Bunissima

This is an old card I have found in my family’s “archive”. It was used during the communism to measure the food you got, mainly the bread, flour and oil. The people who lived in the contry side were forced to give either milk, eggs, meat and fruits alltogether, or cereals, depending on what people were cultivating and growing in different areas.

You could’ve gotten each month one kilogram of flour (= 2 pounds), one of oil, and the same with sugar and maize. I also find out that in the cities you could have gotten 5 slices of real salami per month. Really?

Make no mistake, there were things to buy… like milk, beggining with 4 or 5 am in the morning, because if you got there later you risked of being milkless for your indolence. On the other hand you could just come and stay there with a chair from the evening before or late at night so you be the first on the line when the milk is on the race.

And powdered egg. And… pig heads, that must have been a real feast. And soy salami, why, you all need to be vegetarians cause we tell you to. If you did not turn vegetarian because you could only eat soy salami, you would definately do it because of refusing to eat the pork heads. Maybe some pork legs would do. Or, as people called these pig feet, Adidas. The name compensates for the lack of style. Oh, and a bread a week. Really, no you need to go on a diet, the diet of all people that are equal.

Same things, from a different angle:

My great grandfathers lived in the country side. So did my granma, with them. There was so little food sometimes that they wouldn’t know what to eat. One day, while she was sowing the ground, my great grandmother caught a deer by the foot. It did not run, it did not make any noise. That was a good thing, because you were not allowed to hunt. Not even kill your own livestock, whithout announcing Big Brother, except for pork. And people were afraid anyways to do too much. They ate the deer. They told us kids, just in case someone would ask, that it was a pork they had cut. They burried the skin so that not even dogs would find it.
To make a living my grandma was making tuica (she would sometimes exchange tuica for food). At that time it was illegal to do it without approvals or just illegal, I don’t remember exactly. And since the officialities could not get their presumtion confirmed from grown up traitors, they thought to ask the kids. I can remember even now the tall imposing policeman that asked “Is your granma making tuica?” while we were looking up at him for the dwarf-sized kindergarten chairs. I ignored him. My littler sister, just a kid of 3, could not defend herself, even if the teacher was insisting on him to leave us kids alone. So my sister admitted that it was true. The officialities never knew about this. The policeman had suddenly become a good friend who came to visit often, to pick up his payment.
I don’t recall too much more. All I really remember is seeing the pork head and thinking it was so disgusting. And that soon after the revolution you could buy oranges, without actually having to wait for 3 hours in a line while making room with your elbows. That was enough for me as a kid to understand that something was better. Plus the school vacation, wich suddenly got bigger!