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Can someone calculate the calories in that? I’m too lazy.
Maybe don’t include the sugar. That’s a shit ton of sugar to go through in month.
Ballpark estimate, excluding the sugar:
2.5kg beef: ~6265 Calories
0.5l vodka: ~1082 Calories
1.3kg white rice: ~4743 Calories
1.3kg flour: ~4732 Calories
500g butter: ~3585 Calories
300g cooking oil (Google says rapeseed oil is popular in Poland so I used that): ~2652 Calories
250g chocolate: ~1338 Calories
Total: 24,397 Calories or ~813 Calories per day
Some other people online also did the math and came up with similar numbers. For example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37027027 came up with 33,063 Calories (including the sugar)
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.
You supplement it with potatoes, carrots, cabbage, cucumbers and other veggies. And some apples and seasonal fruit.
Things sucked but people weren’t malnourished back then.
Also not shown here: gasoline was also rationed, as were cars themselves.
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.
Are you referring to ‘Victory Gardens’ in WWII?
If so, that’s a bit of an apples to oranges comparison, since Poland had been at peace for over 35 years.
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.
More on the history of this photograph here: https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/food-rationing-communist-poland/
Thank you for the effort, that was an interesting read.
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.
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…”
