The home economics of abundance and waste

Capitalism, communism, and what we do with what we are given

Making țuică is a moral obligation in the villages of Transilvania. When I return (again) to the question of why go to all this trouble to make your own hooch, the villagers gesture toward their fruit-laden gardens as though it is self-explanatory.

We have to use the fruit.

Letting it rot on the ground is simply unthinkable. The fruit itself compels villagers to the craft, as something must be made of everything that the land provides. This compulsion is born of the rural ethos of thrift and self-reliance. My mother, who grew up on a small farm in Appalachian Ohio, herself carries this compulsion. As a kid I remember her coming home from her full-time job as a teacher and later a school administrator, only to stay up until the wee hours of the night putting up tomatoes or corn or pickles, making bread from the precious every-other-year persimmons, or stirring a surfeit of blueberries into sugar and vodka that would become a Christmas cordial.

She’s still at it—this year’s paw paw bread

This is the rhythm and the shape of peasant life, where everyone has a milk cow, a couple of pigs, a vegetable garden, and fruit trees. Everything is used. Nothing is wasted. Kitchen scraps are fed to the chickens and pigs, crop residues are fed to the cows, and when we’ve made all the jams and preserves we need, the rest of the fruit becomes țuică.

Filling the cazan for the first distillation

Because the value created by our bodies, our minds, our sweat and our ingenuity is not reflected in numbers on a paycheck, but in a full pantry, a full larder, and a year’s worth of țuică to get us through the dark winter, the weddings, the baptisms, and the parties in the coming year. To waste the yield of our work is to waste our very selves.

Preparing the flour and water dough that will seal the seam of the boiler during distillation

But here in Romania, there is another, darker shade to the this compulsion, because it is also born of the state-imposed scarcity and generational trauma of Ceaușescu’s communist regime, which most of my interview subjects lived through, and which indelibly marked the early lives of people my age. The ethos of thrift is not a uniquely rural phenomenon in Romania, because for 55 years thrift was a matter of survival in the city.

Ration lines in communist Romania. The Economist, September 1, 2015

Communism in the city and communism in the countryside were very different experiences. If anything, life in the village was easier than life in the city under Ceaușescu. In the city, food, gas, and electricity were severely rationed in order to serve Ceaușescu’s single-minded goal of paying off the country’s foreign debt—which he managed to do by exporting everything the country produced, leaving his own people starving in the cold. In the countryside, though, there was always wood to burn for heat, vegetables from the garden, pigs and cows in the back yard, and of course, fruit for țuică.

The personal use of these resources was, of course, heavily restricted under communism. It was illegal to slaughter a cow for meat. All cattle were required to be kept for milk or sold to the state. Harsh penalties awaited those caught slaughtering more than one pig, or more than 3 sheep, or making țuică outside the government-owned or -licensed village distillery. For those who did make their țuică above-board, they were required to give 70 percent of it to the state.

But the geography of Transilvania, like Appalachia, put many of these villages beyond the practical reach of the state, which made it possible for most people to continue making their own țuică at home, and often sending it to relatives in the city to trade for medical care or to bribe the Securitate. In general, people in the villages had more (food, heat, freedom) than people in the cities.

Pop quiz: Appalachia or Romania?

Using every scrap of what the land could provide in the village, or what money could buy in the city, meant that the ethos of thrift cut across the rural/urban context. It became a universal Romanian value.

The privation that Romanians experienced at the hands of Ceaușescu is hard to fathom for this child of 1980s capitalist excess. Then and now, asking (or ordering) a citizen to sacrifice for the greater good would be political suicide for any US head of state.

In the US, the fruit does not compel us to use it. Urban fruit trees become bait for vermin, as trees planted for their beautiful spring blossoms produce an abundance of food for rats and raccoons in the fall. Farmers sometimes let their crop rot in the field because they can’t afford to harvest it. Thirty percent of the food that is produced in the United States is wasted while 13 percent of the US population does not have enough to eat.

This is a failure of capitalism.

