Cherries Were Sweet, Wormy, and Juicy

It is high season for cherries, and I find them every time I go to the grocery store. They are red, plump, juicy, and quite expensive. But none as expensive as we found them in June in Calgary, Canada, a farming town. I asked the locals why their cherries were 26 Canadian dollars a kilogram and was told that there was a shortage; the crop was smaller because the weather had been colder than usual, and cherries need heat to ripen.

So much for the non-stop global warming drivel and the need to eliminate CO2 from any human activity by 2030. Yet plants and trees need CO2 to grow, it is the gas of plant life. Nurseries add extra CO2 in their green houses in order to grow plants much faster. And we exhale CO2.

I did not purchase the expensive cherries in Calgary although I was tempted. I reached for their compostable grocery bags and then I decided against buying them and bought apples instead.

Our local Wegman’s carries cherries from California most days for $2.99 per pound and organic or yellow ones for $6.99 per pound. Even at the price of $12.99 per pound, they flew off the shelves in early June. Locals, government bureaucrats who inhabit this area, can afford to pay high prices for everything – apartments, gas, high-end EVs like Tesla, and very expensive homes.

I filled my bowl with red cherries and took them on the deck; they glistened in the sunlight in rich hues of ripened red. Within minutes a bee appeared out of the nowhere, attracted by the fruity fresh scent.

As I ate one and the fruit released its sweet juice, I was reminded of my childhood cherries, infested by fruit flies with their worms. They crawled inside the fruit and burrowed their eggs. We ate them anyway, we were so starved for fresh fruits and vegetables.

My friend Joe K., who served a while at the Embassy in Bucharest, told me the story of one Friday evening, when several friends gathered at his home to watch a VHS movie and he picked up a large bag of cherries which he placed on the kitchen table. As his wife went into the kitchen to bring the guests bowls of cherries, Joe heard a scream. He ran to the kitchen to check on his wife and found her staring grossed out at the kitchen table now crawling with hundreds of white worms which had emerged from the bag of cherries.

Come to think of it, I don’t remember ever eating a fruit, any fruit, during my childhood in communist Romania that was not burrowed inside by worms. Cherries in June and July were sweet, wormy, and juicy, and we ate them anyway.

I feel privileged and extremely lucky to live in this country where I can eat fruits free of fruit flies and their worms, especially cherries, apples, peaches, and prunes. 

Yet one day, I was in Shoppers in Fairfax, Virginia, and the cherry stand was buzzed by fruit flies and did not smell very well. I did not purchase any and left the store immediately, extremely disappointed. The abundance we used to experience once is no longer the same all over America.

Scientific Nutrition, Food Lines, Excess, and Worms

Photo: Compliments of DeWitt E.

It is inconceivable for those born after 1989, who never experienced want of anything, that at one time, the proletariat of the communist dear leader Ceausescu had to survive on a decreed daily rations of food and to stand in line from the middle of the night until stores opened and people fought for the food delivered in the morning.

Standing in food lines had become a method of survival and a national sport. Families involved their children, as young as five, to stand in lines to keep the place for a relative waiting in another line, always carrying an expanding string shopping bag reminiscent of a fishing net and extra cash.

Experiencing shortages of food because of war is something that even developed nations had to endure willingly to make sure that nutrition was available to all. For example, during WWII, there was a ration card issued to shoppers. The reason was obvious, the men were fighting a war and there were less people engaged in the economy to produce enough supply to satisfy demand while more resources were going to the war machine.

But the shortage of food people experienced for decades under Nicolae Ceausescu had to do with his ambitious communist plan to develop the heavy industry, no matter how unprofitable, and to pay off the debt to the west at the expense of the standard of living of the population.

The Communist Party had developed norms of “rational nutrition” based on medical criteria of age, gender, profession, physical condition, and energy expended on the job since the 1964. In case you wonder why they would embark on such endeavor, it was because communists do not leave anything to chance, everything you do must be controlled and enforced by law.

As shortages became more pronounced in the 1980s, the Communist Party issued new legal guidelines for nutrition. A huge control apparatus of propaganda was put into motion: doctors, college professors, the health ministry, the agriculture ministry, nutritional specialists, the communist press, the labor unions, and other political organizations sanctioned by the Communist Party. The declared official scope was to improve the population’s health. But the reality had all to do with the financial situation at the time. The economy was suffocated by Ceausescu’s ambition to pay off western debt and by his very expensive megalomaniacal projects to glorify him and his communist rule. He was, after all, the “maverick.”

A specialized commission proposed by the Health Minister in 1976 took its sweet time to develop norms of “rational nutrition.” It was not officially approved by the Communist Party’s “The Great National Gathering” until 1984. This “rational” program of nutrition led to a general suffering of the entire population unlike any other before.

