Free Socialist Stuff or Capitalist Goods

By Dr. Ileana Johnson Paugh —— Bio and Archives October 5, 2020

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I was cooking breakfast this morning and as the smell of oven-baked bacon wafted through the house, memories flooded 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 centralized socialist government ruled by the communist party was not particularly adept at planning for the food supply properly

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.