The moral economy of țuică
Trusting community, (dis)trusting institutions
Making good quality țuică takes diligence, care, time, and no small amount of muscle. Why go to all this effort—collecting the fruit, grinding it up (in the case of apples and pears, sometimes for hours by hand), setting it to ferment for weeks or months, hauling it to the distillery (or tending your own), chopping wood, babying the fire, testing the proof, collecting the distillate, then tempering and sometimes aging it to yield the best final product? In the post-communist era, it’s easy (and cheap) to buy a bottle of booze from the corner store, even Tennessee’s own Jack Daniel’s sour mash whiskey. So why do people still make their own?
I asked this question in my very first sit-down interview in Brașov County. My interlocutor raised his eyebrows and said, well, I’m not convinced that the bottle we buy in the store is made in the United States.
?
This was certainly not what I expected to hear. I pressed on: so, you think it’s counterfeit? Yes. But not palinca. If you make it yourself you know what you’re drinking.
When I tell my American friends that I’m drinking mysterious liquors made from fruit that was picked up off the ground, distilled in garages and sheds in the rural backwaters of the world, they fear I’ll end up blind or addled or dead. They would certainly never assume that homemade booze is safer, healthier, and more trustworthy than a bottle of Tennessee whiskey made to the exacting standards imposed by the Federal Alcohol Administration Act.
I kept asking this question of why make your own when it is so easy to buy to see if this was just one paranoid individual, or a societal pattern.
Why?
“Because it is natural”
“Because we know what’s in it”
“Because we know that it is just fruit, and so it is healthier for you. It won’t give you a headache or make you sick”
“Because we can trust it”
In Transilvania—and possibly all Romanian villages—this trust is extended to friends, neighbors, and family, but it does not extend to products for sale on supermarket shelves. Several villagers have said that they would trust rachiu being sold by someone on the street in their neighborhood before they would trust what is in the store, even if they didn’t know the street vendor personally. Because in the village, if someone sells bad rachiu, eventually everyone will know. There are social benefits if you have a reputation for making good-quality rachiu, and serious social costs if you pass off an inferior—or even worse, dangerous—product. The rot-gut bathtub gin of American nightmares isn’t being made here. The moral economy of the Transilvanian peasantry prevents it.
This is baffling to the modern American (capitalist) consumer. How can you know that something is safe if it hasn’t been scientifically verified by a reputable institution? Deborah Blum’s book The Poison Squad describes a nightmarish landscape of food adulteration in the early 20th century United States (formaldehyde in milk, salicylic acid used to preserve decaying meat) before the creation of the Food and Drug Administration and the adoption of rules and standards to prevent such evil schemes. But these safety issues were not coming from grandma’s strawberry preserves or milk straight from the parlor out back. This was the dark side of the rise of industrial chemistry and its application to the food supply.
Today, our modern technocratic safety mechanisms point to one of the big liabilities of the industrial-commercial food system that political economist Jennifer Clapp calls social distance.
On the first day of my Political Economy of Food and Agriculture class at the University of Puget Sound, I pass around a bag of groceries that includes everything from a banana to a can of Vienna sausages to a certified organic/humane/sustainable/carbon-neutral chia seed superfood drink. Each student chooses an item from the bag and I ask them a set of simple questions: what do you know about this food? What’s in it? Where did it come from? How was it produced and by whom? How did it get here?
Beyond the ingredient list (oftentimes its own set of mysteries), they have no answers. In a capitalist food system, most of us have little to no connection to the people and places that produce our food. Even if we wanted to know where our food comes from, it is very, very difficult to find out. Just ask the food safety experts responsible for tracing our semiannual e. coli and listeria outbreaks. Even if they can identify the source as bagged spinach or cantaloupe, it usually takes months to trace it back to an individual farm.
In place of the social connection between us and those who produce our food, we have institutions. Government agencies tell us that if we buy something that is certified organic, it will meet a certain list of criteria. Whether we agree with those criteria is beside the point. At least we know that someone is checking that list, so we trust that what we are buying is what it says it is. Corporations launch marketing campaigns and private-label certification programs telling us that our food is natural or healthy. Best-by dates and USDA food processing regulations tell us that our food is safe.
