The late 1980s in Romania were a time of shortages. Ceausescu, the autocrat in power, made nationalist isolationism and economic independence from the West an absolute priority. State propaganda used the phrase “Golden Age” to describe Ceausescu’s time in power. Regular citizens used the phrase ironically. When the regime fell in 1989 most of Romania’s foreign debt had been paid off, but the majority of its population had experienced a decade of scarcity.
Food was being rationed, there were extensive power outages meant to reduce energy consumption and any non-domestic products were, well, a rarity. Oranges were only available once a year, a week or two ahead of the winter holidays. You had to queue for hours and if you were lucky you would get a kilogram of oranges per person. Most produce available was local and seasonal. In winter you would eat pickled vegetables, mostly cabbage, homemade preserves, and compote. Most things were homemade, organic, and homegrown. But if didn’t own a house with a garden, which a lot of people didn’t, fresh produce was hard to come by. This was in part due to the fact that state-owned farms were exporting their crops.
I was lucky. My family owned a garden and so I grew up enjoying plenty of fresh fruit. Yet, I had never seen bananas. That is until one day when a classmate brought one to class. She had relatives in the West and I am guessing someone had sent her family some bananas. All the kids in the classroom were mesmerized. We had a lot of questions, but no one asked any. It was a forbidden fruit after all. It came from the West. The classmate seemed concerned about the unwanted attention and put the banana back in her backpack.
I went home that day and told my mom. That night, I overheard my parents discussing how they could procure the fruit for me and my brother. I didn’t think much of it, but I knew that they probably knew somebody, who knew somebody, who had some connections in the West. So that’s probably what happened. My parents likely moved the network, traded some of our homemade cherry preserves for some chocolate, and traded that for some cigarettes, which in turn were traded for a banana. This may or may not have been what happened, but one thing was for sure, a few months later, there it was: a banana on our kitchen table. My brother and I spent some time exploring the texture, admiring the color and the fragrance but we didn’t eat it. The next day the banana was still there, a treasure. You don’t eat treasures, you hold on to them, you cherish them. We never ate the banana. It stayed there on the kitchen table until it developed brown spots, became brown, and ultimately rotten. My parents’ reaction to all of this was a mix of anger and confusion. They had probably gone to great lengths to get us that banana, and we didn’t even take one bite.
All of this might sound confusing to a 2022 American reader. Obviously bananas didn’t grow in Western Europe. I was actually aware of that fact, kids my age could name many varieties of tropical fruit, we had just never tasted one. What made them interesting and desirable was that they were widely available in the West. You could walk to the store and just buy a bunch. We couldn’t do that, so for us, the banana just joined the ranks of other Western products. Things that you would collect, protect, hold on to and only rarely eat. People were collecting coffee, chocolate, cookies, candy, cigarettes, and cologne. Some people would just collect the empty packaging of Western products. The banana just happened to be one of the more perishable items in this collection. The line between collecting and hoarding was fine and perhaps blurry.