Letter from Poland.

 

Less for your bread and butter.

18.12.2007

One solution to the rising price of food is to grow your own.
By Anna Piwowarska
I frequent my local grocery shop on a daily basis. I don’t mind spending that little bit more than in a supermarket to be sure that I’m getting quality fruit and vegetables and fresh organic meat. However, I have been left shocked by the sudden rise in food prices in the last month or so. Now, on average I would spend around thirty to forty zloty a day on food, now I spend over fifty. And that’s just buying your daily loaf of bread, milk, intake of fruit and vegetables and a small piece of meat.
Last year, the European statistical bureau ‘Eurostat’ published data that showed that food prices in Poland were amongst some of the lowest in the European Union. Data showed that food was the most expensive in Denmark, while in Bulgaria and Lithuania it was the cheapest. Poland was third cheapest overall, and in the area of milk, cheese and eggs we were the cheapest. Well, not anymore it seems.
The price of food worldwide have rocketed – in September the world price of wheat was 400 dollars per tonne, the highest ever recorded. This is scary particularly when it was half the price a few months earlier, in May. In Poland, it is estimated that in December 2008, the cost of food articles will be 8-10 percent higher than in December 2007. Articles most affected seem to be fruit, dairy products, grain products, poultry and eggs. So basically, things you buy on a day to day basis. The guys at the Institute of Agricultural Economics and Food Economy predict that sugar, jam and chocolate will not be affected as much due to the decrease in the price of sugar. So even though we’re constantly told to eat our fruit and vegetables, all we can actually afford is jam and chocolate. No wonder we not getting any healthier.
One member of my extended family seems to have found an answer. She has bought some land near to the Belarus border and grows her own food there from spring till autumn. Apparently she is even able to grow such luxuries such as rocket leaves. She grows all manner of herbs and vegetables and said that last year her carrots were so good that she couldn’t help but eat them all the time. And she doesn’t even like carrots. No wonder she has such lovely shiny hair. She can also purchase cheap dairy products from local farms nearby.
However, this doesn’t quite solve the problem of expensive meat. I have another member of my extended family who seems to have got to grips with the problem of expensive meat. He recently offered me some very tasty sausages which were his own produce. It turned out that he had not only minced the meat and stuffed the sausage, but he had also killed the pig out of which they were made. Obviously, it’s much cheaper to buy a pig and make sausages out of it, then to buy that same amount of shop bought sausages. I was very impressed, especially as the young man in question was not a butcher or a farmer but a law graduate from Poznań.
This got me thinking on how we can become more ‘hands on’ in an attempt to cut household food bills. City dwellers rarely have the luxury of large gardens but the majority of people in Poland to have access to a summer house where in the summer months they grow their own food. Perhaps we should learn from our mother’s and grandmother’s and the skills that they learnt during hard times such as the Second World War and Communism. Pickling and preserving is a brilliant way of stocking up on cheap and tasty summer fruit and veg. All you need is sugar (which we know is getting cheaper) or vinegar (which has always been cheap). Making ‘compote’ out of fruit, water and sugar is a much healthier alternative to those horrid, chemical fruit juices that pretend they’re natural by having ‘100 percent juice’ written on them (what does ‘100 percent juice’ mean anyway?) And you can have the satisfaction of saying that it’s your own work rather than shop bought. So, although I don’t have any money to buy land near Belarus and I can’t bring myself to slaughter any pigs, my resolution for next year is to stop fretting about growing food prices worldwide but to start pickling…