Cooking Was Not Fun Because It Was Survival

Mamaliga with sourcream

People have asked me why I never really enjoyed gourmet cooking nor was I interested in developing such talents beyond feeding my family an inexpensive meal. As a woman, mother, and wife, that is anathema to a failed human being. How can you not be interested in providing the most delicious, appealing, and nutritious meals for your family?

To understand where I come from, you must walk in the shoes of women and children under the communist regime where I grew up, women with children in tow who had to stand in line every day at an early age if they wanted to buy bread and basics. Moms sent their children to stand in the bread and milk lines, and they stood in the meat and fresh vegetable lines and canned veggies in winter. Fresh was a stretch even in summer time, we had to contend with wilted seasonal spinach, green beans, and peas and shriveled potatoes and apples. Meat meant choice cuts of fat attached to bones with which mom used to make soup. Refrigerators were rare and expensive and freezers did not exist for us, window sills doubled as such in winter time. Crows loved our storage system.

We ate well when grandpa dropped by and brought us a chicken, a pat of butter, and a quarter of a gallon of milk from his country “farm” where he raised rabbits, chicken, a sheep, a pig, and a cow. His farm consisted of a small barn and enough land to have a garden and space to grow some rows of corn.

The communist cooperative grew wheat and the crop was split among the villagers who toiled in the fields each day after the communist party received its demanded quota. It was almost like paying the mafia. After the communist party (the mafia) confiscated their lands for “the good of the people,” these former landowners had to work the land, put in the crop, harvest it, really backbreaking manual labor, and then pay the lion’s share to the land confiscator, the communist party. What a deal!

How can anyone be interested in fancy cooking when ingredients were impossible to find, when we lived from day to day on most basic foodstuff after we stood in endless lines daily?

Can spoiled Americans understand how it feels to enter a grocery store and see rows after rows of empty shelves? Can they imagine real lines for food extending sometimes for a mile, winding around the block and the entire neighborhood?

Can they imagine the fist and tug-of-war battles for a merchandise deal they see on Black Friday magnified to the point of exhaustion? If fat Americans give each other black eyes and bruises over a television set, an electronic game, or other silly gadget in order to save a few bucks while claiming that they are exploited, marginalized, poor, and downtrodden by non-existent “white privilege,” how would they react when faced with severe shortages of food and water? Unbelievably, the next day after they give thanks for what they already have, they pull each other’s hair out fighting for a TV that was probably cheaper a few days earlier.

Normally people fought for the five salamis hanging in the deli window, or a hundred bottles of cooking oil, or a few pallets of sugar and flour, that day’s delivery to the store. Even with rationing coupons, there was never enough food or necessities because planning was centralized, not based on free market supply and demand, it was based on five-year plans crafted and decided by uneducated communist bureaucrats who had no idea what they were doing nor did they care as long as they had their own grocery stores, department stores, doctors, clinics, pharmacies, and hospitals.

It was a privilege to find some food with shorter lines around Christmas time when the communist government supplied more pallets to grocery stores in order to pacify the stupid masses and to continue the real exploitation of the proletariat by the elites who pretended to be taking care of them, to be shielding them from the “evil” capitalists.

We were thin from lack of food, but we were not healthy. Pharmacy shelves were empty too, even vitamins and cotton balls were hard to find. There was a thriving black market at ten times the price that most people could not afford on the government-dictated meager salaries. Equality was painful, miserable, and stomach growling and churning.

I am hearing this tune again from bratty liberal kids who demand social justice and equality.  P.J. O’Rourke called them “spoiled, miserable, unsatisfied, demanding, ill-disciplined, despotic, and useless.” Somehow, in an alternate universe, these “sniveling brats” blame capitalism for the generational welfare that fat and comparatively well-off Americans accept and demand from the Democrat Party that keeps them “poor.” Personal responsibility is an alien concept to most who are accustomed to being taken care off by taxpayers’ generosity.

Poverty is a relative term and most people ill-define or misunderstand poverty. According to the World Bank, almost 600 million citizens of the globe make less than $2 a day. Are you poor compared to them?

When people tell me how rewarding it is to cook fancy meals for their families, I just see spoiled individuals who have so much to be thankful for but have no idea how lucky they are to be given so many choices by a free market system promoted by capitalism, not by the socialist egalitarian non-sense.  

Americans don’t understand the concept of the starving goose of socialism who was kept pacified and faithful by feeding her one kernel a day, just enough to prevent starvation. This way, she always knew who her masters were and was kept under control, no leash necessary, just a barbed wired fence to keep geese from escaping.

