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.
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Yea you cant survive on the calories for a month with what's in the picture, so this is just government treats in addition
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Cigarettes and coffee replace breakfast and lunch
https://polishhistory.pl/a-ration-card-for-survival-rationing-in-communist-poland/ A source corroborating this.
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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.
Good post