ah 12 packs of cigarettes and a half a litre of vodka. a complete balanced breakfast.
this post was submitted on 18 Dec 2024
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I was trying to figure out how to make it work for week but a month?
Their priorities were fucked up. Cigarettes and alcohol, obviously, but more sugar than rice? Huh?
Also, lots of meat but no other food groups?
Vodka and cigarettes are not necessities. Different times, obviously. If the vodka was being made either from potatoes or grain, even if of lower quality, those would be better put towards adding extra available calories for people.
p.s
This made me remember being told there was a time, my country being at war then, where cigarette packs were distributed to soldiers with a banner stamped on it that stated "Have a cigar and relax".
That is around 970 calories a day if you take 1/30th of each edible item on the Table.
It's not enough, but surprisingly almost half the needed amount.
If Poland is anything like the US, families were expected to keep a garden where they grew many vegetables and fruits, and often kept chickens.
0.5 liter of vodka? What were they supposed to do the other 29 days of the month?
Is that not a lot of sugar for how few ingredients to use it with?
I imagine there are food items which aren't rationed, because there's no fruit or vegetables here. If you grew your own fruit and had sugar you could preserve it as jam. The sugar helps prevent spoilage. Or if you grew rhubarb you could make a pie, which would be pretty darn sour without sugar.
It's the cigarettes that kill me!
It's the cigarettes that kill me!
Apparently it's not just you, cigarettes are killing several people.
They’ve killed at least 2 people, maybe three people. It’s really hard to say
Not sure. It may be that it looks like a lot simply because we're used to modern foods having sugar pre-added?
Sounds like a miserable existence. You're going to need a lot more vodka than that to cope.
Rationing in the early 80s is considered to be one of the major agitating factors that led to increased labor union activity and, thus, the eventual end of the Communist regime in Poland. Would seem that it was not nearly enough vodka to quietly cope!
I can see why. Like if I was flat broke, these rations would be super welcome, but as an ongoing totality of what I could have for all of my labor? No, fuck that! The people at the top were obviously hoarding all the wealth, which seems to always happen every time this form of government is tried.
Well, you still had to purchase the food, you were just limited by ration cards in how much of certain goods you could purchase.
Oh shit, that's even worse!
Lmao 2.5kg of meat? Forget it. If you got any, it was a day to celebrate. You couldn't get shit for stamps and you had to stand in long queues to get the scraps that you could get. You waited for hours for a delivery that immediately disappeared or didn't come at all. You literally bought what you could. People used to barter the stamps and a grey market to get what you needed popped up. The only way to get what you wanted was to pay with dollars.
I had the opportunity to visit Russia in 1987 at the hight of the USSR. It was a hell-hole. Communism doesn’t work.
1987 certainly wasn’t the height of the USSR
You sound like you were actually there? If so, please continue.
My wife was born in ( but too late to remember) a former Soviet state.
Talking with her grandma is pretty interesting. Recently with global inflation, some of the grandmas friends were speaking fondly about government controlled price of bread.
Then my grandma (in law) who still has more of her marbles than any 91 year old I've ever met said "lol, yeah that was the price on the sign, but there was no bread in the store!"
"Ooooohhhhh yyyeeaaaaahhhh....."
The Soviet Union was a fun place. People whose great grandparents happened to be German were put on a train to Kyrgistan and just dumped out onto the steppe.
The 50% who survived the first winter and actually managed to build up villages were later banned from buying or selling at the local market, forcing them into the black market to survive, which was obviously illegal as well.
But they weren't allowed to emigrate to Germany either.
In the 90‘s they were allowed. And Germany welcomed them.
"would you like your tea with no milk or no cream?"
I wonder how they used it. Fancy baked goods the first days, then a rush to bake long lasting good before the perishables spoil? Did widowers ask family to bake with their rations?
That's like, half a days worth of vodka
Seriously. It's what I'm buying for myself for a gaming evening if I don't want to get drunk.
More on the history of this photograph here: https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/food-rationing-communist-poland/
Who the hell writes like this, felt like a student that had an x word paper due and added literally every adjective they could think of to pad it.
Thank you for the effort, that was an interesting read.
Would they have been expected to grow their own vegetables, or did they just embrace the average young male diet?
I believe vegetables weren't rationed
What was the reason for rationing, was it inflation, unemployment, drought or what? I though Poland economy was free to do what it wanted, or was it subject to the same problems as the Soviet Union?
Same essential problems as the SovUnion, but in the early-mid 1980s, the Polish economy was struggling.
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I find it funny that a lot of people seem to be assuming that this is everything that they were allowed to eat. Fruits and veggies have been completely banned, in this world! Haha
Fruit is often hard to grow, but simple veggies like potatoes and onions are a no-brainer. Garlic too!
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Four and a half kilos of carbohydrates and sugars, goddamn.
For a month, that’s only about 600 kcal/day from carbs. Maybe potatoes are unrationed.
That's a starvation diet for a full grown male. Hell, that's even less than a very small female adult would need.
A loaf of bread is about half a kilo of flour, that's not much for a whole month!
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