There may be a voice in the back of our heads telling us that we should take all this with a grain of salt. Do our own research. But really? Who has time for that? And so, we default to trusting institutions to keep us safe, or at least to do their best in a system that makes it difficult. In the event of the inevitable breakdown of that system we think, “well imagine how much worse it would be without it!” We’ve come to assume that anything that isn’t subject to these standards of scientific verification is suspect.
I see this in things like the raw milk controversy, and the side-eye I sometimes get from friends when I give them a jar of my home-canned pickles. In contrast, talk to Romanians about food and you will find a widespread and deep suspicion of what can be had in the supermarket versus what comes from the garden, the pantry, the smokehouse, and the cellar in the village where parents and grandparents still keep the “old ways”.
I learned many of these “old ways” from my own mother—how to blanch sweetcorn before freezing to preserve the flavor, how to make shelf-stable pickles without a water bath, how to use a pressure canner. After I moved away from home I would often have to call my mom to remind me of the correct processing times for canned tomatoes or peaches, which she got from the The Ball Blue Book—long considered the US “canning bible”.
Eventually I went out and bought my own copy, but something seemed off. The processing times listed in my early-2000s version of the book were sometimes up to 50% longer than the times published in my mother’s 1970s edition. Had my family been living on the edge of fatal botulism poisoning throughout my childhood, or had we simply become a more litigious and risk-averse society?
In 2021 Iowa State University’s agricultural extension service stopped recommending the Ball Blue Book in 4-H programs and to home canners, saying that the safety of the recipes’ finished products had not been scientifically verified.
I see this as evidence of the yawning chasm between US culture and Romanian culture when it comes to trusting institutions, and trusting our own communities, experiences, and knowledge. I come from a capitalist-bureaucratic society where social distance is considered a necessary trade-off for a “safe” and abundant food supply.
Romania is a still quite recently post-communist society where victimization at the hands of institutions was a nearly universal experience. The state was untouchable, unreliable, and unaccountable. Your neighbors, on the other hand, would keep track of whose turn it was to slaughter a hog, and would remember whose rachiu gave them a wicked hangover.
Even today, if you add sugar to your fruit, if you let the distillation go too long, if you water down the final distillate (all strategies to increase quantity at the cost of quality), everyone in town will know, and no one will trust you. In other words, fidelity of product is key to good social standing in the community. In the US if someone 3,000 miles away gets sick from a bag of spinach that can’t be traced back to the original farm, what is the real consequence to the farmer who used contaminated irrigation water on the field? In a small village in rural Romania if your rachiu makes someone sick, the consequences are immediate and personal.
I’ve been cheeky in my captions on the photos in this post, because I know that American readers might be a little nervous that I’m consuming this stuff, and maybe with good reason. At a recent site visit, I stuck my finger into a vat of fermenting fruit and tasted it, as I’ve seen many Romanians do to test the progress of fermentation. My American colleague wrinkled his nose and suggested that he may have found the source of my recent mild intestinal issues.
But a few days before, another distiller who buys his fruit from the local market told me that he is always suspicious if the fruit is too pristine. If the plums don’t have worms in them then it probably means that the fruit was sprayed with insecticide, and he doesn’t want chemicals in his palinca.
I can see both sides of the argument. It’s risky and maybe kind of naive to consume something that could make you sick. On the other hand, scientific oversight isn’t a guarantee, especially when that process is deeply entwined with the imperative of capital accumulation. From a USDA-approved production standard perspective, it probably wasn’t logical for me to stick my hand in a slurry of organic matter teeming with bacteria. But from a post-communist Romanian perspective, it seems perfectly logical to trust the plums with worms more than the ones without.
fascinatingly edifying...
So weird that you ended up with a home in a community where neighbors rely on and trust each other, particularly in the depths of winter! :-) Love reading the updates.