Translated material
To the village of a girl
Dear granddaughter Lisa
And I am writing a letter to you.
Because the system refused to accept my turnouts and passwords and as it is now called.
I did not know, sitting in my "airport" Dlusy that now there is another post - Rosstatovsky is called. Well, God be with him. All the same, the great post is now. True, there are people who are the rest who are who are now thinking that before people were starving or sitting on one oatmeal jelly. They are ignorant.
“It was easy to observe the posts in the former Moscow if Beluga cost 18 cents of a pound, and sturgeon - 20, and more ordinary fish -fish, bream - were inadequate. Somovin - good and fat - did not eat, disgusted, trusting in rustic rumor that the catfish, it happens, drags and devour children; In small respect there was also toothy pike, it was reluctant to buy it.
The herring, during piece sale, is the best, Dutch or royal, cost 7 kopecks, were both for 5 and 3 kopecks. Astrakhan Vobla cost a penny.
A thousand times I have seen the following picture: a convoy with cules of flour or carcasses stretches from Gavrikova Square. The cart, running around the convoy, will run into a corner petty bench and, having bought a pound of bread and a fat bubble there, a convoy goes calmly next to me on the move. In total, for the whole breakfast he needed a minute and two pennies of money.
The vegetable part was already completely nothing: a pound of the best sauerkraut cost 3 kopecks, a dozen salty cucumbers - a nickle. Dried white mushrooms, the best seasoning of all lean dishes, cost a quarter (25 kopecks) per pound. Salted mushrooms-saffronies, loads, etc.-10-12 kopecks ”(Durylin S.N. in his corner: from old notebooks. M., 1991. P. 59-60).
Exactly a hundred years have passed since then. Not only you, but I have not been in the world yet. And Rosstat has not yet been invented. But if you open “Letters from the village” by A.N. Engelhardt, you will find out that fur bread does not mean fluffy , that is, very fresh. This is bread with Myakina , which Russian men in the Non -Chernozem ate ate almost all year round. So life was different .
Let us return, however, today.
***
Hardly many of you read V. Dudintsev’s once -crazy story “Not by Bread” (1956) - for my generation, the 60s began with it in literature. There, one of the heroes, a middle -aged scientist, assured that it was quite possible to live, eating only with black bread and pharmacy fish oil. It really is possible for some time.
Special thanks to Rosstat that this is not offered to us. I think that one person can still live on the amount indicated by him-but under the following conditions:
1) He/she does not work in Polit.ru - and generally does not work anywhere, because any working person simply does not have enough time: neither in search of the appropriate set of products, nor for its rational use;
2) He/she is completely healthy.
One reader wrote to Lisa that there is pointless potatoes, since it consists of 70% water. I was too lazy to check the accuracy of this assessment, but any root crops, as well as vegetables and fruits, really contain a lot of water, and cabbage is even more than potatoes. By the way, our brown bread is sold for weight and, as a rule, not quite baked, that is, “with water”. But try to switch only to white bread and pasta. The gastroenterologist is already waiting for you ...
Just do not ask me, but what about the Italians? Read the excellent book of Elena Kostyukovich about their food culture - the book is called “Food” - you will find out that the paste without everything is not eaten even in the poorest provinces of Italy.
3) He/she knows that, contrary to common sense, many products of the same brand , conditionally - Kats yogurt or MAS cheese - at different retail outlets, they can be sold not just at a few different prices, but with a difference of 15-20 %.
Do not think that I am comparing prices in the buffet at the station, on the wholesale market and in a good supermarket: these are the prices of supermarkets located in one quarter! So first you will have to spend a lot of time to collect the necessary information.
According to my observations, this is nowhere to be found in the world.
In Copenhagen (as you know, this is a very expensive city) we lived in a good area for a month, where three supermarkets were in walking distance: one “for all”, the other for the rich (of course, it was not called that), the third - “for economical”. In all three, I specifically asked orange juice and frozen pancakes.
"Economic" proposed juice restored from concentrate; “All” - juice without preservatives, rich - either freshly squeezed (it was squeezed with you), or without preservatives, but another company and in a prettier packaging.
The pancakes in the store “for the rich” were too expensive for us, so they left them unknown to me, but in the store for “economical” they were in a different package and turned out to be quite tasty, although also not cheap.
You do not have to be a physician to understand that a single minimum cannot be calculated either in rubles or in calories. Even within the Caucasus, a physiologically justified minimum set of products will be different for subtropics and high -mountain regions. Experienced geographers and ethnographers who go to long expeditions to other lands, with great care and are very gradually switching to local food and, by the way, to local water.
Lisa should imagine herself a foreigner who came to the capital of our Motherland without money. Or almost without.
I have a similar experience of life in Stockholm - however, it lasted two weeks, but I really did not have money. But it will still be interesting to compare ...