Detail 1
A VERY SHORT HISTORY OF THE COLD WAR
There is a rumor. If you climb the wrong wall, you will die. They will shoot you. Which wall, where it is, who they are - all things we do not know. All we know is that wall climbing can be dangerous business. We stare with new respect at walls...is it this one or maybe that one?
“No”, some older kids laugh, “it's the one in the big city".
Life goes on. More stories, more dangers which let you forget the old ones: spiders that bite you and leave their eggs under your skin, needles forgotten on a couch that find their way into your body and travel all the way to the heart and, last but not least, rusty old metal in the woods that might be a bomb from the last war that will kill you, or at least blow your hands off. Never mind hornets, poisonous mushrooms, and foxes with rabies. Life is so exiting that one more strange thing gets easily forgotten.
Then one day we are in the big city, visiting my father’s friends. There is a supermarket close by, and my father decides to go shopping. Meanwhile, we are allowed to play outside. "But”, my father says, "do not climb the wall. That is forbidden!" My jaw drops. Could it possibly be right in front of me… THE WALL? I forget to play, and observe the wall instead. It is not very high, but high enough for me not to see anything beyond.
My mind adds all the things we whispered about: guards with giant dogs, 100-meter height, barbed wire, and dragons, even though all I can see is a little wiener dog. Also, nobody is trying to climb over the wall. I stare and stare. I am dumbfounded, so much so that I totally forget to ask my older siblings what they think of this.
This picture of the (supermarket) wall (with my add-ons) burnt itself into my 5-year-old brain. Many years later I still wondered why the Berlin Wall, that was supposed to divide worlds, would run through the middle of East Berlin.
Detail 2
SWEET SIXTEEN AND THE SWEET FRUITS OF FEAR
Suddenly they were everywhere,
Strawberries, - polish ones-, we were told.
Not that we did not have our own.
My mum grew them in small amounts in her garden. Once a year, for a very short fort night in June one could even buy them.
Secretaries lined up to get strawberries for their bosses, students skipped classes, with permission or even on a mission to get some for their teachers, workers walked away from work and joined the long lines. I am sure the whole economy suffered. The rather poor phone system got overwhelmed because everybody called everybody with tips, where, when and how many baskets you were allowed per person. How the Stasi could listen to all this strawberry-talk without losing it, I do not know. Farmers sold whole baskets full off their trucks and we lined up happily for hours, while arguing over the best way to eat this fragile tasty treats.
For two weeks you could buy fresh strawberries, and they had to be eaten fast, since they spoiled so easily.
But now it was just May and you could get them in the usually rather empty fruit and vegetables stores. Fresh, red, ripe - but not so mushy like ours. And so many, that we were even allowed to take them to school. Strawberries everywhere you looked.
We heard that these sweet berries where farmed for the West. But then the West Germans rejected them. Why?
Because of fear, we acknowledged, heads shaking, “stupid, strange West-Germans…so spoiled…."
Just because of a little nuclear accident, in a small town called Chernobyl, where some reactor blew up.
We devoured some more, still not believing that anybody would turn down strawberries because of some event hundreds of miles away, fearing the wind, of all things.
“Hey you idiots”, yelled a classmate,
"don’t you understand - r a d i a t i o n s s i c k n e s s-
you know, like in Hiroshima and Nagasaki!”
We looked at him doubtfully. He was a strange one, very brainy. His mother always complained about pollution.
“I already got a birth defect, I was born stupid, nothing worse can happen to me.” one of us joked.
No, we decided, bullshit - maybe that chicken shit just did not like strawberries.
But we did, and these ones tasted deliciously normal. Who cared about something that might happen 30 years from now. That was like threatening us with lung cancer or liver cirrhosis just before we started to party.
30 years later I am slightly amused.I did not get radiation sickness.In my twenties I was mad for a while, mad at the evil communists who tried to irradiate us with strawberries.Then I forgot all about it.Now it is just another story from the communist wonderland I used to call home.
Detail 3
SUPERFOODS DURING THE COLD WAR
They were laughing about us, or declaring us outright crazy.
"You guys eat kale raw?" Shuddering "You make salad out of it?"
