Breadcrumbs and Spoiled Milk
The Milk and Bread Programme, and how Romanian children were left hungry by false promises and neoliberal policies. Words by Radu Stochita. Illustration by Sinjin Li.
Good morning and welcome to Vittles Season 7: Food and Policy. Each essay in this season investigates how policy intersects with eating, cooking, and life. For our twentieth newsletter in this season, Radu Stochita writes about the Milk and Bread Programme in Romania, through which the government has provided a bread roll and a carton of milk to every school child for the past twenty-two years. In his essay, Radu writes about the failure of successive Romanian governments to provide food security for children, and how austerity policies have little to do with the sustained wellbeing of citizens.
This is also our final piece for Season 7. This season has tackled everything from the sugar tax to gastrodiplomacy, examined the labour of fruit pickers and domestic workers, and celebrated blue roll and the motorway service station. You can find the entire Season 7 archive here. We will be back with our new schedule after a two-week break. Vittles Recipes on Wednesday and Vittles Restaurants on Friday will run as usual. To receive them, and to support out publishing, you can subscribe below for £5 a month or £45 a year.
Breadcrumbs and Spoiled Milk
The Milk and Bread Programme, and how Romanian children were left hungry by false promises and neoliberal policies. Words by Radu Stochita. Illustration by Sinjin Li.
Every day during lunch break at our school in Pucioasa, the southern Romanian town where I grew up, one student from each class had to go and pick up a brown box filled with milk cartons and pieces of bread wrapped in plastic to distribute to their classmates. Each student was supposed to receive exactly one bread roll, one dairy product (sometimes ayran or kefir, but milk was the most common option because of its low production price), and, during the warmer seasons, a piece of fruit. The bread crumbled all over our uniforms upon unwrapping, and the milk, meanwhile, was watery and rancid – nothing like the thick, creamy, delicious milk my father brought from his village of Valea Lungă, twenty kilometres away from the town where I grew up.
These food deliveries were part of the nationwide Milk and Bread Programme, which was initiated in 2002 by Adrian Năstase, the social democratic Prime Minister of Romania at the time. The goods were offered as part of the wider ‘National Anti-Poverty Plan and Promotion of Social Inclusion’, which provided children with a healthy snack when their families could not. The programme was also created to support local production of milk, helping the producers who were being squeezed out by competition after the market opened up to global companies. Even though there were supposed to be routine quality checks on the milk and bread, these were mostly unsupervised; the only condition for becoming a school provider was to offer the lowest price, resulting very often in low-quality products. And while the Milk and Bread Programme had an educational component – intending to teach students about healthy eating habits, nutrition, and the path that food takes from farm to plate – this was neglected as well. As the years passed, the milk and bread was increasingly left at the back of the classroom, exactly where it had arrived.
During the 1990s, the transition from communism in Romania caused inflation and widespread unemployment, meaning families struggled to access and provide food. When I went to school in the late 2000s, I took a packed lunch: a white-bread sandwich with three slices of moist salami and occasionally cheese. But not everyone had someone packing them a lunch bag – during the financial crisis of 2008, many parents could not afford filling school lunches for their children. The pieces of bread and cartons of milk provided at school were whole meals for some and distractions for others. Today, they are a way to remember our history.
Prior to the 1990s, political and social life in Romania had been marked by an abundance of hunger and lack of democracy. Before its collapse, the communist government, headed by Nicolae Ceaușescu, faced immense pressures from its debtors (such as the IMF), who imposed tight fiscal austerity and rationed food. One of the starkest memories of life under communism is waiting in line for groceries. My mother, who grew up in Dâmbovița county, remembers having to wake up early to get the half-a-bread-roll-per-person-in-the-family ration, which she and her family would eat with simple dishes made from their crops and cattle, like cartofi prăjiți în untură (fried potatoes in lard) or ghiveci de legume (vegetable stews).
