i totally dug your story about growing up with all those home grown veggies
eating all those salads

what a cool story

that is neat!!

i'm imagining you growing up surrounded by a green house and mom and dad bringing home an interesting exotic vegetable of the month every month

how cool is THAT?

neat

Well...it is and it's not. First, they were working for some very large green-houses. It was a big socialist agro-business where the production had tp be huge. They DID use pesticides and all sorts of things to increase production - those were the directives. They were two of the dozens of engineers working for those green-houses.

Besides...at home, we were not a "green"/"raw" little cute family. We DID love our raw salads but those were just "part of the deal". My dad wanted meat, meat, meat...we were all used to lots and lots of bread and then it was a tradition in our house to make lots of French-type sweet delicacies. Many recipes were passed down from generation to generation so...

All in all though, I still think we probably ate better than people who eat the SAD in this country because we never used anything pre-packed or pre-cooked. Everything was done from scratch. My mom and grandmother made their own mayonaise and their own everything. We even had home-made pasta.

To this day I cannot fathom how my mom was doing all that elaborate, cooking-from-scratch with a high responsibility full-time job...but heck, socialist women were supposed to be super-women. Or something.

I hear you Siracusa. When people were asking me where I was from and then I heard the answer "How nice!" I always wander if they were just polite or they had no idea what coming from a former commnunist country meant. I remember times when we had only bread and margarine (not butter) at home, some awful salami and no money. Our parents did miracles of cooking with what we had and we as kids had to stay in huge lines early in the morning for any peace of better food. There was notihng neat and not much neatness now either. I, as a professor earn 300 $ and prices are not much lower than in the Sates, some are actually higher (gas). Without your own garden it is hard to stay raw because veggies and fruits are EXPENSIVE. With a really dry year they are going up every day. Man, I'm grim. I can't wait actually to move to Canada. Hopefully I can offer a better and cleaner life to my daughter.

So guys, enjoy what you have. It can be so much worse!

love,
peace
cricri

So Cricris...you're still in Romania...!
Your English is so good I never doubted you left long time ago.

Yes, I remember those times well, I am 34 - the Revolution caught me at 17. I must say I might have been among the luckier ones. We always had lots of food because of my parents' workplace. They could also procure meat and all sorts of other things due to their occupation. But not everyone was so lucky.

Yes...I know about the 300$ a month as a professor. Not good. I rejected a professorship position here in the States because it only paid 2000$ a month net. I will hopefully get the position back next year and will leave behind this office/cubicle job that has made me more sedentary and less healthy since I started it over a year ago. I miss the healthier life I used to have when teaching.

yeah, well... that is where "imagination" comes in
it always saves me from seeing what i don't want to see

like in my "imagination" i see a happy family enjoying a bountiful salad

in my "imagination" i just take out the pesticides,meat, and any other hardships and just see

GREEN GREEN EVERYWHERE

it is said that people see what they wish to see
believe what they wish to believe

geeee

i wonder why

I love reading about your lives. So different from mine but searching for the same things, happy and healthy choices and lives.