Pig stalls and urban kitchen gardens. Food shortage management and scarcity strategies in the eighties Cover Image

Disznópajták és városi haszonkertek. Hiánygazdálkodás és szűkösségkezelési stratégiák a nyolcvanas években
Pig stalls and urban kitchen gardens. Food shortage management and scarcity strategies in the eighties

Author(s): Horváth István
Subject(s): Cultural history, Social history, Post-War period (1950 - 1989), History of Communism
Published by: Presa Universitara Clujeana
Keywords: state socialism; social history of consumption; urban kitchen gardens; consumption statistics;

Summary/Abstract: This paper reviews the features of consumption and, more specifically, food supply under state socialism in Romania. Emphasizing the specific duality that characterized food production. In parallel with collectivisation, which was also proclaimed as a rational organisation of production, forms of production organisation based on family ties were maintained to a considerable extent. Moreover, this form of production organisation was extended from rural to urban areas in the crisis management process of the 1980s. The emergence of urban kitchen gardens and barns was not only of economic importance in the context of shrinking supplies, but also functioned as an important social historical moment. It reversed and inverted the processes of systemic identification that had begun to take shape in certain forms during the two good decades of consolidated state socialism.

  • Issue Year: 19/2021
  • Issue No: 02
  • Page Range: 9-42
  • Page Count: 34
  • Language: Hungarian