On 25 December 1989, protests against Ceaușescu resulted in the Romanian revolutions, when Ceaușescu and his wife Elena were executed on public television. That Christmas brought more than just the usual family get-togethers; it marked the shift from over forty-two years of communist rule to an economy and society premised on the free market and neoliberal capitalism – one which promised freedom of expression, abundance and, most importantly, the possibility of individual profit and capital gain. Even though there was some hope on the eve of the revolutions, the bloody transition of regimes gave rise to a dissatisfied political milieu, with ​​miners’ strikes, general strikes, and the 1995 students’ demonstration against additional taxes on those who had failed exams. The protests were reflective of the sentiment of dissent against new systems that marked the 1990s; they showcased the desperation of Romanian citizens, who now had a whole new spectrum of challenges to live with.
Those who suffered most in this shift were the workers. People lost their jobs when industries like coal mining shut down, while the relaxation of import duties led to the closing of domestic factories. Between 1991 and 1997, inflation averaged around 150%. Wages did not keep up with the increase in prices, pushing Romanians to tighten their already-tight belts. More than 40% of the Romanian workforce lost their jobs in the 1990s, with the number of people legally employed falling from 8.15 million in 1990 to 4.76 million in 1999. During this time, Romanian workers also left for agricultural and industrial jobs overseas, primarily moving to Italy, Spain and the United Kingdom (where they are now the country’s fourth largest diaspora).
These developments put pressure on families – especially those of the working classes – who did not have the means to effectively feed their children, while many students were also prompted to stand up and work to provide for their families. In 1990 alone, 152,530 children dropped out of school (a total of 4.9% of the entire cohort), and across the decade, a total of 834,000 children stopped going to school altogether. Even today, one in four students drop out before finishing middle school in rural areas of Romania. The Milk and Bread Programme was supposed to help to curb this exodus of students, but despite its laudable ambitions, the programme ultimately did very little to address the food poverty of Romanian children. Today, the programme’s trajectory represents the lack of attention successive governments have paid to providing adequate nutrition in schools, and also creating infrastructures of care for their citizens, both old and young.
Over the past months, I have asked many of my former classmates about their memories of the Milk and Bread Programme. Most recounted problems with the products’ taste, and noted that this could be traced to the lowest-price approach – a gradual decrease in quality that led to fewer students picking up the food. This has its basis in the programme’s funding, which was always inadequate. For instance, the amount allocated per student was 1.17 RON in 2008, and it remained unchanged until 2017 – even though, between 2008 and 2017, overall food prices increased by 30%. Bianca, my classmate from school, recounts how teachers would come and pick up the bread which children had left behind to feed the pigs. Her mother Elena, meanwhile, remembers that schools ‘received spoiled milk at times, some cream cheese that looked suspicious, and bread that was just crumbling everywhere,’ which meant that the programme did not always help parents to feed their children. (Even Năstase later acknowledged that the lowest-price acquisition mechanism led to food of inferior quality being offered.)
Another lesser-discussed issue with the programme, like other dietary policies in Romania at the time, was that it did not concern itself with the lack of nutritional education provided to families after the fall of communism. With the entrance of the free market in the 1990s, the new Romanian diet became defined by an appetite for over-consumption, which probably derived from the scarcity of food during the 1980s. Mara Mărginean, a historian of food and agriculture, calls this shift – from food shortages and penury to filled supermarket shelves – a ‘false abundance’. In the 1990s, ‘the supermarkets were filling up with undesirable products that lacked any nutritional value,’ Mărginean told me over the phone. There was little understanding of the make-up of balanced and nutritious diets in this new system, and Romanian citizens like my parents didn’t know what to pick from the supermarket aisles filled with new products boasting snazzy slogans they now frequented.
Growing up, I consumed cheese, milk, soups, stews, and cold cuts such as bologna and salami. Like other households of the same demographic, there was only one condition for our food – it had to be cheap. Adina Rusu, a nutritionist based in Iași, said that pre-packaged foods were also consumed because of the lifestyle of most Romanians, who worked long days to make sufficient wages: ‘People no longer had time to cook, to pick between foods, so they chose what was most filling.’
And so, providing a minimal meal in school did not make much difference to students’ lives. Even if the Milk and Bread Programme worked as a temporary Band-Aid for children who had nothing else to eat, it did not mean they were well fed for longer periods. Even when children could consume the poor-quality milk and bread at school, they went home to overworked parents, confused dietary systems, and a life in which expenses increased year on year. Rusu said that ‘No piece of bread or milk could keep children in the classroom’ during the years of the financial crisis, seconding what Peticilă and others call the ‘short-term’ narrow effects of the Milk and Bread Programme.
