have engaged in what is called panic-buying of certain products in anticipation of a disaster, shortage, or large price increase. Some examples of panic-buying through history include the first and second world wars when everything was in short supply; the 1918-1920 Spanish flu pandemic when people stored quinine and remedies for flu such as Vicks Vapor/Rub; Cuban missile crisis in 1962 when people bought excess quantities of canned food; any hurricane or tornado causes people to buy excess milk, bottled water, bread, and toilet paper; Coronavirus pandemic caused people to panic-buy food, facemasks, rubbing alcohol, hand-sanitizer, anti-bacterial wipes, anti-viral wipes, and toilet paper. Panic-buying causes price gouging by both individuals and grocery stores.

The most glaring example of constant hoarding occurred during the entire existence of the socialist republics of the Iron Curtain which were run by the highly inefficient centralized government of the Communist Party. Citizens of such countries like Soviet Union, China, Poland, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, North Korea, Vietnam, and Cuba were forced to constantly hoard items in short supply. Most products were in short supply because of the absolute mismanagement by Communist Party apparatchiks.

In these socialist/communist countries hoarding was punishable by law, and those caught served jail time. Both a black market and a barter market emerged from the severe shortage of everything. People were accustomed to carry around large sums of money and jute shopping bags to join a line in progress because they knew, whatever was on sale, they needed it.

But why hoard toilet paper? It is a basic instinct to be and stay clean. There is also the knowledge that, unlike food where there are substitutes, toilet paper has no substitute unless you consider paper towels, newspapers, and leaves.

People stockpile toilet paper because it is not perishable and are afraid that the domestic production and distribution will be disrupted. If needed, toilet paper can also be used as cosmetic wipes and tissue. Toilet paper under the centralized Communist Party economy had huge splinters in it and was always in short supply. Finally, people engage in mob mentality, ‘everyone is hoarding TP, I should too.’

There are 150 companies that manufacture toilet paper, and the average person uses under 100 rolls a year, some much less. The U.S. demand for toilet paper stands at about 3 billion rolls a year. We import about 10 percent of our needs of TP.

If hoarding from grocery stores is not an option, people turn to canning and drying fruits and vegetables. If you freeze a lot of food, remember that, if the power goes out, the cache will spoil. Twice we lost the contents of our freezer and refrigerator due to spoilage after hurricanes when electricity was out for days and even weeks.

No matter what you hoard for survival, you will eventually run out if production and distribution are disrupted for extended periods of time.

Psychological hoarders will continue hoarding unless the underlying medical problem is addressed.

 

 

A Hard-Cheated Pyrrhic Victory and a Mute Wedding

As I watched millions of well-fed, educated Americans dancing in the streets, cheering, and gloating over their hard-cheated pyrrhic presidential win to install the much-desired socialism, touted in the press and academia, all I could think about was the 100 millions of people who had lived and died under a socialist dictatorship ruled by the Communist Party and other millions who risked their lives to flee such a socialist society. And I was numb that people can be so naïve and easily swayed by clever rhetoric, just like people were enchanted a century ago by the Bolsheviks. I never once met an American who fled to Cuba or North Korea unless they were criminals sought by the law. But I sure met a lot of defectors and refugees from tyrannical regimes who sought shelter in America.

While a student in the 1980s at a southern university, I met dozens of people from Iron Curtain countries, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Soviet Union, East Germany, Romania, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, who had left everything behind in order to escape to the freedom of the west.

We formed a union of sorts, sharing food from our respective cultures, learning about our new country, loving and respecting America who took us in, and speaking against the oppressive regimes we had fled from with just the clothes on our backs in some cases.

Now it is entirely different. Americans have been convinced that socialism is great, and they must have it at all costs, including a pyrrhic election victory. What is a pyrrhic victory? It is a victory won at such a damaging toll to the victor that it looks more like a defeat because it will destroy any long-term progress.

Pyrrhus of Epirus was a Greek king who opposed the expansion of early Rome, often compared to Alexander the Great in his tactical war efforts. But some of his victories were won at such a great loss to his troops and kingdom that history remembers him as having won battles with such unacceptable losses that the term “pyrrhic victory” was coined in his name.

Which brings me to the presidential election – a pyrrhic victory won at all costs, losing the soul, honor, integrity, and Constitution of a nation in order to achieve the promised socialist utopia of a globalist cabal who stopped at nothing to fundamentally alter its foundations and Constitution through technology, hacking, deceit, mass media indoctrination, unethical activist judges, utterly corrupt politicians, and fraud.