The year was 1989 and Angy and I had decided that enough is enough - we could not wait till next summer to eat something fresh and green. Winter was good for cole slaw, onions and old apples, sometimes carrots and Christmas for Cuban oranges. Oh and pickles...
But green kale had to be cooked until it turned into a grey mash. Maybe with smoked bacon and onions. Like all the other proper winter vegetables- (old potatoes, cabbage, peas and maybe turnips- but I would not know about them, there were kind of taboo in my family, my grandparents overate on them during the first world war) you boiled it until it surrendered.
Never raw!
Here we were with our invention. We bought each day a bag of kale, and made a big bowl of salad using buttermilk as dressing. (no, we did not have olive oil ever, and lemons not very often)
We should have patented it, as communist dictatorship survival food. Because survive we did. That should be enough proof.
Maybe we were just shitty at promoting it. Superfood sounds so much better.
The thought that we could be the better people and mother earth would shriek with delight because of our food choices did not cross our minds ever.
This is what happens when you got an egoistic one-party dictatorship brainwashing you from early age on.
Somehow we did not even think about the vitamins and antioxidants and minerals and fiber in it, we just liked it. How naive it seems now to have eaten vegetables for the simple reason of liking them. And meat was more expensive. We rather spend our money on booze. That was cheap too.
Nobody ever told us there to eat kohlrabi, tomatoes, cucumbers or asparagus. You just ate them whenever you got them. That was not very often. A good way to force people to eat something is not having it in abundance or rationing it. Better then giving it out for free. Then most people think there is something wrong with it. " Why are they throwing this broccoli after us? Must be really bad for you, make you fat or something..."
Arguable back then we might not have taken the broccoli either, even if they had rationed it. Because we would not have known what to do with it. Never saw one until we were allowed to join the civilized west. And then for sure most east Germans cooked it until butter-soft and rejected all attempts to feet them crunchy vegetables. (“This west Germans are soo cheap, they don't even cook their veggies properly because it cost them too much energy.")
My first pineapple came with a care-packet from the west. For some reasons my grandparents, who had lived in the terrible times long before socialism, when the working class was either starving or considered that having a salted herring with the weeks old dry bread equaled a great party. Oh, but then, my family was not working class...we belong to the subgroup of " others". (my father managed to sneak into the leading class, e.g. the working class by doing an apprenticeship as brick layer before becoming an engineer) Anyway, grandma knew how to peel and cut it and we all started to devouring big chunks until nothing was left. More then it being very delicious, I remember how my tongue hurt quite some time after.
Ten years later, in Christmas 1988 I got my first taste of a mango. A friend of mine had some student mates from Mozambique. They invited us for a Christmas mango dinner. I do not remember their names or faces, all I remember is us four, sitting around a cheap plastic table, in the huge ugly cafeteria of their student resident. In the middle of the table was a plate, on this plate proudly sat a mango. (I think the one guy got the mango mailed from home by his parents) " What now?" we asked, after an appropriated silence. " Well we eat it." they responded. "But how?" So they showed us, slicing it up and feeding us little pieces, dividing this mango in exactly four parts. I am sure we giggled and shrieked. And, oh my, was it ever delicious. So tasty, sweet, fruity- on of the best things I had ever eaten. Mangos became one of my favorite foods and still are now, where I can buy them whenever I want. The poor guys meanwhile might have hoped to get laid by sharing a mango, but not with us...we were just so proud of ourselves that we were not racist, that we did not even consider our friends from Africa reacting like any other guys on a date... That was that.
Another favorite fruit of mine are kiwis. When I was in about grade five our relatives from the west German wonderland came visiting - and brought some kiwis. I organized a guided tour for my school friends through our kitchen. Everybody was allowed to touch and smell (no, we were not that communist, the kiwi eating was restricted to close family members) and then we discussed if it is useful to have a fruit that taste like a mix of strawberries and gooseberries. It certainly was...ha-ha, I told my envious comrades the next day in school. This example might show as well how difficult it is, to built an egalitarian society. Some people had kiwis and others had not, and the one with the kiwis did not always wanted to share. Just like now with the money.
Maybe the North Korean Semi God is right - kimchi for everybody and nothing else. Even the friends from peta should be happy about this low carbon, animal friendly life style. And then you can build as many nuclear and hydrogen bombs as your heart desires.