https://mobile.twitter.com/Gritty20202/status/1483110307417444359
Yea you cant survive on the calories for a month with what's in the picture, so this is just government treats in addition
https://polishhistory.pl/a-ration-card-for-survival-rationing-in-communist-poland/ A source corroborating this.
As someone in the thread you linked pointed out, growing your food was incredibly common in the Eastern Bloc. Here in Bulgaria going out to the country to visit grandma/grandpa and being sent back with a ton of delicious food was (still is to an extent) a way of life. My paternal grandmother was a school teacher, but also a member of the local farming co-op. Apart from her house garden where she grew the most delicious tomatoes and sweet red peppers, she also had chickens, raised a couple of pigs, was given a small plot of land where she grew melons and watermelons in the summer.
Ask Eastern Europeans what they had in the basements of their "dull grey apartment blocks". The answer is they were full of homemade preserves, kompot jars, cured meats, and pickles. It is a widely held consensus here that "back then" people ate better, healthier food. Modern profit oriented agricultural practices produce plasticy vegetables with poor nutrition and the food grandma used to make is now sold as "organic" for a markup that is beyond the means of most people.
EDIT: Oh, also as part of the co-op she was given some 20 or so liters of sunflower oil each year. That's most of your cooking sorted.
ADDENDUM: I need to point out that both my parents and grandparents (while they were alive) do talk a lot about hardship and hunger in their younger years. Which is only to be expected - the recovery from WW2 was definitely a time of hardship.
lmao thats a lie we lived high on the hog in czechia restaurants were cheap as fuck too. family and communal gardens were a big thing too and you got that for free too. we have a pretty big back yard and there are like 80 kinds of bushes and trees for fruits that the family goes out and picks all the time. typical life in rural czechia at the time. some of the bushes are so big these days cause theyve been around for maybe 90 years that we just give shit away for free to the neighbors. its a ton of fruit, even making pies and stuff out of it doesnt make a dent
like yeah poland is different country but i doubt they were that different
nah like 80% of my fam did tho
czechoslovakia was pretty well off in comparison to most commie eastern countries. was up there with the gdr in terms of development and pay rates. there was a bit of a inequality between czechia and slovakia, urban czechia was a bit more well off than rural czechia or slovakia so a lot of development projects were set up there and in the mountains, of which my family was a pretty big beneficiary.
theres a plot of land out in rural czechia that my family has been living on for around 300 years. lots of old growth fruits and stuff. pretty big plot of land, most of its hills but theres a small area thats flat, and a small house thats very old (like 1600s but renovated) and then a newer one next to it (80s). family was mostly a mining / agricultural family over the ages. its said that a lot of our ancestors would steal seeds from lords and take em up into the mountains where we were technically living illegally but they couldnt do anything about it lol. one of our ancestors was in the hussite army (protosocialists) and walked pretty much the entire length of czechia in the winter to go join them. lost some toes or something.
in my family theres a lot of mixed feelings about the fall of czechoslovakia. my parents are libs and support it (ah yes we have iphone and can live in america now!) and most my grandparents are staunch commies cause they know how terrible things were before the commies but it got way better in their lifetimes. grandma was born in like 1939 or something so vaguely remembers the war and how some of our family just went missing without a trace after the germans annexed our area. my parents just say nazis and germans bad but my grandma says it was capitalisms fault which was based
The replies are amazing
"That was the maximum you were allowed, and you had to pay for it. That's how the rationing system worked."
People ask for sources
Only get linked to this
Their own source only says that during the worst period of crisis, meat rations were limited to 3kg a month during a shortage as an emergency measure, more than the 2.5k indicated in the image
The ebil George Orville 1984 government let the demonstrations happen
This is a truly :galaxy-brain: argument against the fact that old people, who actually saw both systems, preferred communism.
I think the availability of history may change history
Literal quote from the article you brain dead mutant.
I think we should start using 'mutant' as an insult
Charles Xavier didn't die for you to throw around the m-word
That’s how the rationing system worked
it was how it worked in the UK
≈387g less than what an american eats on average per month apparently
For one person though. Although to be fair someone in the twitter thread pointed out that sugar is used for canning fruit, which was a great point I hadn't considered.
That’s a lot, thinking about a family of 3 that’s over 3 pounds of butter a month, 6 pounds of flour and 6 pounds of rice, an obscene amount of sugar (seriously what would you do with it?) and 16 pounds of meat (no beans :sadness: )
No vegetables obviously a problem but this is more than enough to live on, I’m sure this would get augmented with produce etc) and represents the minimum
I've heard that desserts were often way sweeter back in the day, sugar wasn't as ubiquitous in everything but when it was used it was used a lot.
That's how it should be. Keep the sugar out of stuff you wouldn't expect or want it in, and then go all out on the actual sweets.