While America’s young generations are dancing in the streets with joy that a man with incipient dementia and a Marxist have won the White House, I see pictures flashing through my mind of people escaping from tyrannical socialist societies through Checkpoint Charlie in Berlin, cutting through barbed wire, dodging bullets, flying low in makeshift aircraft, stealing a train and braking through a barrier, digging tunnels, swimming across the Danube and other treacherous rivers, floating in makeshift boats, a dingy, fighting sharks across 120 miles of ocean from Cuba, stowaways on ships, on plane cargo holds, fitted inside the seats of cars, or too close to the engine compartment, all to flee to the freedom of the west.

I see a young woman holding her breath while the airport checkpoint officer discovers that she has not signed her legal passport. Instead of being turned away, the guard demands a carton of Kent cigarettes to allow her to sign the passport in front of him. And she complies – the $20 carton of cigarettes at the time was a cheap escape from imprisonment within socialist borders.

I see another woman being stripped of her jewelry because the socialist law does not allow anybody to leave the country with any gold and silver except a tiny wedding band.

I see people’s homes, personal belongings, savings, and land being confiscated by socialists and distributed to their Communist Party activists for their personal use. I see people being hauled to jail for non-compliance, protesting their incarceration until the prison door is slammed shut.

I see people standing in line to find food, toilet paper, paper towels, and sanitizing products, just like the recent lines we had to stand in at our local grocery store for months after Covid-19 lockdown. People were irritated and impatient, herded like cattle behind yellow lines, set arbitrarily six feet apart. Shelves were bare for a while but imagine doing this every day to get food?

Imagine the online ordering and curbside pickup going away if there is no adequate production planning, manufacturing, and delivery because the government is run by inefficient socialists in the same vein as Venezuela?

Starry-eyed people who get mad because their latest XBOX supply runs out before they can hit the order key on their computers, will discover a new reality, a reality of shortages of essentials.

A good friend, who read my first book, Echoes of Communism, was skeptical and could not understand how the entire population was so deprived in their daily lives by a small percentage of activists who belonged to and were loyal to the Communist Party who indoctrinated everyone initially into the “wonders” of socialism.

The day his wife called him in a panic that the shelves of their local grocery store in Virginia were bare because of the first Covid-19 lockdown, disruption of production and delivery in March 2020, subsequent hoarding of essentials, and when their refrigerator was nearly empty, he understood. They felt for a few days what we felt every day for 49 years of oppressive socialism. Once installed, the socialist republic rule of the Communist Party did not go away, the suffocating control grew like kudzu, one foot per day.

The Silent Wedding, a movie made in 2008, artistically wove the alleged “real” story of a couple’s wedding from an isolated village in Romania. The ceremony and the reception that followed, held in March 5, 1953 (a Thursday), was allegedly interrupted by a communist activist from the city and a Soviet officer who brought the news that the USSR tyrant Joseph V. Stalin had died and thus seven days of international mourning were decreed in which public celebrations of any kind were prohibited. The celebrants held a mute wedding.

Likely a fictional event, this artistic story brings to mind the fact that Americans are not allowed to celebrate Thanksgiving this year in their homes with more than six people as guests, a breaking of familial tradition disrupted and imposed by state governments around the country.  Neighbors are encouraged to snitch, [and they did already in New York] if such draconian executive orders are violated.

Ten months since the first Covid-19 lockdown, healthy people are still forced to wear masks for the good of the collective, not for their own protection, since masks are not really effective as it is stated on the manufacturer’s packaging.

This is America, of course, shortages of food and necessities cannot happen here, we have an abundant economy, optimists and the naïve repeat ad nauseum. What will happen to this horn of abundance when the socialists just elected will enforce their New Green Deal, and solar energy and wind power will not even begin to supply our country’s huge energy needs? How will cars run? How will truckers deliver food? How will products be manufactured and hauled? Joe Biden’s fairy dust?

When Joe Biden’s rhetorical pixie dust, which blinded many to choose socialism, will lift, they will be left with very little to go on and will be begging the omnipotent government to feed them and house them. Computers, technology, social media, politicians, and the mass media produce nothing of consequence that sustains life, they manufacture hot air, advertising, socialist indoctrination, and are quite good at spending trillions of other people’s money.