People were starved but did not have to eat grass, leather, or engage in cannibalism as was the case in Ukraine. The man-made famine in Holodomor (Ukrainian for ‘murder by hunger’) happened in 1932-1933 when 28,000 people a day died of starvation. Stalin’s Soviet regime had taught Ukrainian farmers a lesson they never forgot. http://holodomorct.org/

An article in “Financial Times” of October 25, 1984, mentions that “Romania surprised its skeptical creditors by paying off a debt of $1.5 billion in the first 9 months of the year.” The same article mentions the fact that the payoff was achieved at the expense of the deplorable standard of living of the population, as evidenced by “the sad lines in front of all stores.”

Speaking about Romania paying its debt off ahead of schedule, Washington Post quoted Sen. Dennis DeConcini (D-Arizona) in April 1989: "Fuel and electricity have been rationed for years. Staple foods, including milk, bread and flour, are rationed, and in many localities even these are unavailable. Meat is a rarity; soup bones only occasionally appear in stores. Decades of financial mis-planning and inefficient industrial development have led to the dire condition of the Romanian economy, making it the poorest in Europe after Albania." https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1989/04/14/debts-paid-romania-says/89557c5f-9f4d-4810-8e15-91538f134a3f/?utm_term=.c580cd34e479

The communist party leaders concealed the draconian rationing of food to pay off its debt by implementing the “scientific program of feeding the proletariat.”

The severe food shortages gave rise to black markets and hoarding, even though having excess food was punishable with jail time. People also bartered food and services to survive. Food lines became an economic input and the “entire social life developed around the obsession of finding food.” The terms “malnutrition” and “starvation” were replaced by the euphemistic concept of “rational nutrition.” http://www.istorie-pe-scurt.ro/cum-arata-o-cartela-pe-vremea-lui-ceausescu-programul-de-alimentatie-rationala/

An American who lived in Romania in 1983-1986 attested to the many horrors of Ceausescu’s reign of terror called the Golden Epoch. Speaking of food rationing and long-term malnutrition, she said, “I regularly saw people stand in line all day to buy a Styrofoam cup with a few broken eggs in it.  Unrefrigerated raw milk was sold on street corners on hot summer days.”

She continued, “Romania was rich in oil but Ceausescu shut down the urban heating grids [villagers burned wood for heat and there was no running water or indoor plumbing] in the middle of winter so that he could export the oil to the west for hard currency.  The very young and the very old dropped like flies.  We had no heat, no hot water and no cooking gas for 5 months out of the year.  We actually saw miles long gas lines right next to oil refineries.”

Joe Keller, an attaché to the American Embassy in the mid-80s, told another interesting story about food. He had picked up two bags of cherries from a street vendor at the airport. He was having friends over that evening to watch a movie. One of the children went into the kitchen to get a glass of water and came back horrified, telling her parents that there were worms in the kitchen. Sure enough, the table was covered in fruit flies’ worms. Some had crawled out of the cherries they had all consumed in the dark while watching the movie.

I don’t think I had ever eaten fruits in my childhood that did not have fruit flies’ worms. It was extra protein. Years later I wrote a story about that called Wormy Banana. https://ileanawrites.blogspot.com/2012/06/wormy-banana.html

Unscientific and chaotic means of running the socialist economy gave rise to decades of misery caused entirely by the communist dictatorship with its “golden” dear leader Ceausescu and his wife Elena.

The arbitrary and forced industrialization of Romania under his reign of terror gave rise to industrial giants which produced goods inefficiently, with massive energy consumption, massive raw material use, and high costs at the expense of the destitute people. Food and water were always rationed and in short supply and electricity and thermal energy were delivered arbitrarily on the whims of the apparatchiks in charge.

Nobody dared to object as the communist ideology ruled supreme. This perverse philosophy intended to shape the “new man,” a human being willing to enthusiastically approve and cheer the dictator’s random and destructive political and economic decisions.

Copying North Korea and China, Ceausescu developed his cult of personality. Millions were required to idolize and sing praises to the dear leader and his wife. Revisionist history placed him and his wife in the hall of revolutionaries, turning them into “the mother and father of the country.” Ceausescu, with just an elementary education, became the Honorary President of the Academy. https://istoriiregasite.wordpress.com/2012/06/16/romania-in-timpul-regimului-ceausescu/

While malnourished proletarians lived in Spartan conditions, barely heated concrete block apartments often without hot water and even cold water, the dear leader was chauffeured to different residences and his family luxuriated in the “Spring Palace” in Bucharest, built in the mid-60s.  This permanent family residence was decorated with one of a kind gold leaf mosaics, indoor and outdoor swimming pools, mahogany, rose, and teakwood furniture, hand-made brocaded draperies and tapestries, an extensive collection of original paintings and sculptures by famous Romanian artists, a trophy room, a wine cellar, and a bunker. There was Limoges, Baccarat, Mainz and other expensive porcelains and crystals. The 5,000 square meters residence had 170 rooms spread on two levels and a basement (88 rooms). His Swiss bank account was flush with millions of dollars. https://www.punctul.ro/in-vizita-la-fosta-resedinta-a-familiei-nicolae-ceausescu/

While the proletariat stood in food lines, subjected to “scientific nutrition,” the communists engaged in obscene excesses.