This paper reviews the features of consumption and, more specifically, food supply under state socialism in Romania. Emphasizing the specific duality that characterized food production. In parallel with collectivisation, which was also proclaimed as a rational organisation of production, forms of production organisation based on family ties were maintained to a considerable extent. Moreover, this form of production organisation was extended from rural to urban areas in the crisis management process of the 1980s. The emergence of urban kitchen gardens and barns was not only of economic importance in the context of shrinking supplies, but also functioned as an important social historical moment. It reversed and inverted the processes of systemic identification that had begun to take shape in certain forms during the two good decades of consolidated state socialism.
Keywords: state socialism, social history of consumption, urban kitchen gardens, consumption statistics
