The dairies were sold in the morning. People woke up at 3-4 in the morning and went to stand in a queue. As they couldn?t stand too long in one spot, they would leave bags and rocks. Long lines of unattended bags and rocks could be seen.

You could not buy food in Bucharest in ?87, either. They would ask for your ID card, and not even students could buy anything.

Meat was increasingly scarce, in Bucharest and throughout the country. All you could find were bones from which meat had been cleaned off, which people would call ?adidas?. We had to settle with that, though.

In early 80?s you could only buy tinned fish and biscuits without standing in a queue. No meal without fish, they used to say. In late 80?s you couldn?t even find the out of date cream biscuits called Eugenia. Starting 1987, things got so bad, that we were terrified we would literally die of starvation. (23).

There were queues of 10-20 persons for salami, not so long as the queues for meat or milk. We used to buy raw salami, wrap it in paper and hang it on the balcony. We waited for it to dry; if it didn?t go off, it eventually dried. Salami was a luxury food, you could live without it. (I. H., S. R.-B., 15)

Early 80?s meant a period of dire poverty. You couldn?t find sugar or oil. The potatoes you bought at the grocer?s were the size of a nut. They sold us 2 to 3 kilos, which was supposed to be enough for one family. However, we could find frozen fish everywhere.

We couldn?t find cheese or hard cheese, while the butter, the bread, the milk, the oil and the sugar were rationed. In Bucharest you could only buy cold meats if you had your ID card with you. You could also buy tinned fruits and vegetables. Food consumption was limited and scheduled. Food products were rationed, sometimes arbitrarily, by shop assistants themselves. Most of the times we would stand in never-ending queues to buy chicken. I remember those plastic bags containing two small chickens, which we would call the Petreus brothers. I would wake up at 4 in the morning to buy milk and cream, otherwise there would be nothing left. People would step on each other, children would suffocate. We were like animals. At the market, you could find vegetables sold by peasants: tomatoes, cabbage, greens, cucumbers, or fruit: apples, pears, grapes and nuts.

Confectionaries sold cakes and ice cream. But most of the time we made cakes at home: cake, donuts, pancakes, everything. We rarely made tart, only on special occasions, because you had to start storing the ingredients a month before. We would buy cocoa for New Year?s Eve and make sure we had enough for the whole year.

Before New Year?s Eve everybody would stand in long queues for a kilo of oranges. There were no bananas, mandarins or kiwis. There were however, bad quality Romanian wines. Bear was quite difficult to find, and so was the coffee. Usually we would drink coffee made of chickpea and fried rice, we used to call ?nechezol?. A 250-gr pack of coffee was sold for 400 lei on the black market, which accounted for the price of a good pair of shoes, the average salary being at the time 2,500 lei. As for juice, you probably know about the famous ?Quick? made of citric acid and colorant. That was what our children would drink. There was also Pepsi and Cico. The first time I drank Coca-Cola or Fanta was after 1990. (F. Z. N., 33)