Yeah I love flipping over to the nutrition label and seeing the huge quantities of salt they use to mask the equally ruinous volume of sugar.
Sugar consumption in the US has been roughly constant from the 1930s to present, with a small peak in the early 2000s. I'd imagine Euro countries are similar. It's a bit of a myth that people eat "so much more sugar" now, people have always had a sweet tooth.
Plus as others have alluded to, sugar was rationed in Poland specifically because people were hoarding it to make moonshine, but the government still wanted to make sure people had enough for treats.
No vegetables obviously a problem
Grow your own, there's dirt everywhere.
The couple still has an active change.org petition going.
:joker-dancing:
Honest question, has Change.org (or online "petition" sites in general) ever accomplished anything that objectively improved material conditions? A skim of their wiki article lists that [in the US] they; A) saved a dog from being euthanized after he killed a duck on a farm(???), and B) got Sallie Mae to stop charging people money every 3 months to keep their loan payments suspended. and that's about it. Both are unironically good things, as is the platform's potential for spreading awareness to causes generally ignored by the news cycle.
It's just, the reverence liberals have for petitions and "engaging in your civic duties" is perfectly personified in the popularity and undeserved (imo) reverence that Change.org has. They're a for-profit organization! They're incentivized to maximize engagement, regardless of whether it's genuine or not, and they certainly don't have the pull the meaningfully influence the decisions of capital. And yet libs keep parroting that "you just need to get involved in the PohLittyCall Process" yet this kind of shit is almost entirely what they mean by that. "Yes I'll give my personal information to a random website and comment that trump is a burnt cheeto who should be IMPRISONED! wow I am such an activist, time for daily brunch!" ugh
yeah but people can get pissy if you don't own the land since enclosure
12 packs a month? I would've been miserable back when I smoked.
E: By that I just mean I used to smoke too much. Shit was expensive.
my grandad smoked during the war 2 packs a day cause the army gave them to him. The day the war ended he quit cold turkey completely
wait wait wait wait wait
12 packs of cigarettes a month? like was this on a household basis or literally every single person?
It says every person, 12 packs is half a month's supply for a pack a day smoker
It's for a whole month.
But the sugar...Jesus. That's a lot for one person in a month. Super unhealthy.
I thought you make rum or cachaca from sugar. Can you actually do that with refined white sugar?
I know white sugar is an ingredient in pruno, so if you've got some fresh fruit lying around you're good.
Yeast will happily metabolize sucrose into alcohol. White sugar is popular among moonshiners as it is cheap and easily available. Winemakers also sometimes bumps the sugar contents of thin grape must by adding white sugar, they call it chaptalization to make it sound fancier.
A fermented sugar wash tastes like shit though as it has none of the nice flavour compounds you get from fruit juice or malt so it has to be distilled and filtered into vodka to be enjoyable.
Yes, but it was not free as others have suggested. The card let you buy a certain amount of those goods at a subsidized rate, meant to ease the effects of people hoarding. Vegetables aren't included because the general idea was that people would grow a lot of their own, and demand in the state stores wouldn't exceed supply. Things like meat were harder to come by, so you had ration cards to buy a reasonable amount at a controlled price, and then hope you could have money to buy extra (if it was available).
How does the amount of food people eat/ate in Eastern Europe compare to how much people get to eat in poor countries today? Compared to any country in LatAm or the Caribbean or most places in Asia.
I don't know, but if I recall correctly the average USSR citizen in the 80s consumed more calories than the average US citizen in the 80s.
Yeah, fwiw more of them were carbs (bread and potatoes probably) and selection was non-existent (my mom often jokes they had 2 varieties of chocolate/salami/tea/anything else: Available or Unavailable), but they certainly weren't starving
I don't remember the source at all, but I recall reading the average Cuban consumes close to 3000 calories per day
How does the amount of food people eat/ate in Eastern Europe compare to how much people get to eat in poor countries today?
insanely better, particularly with meat. That picture comes out to 1/5th lb of meat per day. Try affording that as the global poor in literally any 3rd world country
Meanwhile in in capitalist countries the poor just get fucked and die
Maybe I have a weak constitution, but one bottle of vodka a month is more than enough for me...
So ignoring different ration amounts for children, a family of 4 is bringing in 7.5 kg of meat, 2 liters of vodka, 8 bars of soap and about 5 kg of rice, on top of whatever other groceries they buy? That's not bad at all.
I mean the lack of vegetables is startling but still.
Also mushrooms. It's Poland. You gotta have mushrooms.
Imagine getting mad that the government sends you FREE shit for FREE, that you don't have to pay for. :poland-cool:
So in the face of scarcity the government made sure that available goods were being distributed equally instead of opening the floodgates for hoarding and price gouging?
Monsters!