The programme also evolved during a time when social welfare was demonised by both the government and the mainstream media, as well as other citizens. While the government offered students goods of inferior quality, it simultaneously blamed their parents for not providing enough – relying on the state to provide food was perceived as a sign of laziness, which disregarded the structural challenges that people faced in securing basic needs. Traian Băsescu, Romanian President from 2004 to 2014, claimed that the social welfare system was putting a major financial strain on the state budget. Business groups decried social welfare too; RomPan, which represents breadmakers (some of which supplied schools as part of the Milk and Bread Programme), decried social welfare as ‘ruin[ing] the concept of work’. The message was clear: a poor child was the responsibility of the parents, but the poverty of the parents was their own fault.
Today, dining in Romanian cities is very different from the past decades. For instance, in Bucharest (the capital), South Asian restaurants have begun to emerge, piquing the interest of Romanian diners in international non-European cuisines. There has also been a push to mandate supermarkets to sell Romanian produce (even though a good chunk of this leaves the country to be sold in Western Europe). More crucially, in the past five years, there has been a resurgence of traditional Romanian food culture, as chefs and diners have started to reclaim their lost past, which suffered with the influx of industrially made food. In the capital, restaurants like NOUA. Bucătărie Românească, Kane, and Old Kitchen have been serving native recipes using locally sourced Romanian produce – dishes much like those my parents ate. However, beyond recreational dining and some awareness of ‘buying local’, there has been little progress in how ordinary people can access good ingredients and produce.
Routine culinary and household staples still remain at the mercy of escalating prices, and with a combination of highly processed foods, a lack of dietary education, and the high poverty rate, cardiovascular disease caused by poor diets is the highest contributor to mortality in Romania today. Even though traditional Romanian pastoralist cuisines and local produce are becoming popular in some dining spaces, little has been done to make this accessible for people who need it the most. Since the pandemic, Romania has faced some of the highest price increases in Europe, experiencing an average increase of 15% a year in 2022 and 2023, with prices for food oil going up 35% in 2022. Romanians remain amongst the unhealthiest Europeans, with 57.8 years of healthy expected years at birth compared with the European average of 63.6 in 2021. In 2019, it was reported that fewer than a quarter of all Romanians eat fruits and vegetables once a day (compared with the European average of 55%). And most importantly, one in ten Romanian children still go to bed hungry.
Since its inception, the quality of the Milk and Bread Programme has steadily decreased, with citizens repeatedly being told about the ‘lack of money’ from politicians on television. In the current school year, students in multiple regions throughout the country have not yet received a single piece of bread or any amount of milk, and healthy food education, despite being a component of the programme, is hard to come by. Following teachers’ strikes in 2023, the coalition government, headed by Nicolae Ciucă and later by Marcel Ciolacu, passed new reforms, such as the 2024 ‘warm lunch’ programme (later rebranded as ‘healthy lunch’). As part of these reforms, funding was increased to provide more nutritionally consistent meals, such as macaroni and cheese, chicken sandwiches, or stews. But the programme has already faced its hurdles; the government has been slow to publish a list of participating schools (not all will have the programme by the end of 2024) and, due to poor allocation of funds, only 18% of the allotted sums have been spent.
Twenty-two years down the line and the Romanian state’s attitude towards its children’s health is still one of neglect. The state’s policies are mediated by an antiquated system that promotes food as fuel – without paying attention to nutritional values, quality, or diversity – and also escalates the idea that food is a ‘reward’ in a system of competitive capitalism, not a basic human right. More than anything, programmes like Milk and Bread do not consider how children come from distinct backgrounds, some with more needs than others, and that adequately feeding children could be a policy that works towards uplifting the state of life for citizens from the very start. Romania’s people do not need idealism and missed targets; the state must provide measures that provide not merely survival but sustainable health and pleasure, too.
Credits
Radu Stochita is a labour expert working closely with trade unions and progressive causes in Romania. In his free time, he writes about tech, food and society for publications such as Al Jazeera, Nation, and Jacobin.
Vittles is edited by Sharanya Deepak, Rebecca May Johnson, Jonathan Nunn, and Odhran O’Donoghue, and is copyedited by Sophie Whitehead.