Letter from Romania

In a corner of the Museum of the Romanian Peasant in Bucharest is a gallery filled with old Communist relics. Alongside a few busts of Lenin and portraits of the dead dictator Nicolae Ceausescu is a memorial to a huge group of Communism’s victims in this country: ordinary farmers who opposed collectivization.

Since my Romanian is nowhere near good enough to have understood the captions on this exhibit, I’ll let this excerpt from the British academic Tom Gallagher’s book, Theft of a Nation: Romania since Communism, tell the story for me. It was “difficult to get millions of peasant proprietors to give up their land to the state and enter collective farms,” he writes.

“It took thirteen years for collectivization to be accomplished after the campaign to end landed property (except in unproductive parts of the country) started officially in 1949. Some 80,000 peasants were imprisoned for their opposition. Armed resistance in the mountains continued sporadically through the 1950s unknown to the outside world.”

To make matters worse, Ceausescu exported food during his regime even as the population went hungry. This was one of the primary reasons for his violent overthrow in December 1989 even as other East European Communist dictatorships ended without such incidents.

Since the fall of Communism, Romania has gradually begun the process of de-collectivization, giving state-owned land back to farmers to cultivate for their own benefit. According to Gallagher, this process has proceeded far too slowly. Most farmers still do not have enough land to make enough money to lift them out of poverty.

Nevertheless, from a gastronomic standpoint, the results have been spectacular. Groceries and food stands throughout Romania are full of fresh, domestically-grown fruits and vegetables this time of year. The size and taste of these delicacies compares favorably with anything you’d find in trendy upscale grocers in America like Whole Foods Markets.

I don’t know how else to describe it but to tell you that the carrots here are more “carroty,” the pears grown here more “peary,” and so on and so forth. Indeed, with all the new restaurants started in the country since the fall of Communism, Romania is a kind of culinary paradise. I can’t help but wonder whether food in the United States tasted this good before the corporatization of agriculture.

Nevertheless, Romania still needs to change the way it produces its food in order to create a system that can raise the people who grow its crops out of a peasant-level existence. However, such changes will inevitably be resisted by a populace that is used to its traditional fare.

For example, the other day I had a friendly argument with our landlord at the market about apples. He insisted that any apple that approaches the size of a fist tastes like the chemicals that must have been used to produce them. When I told him that the Chinese actually prefer giant apples and that they’re quite tasty, he didn’t believe me.

At present, foreigners are forbidden from buying land in Romania, but this will change with Romania’s entrance into the European Union in 2007. This is apparently the major stumbling block for creating giant American-style corporate farms because nobody in country has the assets to buy up the necessary number of small plots.

Will large-scale agriculture wreck Romanian food? Not necessarily. Small scale-farmers will not disappear as long as there is a market for their specialized, high-quality products. In fact, they might even be able to make more money for their products if they can raise tastier crops than their corporate competitors.

You can already see the benefits of modern agriculture in grocery store shelves here. For example, there is now a greater variety in the diet of urban Romanians thanks to fresh fruit in winter from South Africa, Spain, even Brazil on the shelves of local supermarkets. The economic benefits of agricultural exports, already an essential part of the Romanian economy, will help ordinary people throughout the country as they grow.

Yet there is always the possibility of carrying a good thing too far. It would be most unfortunate for consumers if small farmers became rare in Romania just as they’re disappearing from other parts of the industrialized world. After all, they were practicing “organic” farming here long before it became trendy in the United States. In fact, Romanians might even have something to teach American farmers who are trying to rediscover their agricultural past.