When food becomes a commodity, it is produced according to the law of economic efficiency, and consumed according to the law effective demand. A farmer does not grow food to feed the household, but to sell for money. Economic efficiency dictates that if a crop costs more to harvest than it will fetch at market, it stays in the field.

Effective demand simply means having money. Demand is wanting or needing something that the market can provide. Everyone demands food. We need it to live. But that demand is only effective if the market can see it—if you have money to go to the supermarket and buy food. Markets respond to that effective demand.

In a capitalist economy, however, there is often a gap between our effective demand and our actual needs and desires. One may desire fresh organic vegetables, but may only be able to effectively demand Ramen noodles. If you have no money to buy food, you have no effective demand at all, and you become invisible to the market.

Slavish adherence to economic efficiency creates waste. Lack of effective demand creates hunger. The solution to each lies in the other, but capitalism is incapable of solving these twinned market (and state) failures.

Enter the gleaning movement.

Gleaning is an idea that goes back to biblical times, when farmers were encouraged to leave a portion of their crop unharvested for the poor to gather.

Vintage engraving of 'The Gleaners' after an oil painting by Jean-François Millet. Getty Images/duncan1890

Today, the concept has been embraced by environmental and social justice groups seeking to address the wedded ecological and humanitarian crises of food waste and hunger by rounding up volunteers to go to farms where economic efficiency has left crops behind and distribute that food to those market ghosts whose effective demand is invisible, but whose embodied need for sustenance is very real indeed.

They also go to people’s houses, to their backyard fruit trees, to harvest and then give away the fruit that would otherwise rot on the ground.

In the deeply capitalist US, putting these valuable resources to use requires a robust, bureaucratized system of non-profit organizations that rely primarily on precariously underpaid and volunteer labor. In still-recently post-communist Romania, it is simply what you do.

One could see this as two very different cultural responses to abundance. In post-communist Romania, abundance is a gift that may or may not be given again. The generational trauma of communist-era scarcity has branded the Romanian psyche. Even today, practically speaking, many fruit trees bear in ever-other-year cycles, and climate change is making yields increasingly unpredictable. Therefore, a bumper crop is not a reason to relax. It is a reason to work even harder, because next year the fruit may not come.

In the US when something is abundant, it is usually cheap. Capitalism compels us to value what is costly. If abundance costs us nothing, it becomes waste.

In the peasant economy, the costs and benefits of making țuică are calculated differently. The labor and raw materials cost the farmer nothing in that no money changes hands. But they are not free. And resources that are abundant are transformed into a store of great value, which cannot be translated into an equivalent market price.

In the ration line, no one’s demand is any more effective than anyone else’s when the shelves are empty.

Effective demand won't get you much in 1980s Romania. Photo credits Adrian Dumitru Pîrvu, Stiri De Actualitate, 2015; Dorin Ţimonea, adevarul.ro, 2019

But not everyone in Romania remembers the ration lines, or remembers hiding a pig in the cellar so it wouldn’t be confiscated by the state. Romania is a country only one generation (or less) removed from the villages, and today’s college students are part of the first generation born after the revolution that ended Ceaușescu’s regime—and communist rule—in 1989.

I’ve talked to several college students in my time here, and many of them express ambivalence, sometimes indifference, sometimes maybe even a bit of embarrassment, at the persistence of the “old ways” in this modern country. One urban mother of teenagers told me that her kids roll their eyes at her compulsion to make use of every little thing. Maybe as those social and psychological distances grow, the ethos of thrift—as expressed in the annual ritual of țuică—will fade?

Few of the students I have talked to express enthusiasm for making țuică. One or two could confidently say that yes, they know how. Most have maybe helped their grandparents a time or two, but they couldn’t do it on their own. When I ask if they want to learn, they shrug their shoulders noncommittally.

So I ask them, if they aren’t interested in learning to making țuică, will the tradition die out with their generation? They say, emphatically, universally, no. Of course not.

As long as the fruit is there, someone will make the țuică.

The fruit continues to compel.