 

A Piece of Land and a Moment of Time

In December 1989, communism fell in Eastern Europe and Romanians started the process of reclaiming their land and personal property confiscated by the Communist Party during 1949-1962. My maternal family recently received judicial notification of recovery, 23 years after the suit commenced.

Mom and I were given a plot of land that we have never seen. I am told that it is covered with rocks, the type that an enterprising fellow nearby is already exploiting and selling to construction companies for road building. I am not holding any high hopes or interest right now to plant a crop but it feels strange and empowering at the same time to own an ancestral piece of property that had belonged to my family for generations but was taken by force after World War II. Grandpa would be proud!

In 1921, peasants were given 4 hectares of land. When communists came to power in 1945, under pressure from Moscow, a new agrarian reform was passed meant to disband large farms and to gather votes for the Communist Party. Hundreds of thousands of farmers received small plots of land to grow crops on and feed their families.

Once entrenched, the communist agricultural vision changed. Their leaders were convinced that small properties were not valuable and condemned to non-modernized operations. At the time, people had plenty to eat and their families were thriving. However, community organizers fanned across the country convinced them through extensive propaganda that the state would be more efficient in administering the land.

The Marxist-Leninist dogma said, “A small property generates capitalism day by day, minute by minute, spontaneous, and in mass proportions.” The small-time farmer feeding his family, with a little surplus, was seen as an individual member of the bourgeoisie, requiring squashing.

The commie’s strategy was to turn farmers against the richer farmers through class envy and class warfare and it worked quite well.

The communists began the process of confiscating land from farmers who owned 50 hectares or more in a violent manner in March 1949 via an immediate executive order or decree. Overnight, farmers were taken out of their homes and forcibly moved to other villages, while their homes, animals, agricultural equipment, and land were seized. Farmers who had some mechanized agricultural tools were labeled “rich and bourgeois.” The “socialist transformation of agriculture” followed via division of farmers into five categories: those without any land, poor peasants, middle peasants, well-to-do farmers, and the very rich farmers.

The Communist Party introduced the quota system in order to compensate for lack of food in cities across the nation, to make war reparations to the Soviet Union, and to ruin farm operations that were doing well. A significant part of the crops had to be turned over to the state. Oftentimes the farmers were only left with the seed necessary for next year’s crop or nothing at all. Thousands of previously well-off farmers or people of modest means were ruined this way, including the very poor whom the communists pretended to protect.

The farmers who opposed collectivization, the joining of small private farms into large, state owned and controlled farms, were violently repressed through deportations, incarcerations, and confiscation of everything they owned, including clothes.

Deportations involved taking families who were considered most resistant and uneducable in labor camps and placing them in the middle of nowhere, far from civilization and transportation, forcing them to live in a hut in order to have shelter from wind and cold, surviving like the American pioneers in the west. More than 40,000 farmers were deported this way to 18 geographically difficult regions to survive in, the so-called called „special communes” run by the dreaded security police loyal to the Communist Party.

Northern Moldova and Transylvania offered most resistance. The farmers were arrested, shot in their homes, or summarily executed without due process. Thousands were sent to jail by 1950 and their wealth confiscated. If allowed to return to their village of birth after a lengthy deportation (1949-1956), farmers found their homes occupied by other families who were staunch communist party members and were rewarded for their loyalty with ownership of a confiscated home. Injustice was swift and the spreading of wealth was cruel.

Collectivization was completed in 1962 with medal awarding ceremonies. The chaotic and mismanaged agricultural system under communists experienced such a sustained crisis between 1948-1962, that the effects are still felt today, twenty-three years after the communists lost power.

Can this happen in America? Can we lose our land and property to someone else deemed more deserving by constant leftist propaganda? Can we lose our land to wilderness because environmentalists in control force us to move? Or is it already happening peacefully and silently while the population is being soothed with „hope and change,” lies and fabrications on a daily basis?

Americans are asleep, ignorant, mesmerized, doped up, or so corrupt that they no longer care what happens to their fellow citizens, their children’s future, the future of our country, so long as they have a cushy job, mindless television shows, sports, a pay check, perhaps bribes, comfortable homes, club memberships, vacations, and most of all, intoxicating power and control.

Redistributing wealth is the only thing communists know how to do brutally and stealthily well. Those who do not pay taxes or hold down jobs protest that it is their right to steal someone else’s money. They’ve even come up with a new euphemism, they are not stealing the wealth of producers, they are merely forcing them to „share the burden.”

But it is stealing! Every moment of time that we must work to earn money and pay taxes that are then spent by our out-of-control government on non-producers is a moment too long that we are slaves to someone else, a moment of time that is stolen from our limited time on earth.