The Cruel Fantasies of Well-Fed People

Sorry, sir. We are in a reductionist moment in history, where sides have been chosen; judgements made; debate stifled; views anathematized; and conflict reduced to an inevitable choice that is the fault of "other".

- I lived in rural Romania through the 80s when Ceaușescu decided to basically return to war time rationalization of food.

- My father was an agricultural engineer on a state farm, a specialty almost forgotten today yet of utmost importance in the 50s-60s when he graduated university and got the job.

People today scorn at the idea of state farms but my father comes from a family of rather wealthy peasants from before collectivization and always told me that productivity was shit before modern cultivation methods, mechanization, chemical fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides were used. He died this year at 82 years of age of Parkinson's disease, almost surely caught due to his involvement with agricultural herbicides. His 90 years old brother that worked as a physics teacher is alive and kicking. Takes the bus from the village everyday to the city to have a coffee with his friends.

Anyhow, I digress. Let's get back to the original article.

>> Much of the protein, insufficient as it was, came not from cheese and meat but from what we now call dhal. It had names (to give some English examples) like pease pottage, pease pudding, mushy peas and pea soup

The Romanian countryside was far better off in the rationalization period than the cities. I've visited my city-living aunt a few times and noticed the terrible queues to procure basically anything: bread, butter, meat. I don't recall much of my meals as a 10 years old (I was 12 when Ceaușescu was shot and shortages ended) and with my parents might have been a bit atypical. As my father being chief engineer of the state farm we never lacked anything, of course :)

But when living with my grandparents, I think my diet was a lot more what regular people ate. There was no lack of protein but it wasn't the obscene frenzy I see in American movies (probably fake?): all beef chops meat and basically no bread or carbs or vegetables at all.

I ate a serious amount of carbs from wheat bread and corn bread, lots of milk and derivatives, eggs, vegetables in salads and soups. Btw, a salad here is a mixture of vegetables that you eat with your main dish. It's never the main dish, another habit of well fed people. Chicken was a rare treat, my grandma would sacrifice growing chickens but almost never a fully grown hen that would lay eggs. And how much can you split a chicken between 2 adults and 2 kids (my and my cousin)? It was always stew, I never ever saw fried chicken EVER during those times. Almost all meat came from pork. Occasionally beef but the penalty for having beef in communist Romania was straight prison. Peasants were supposed to hand over the calves to the state, but sometimes they were born "dead" (i.e. kept in the stables and fed a bit until slaughtered). Btw, it's those times when I developed a less than today's modern sensible view towards animals as opposed to humans. First time slaughtering a calf or bagging a litter of puppies into a sack before drowning them is the hardest. You get used to it and learn this is life if we're about to live.

Darn, I digress again. Must be the 3rd glass of wine :P

I find it astonishing that Monbiot manages to mention China's famines in the 1950s and 1960s, but somehow fails to mention that most of the progress in the fight against hunger since the 1970s was made here: If you exclude China from the numbers, "falling hunger during a time of rising population" didn't really happen.

Old story: China bad.