Written by Yanagi Cheng
After Xiaogang Village was divided into households, it began to be reported on the Internet that life in the sixties and seventies was extremely difficult, rural people did not have enough to eat, children were so hungry that they "screamed", and there were starving bones on the road. This is a partial generalization, a kind of irresponsible performance, restore history, and speak with conscience!
◆ There are two possible reasons for not having enough to eat
Xiaogang Village guards five acres of fertile land per capita, and pays public grain on other land, but they "don't pay their debts". Then why don't they have enough to eat? Because they like to beg for food, and they are busy farming, and they go out to beg for food, and it is said that they only need rice. Every household is short of rice, and the people in Xiaogang Village can really be described as "poor and hard". In fact, Xiaogang Village is still begging for food until now, begging for the country's support for food, and lazy people have lazy blessings.
According to the analysis of Xiaogang Village's lack of food, there may be two reasons: one is that people are lazy and do not want to work; and the other is that there is little arable land and little grain.
In the sixties and seventies, it was true that people could not eat well, and rice polishing and fine noodles were indeed luxury goods in that era. The peasants had to pay the public grain for some grain, and they did not eat well like the landlords in the old society who paid rent. However, not eating well does not mean that you are not full, and if you are not full, how can you have the strength to work? Could it be that the Bodhisattva planted it for you? The river was picked out by the dragon king?
Guarding five acres of fertile soil per capita to beg for food, begging only needs rice
◆ During the period of the production team, why did the farmers wrap their stomachs?
At that time, the acres of land that were convenient for drainage and irrigation were planted with wheat and rice, and these two crops had to be handed over to the state. As for the scattered corners and the thick sand that does not retain water, they are used to grow cereals. Corn, yams, taro, and carrots are mainly grown, which are not handed in, and are also the main food for farmers to fill their stomachs.
Let's take the potato as an example, that thing has a high yield, and when the potato is opened, the children and grandchildren are full, unlike wheat, which only produces two or three hundred catties per acre, the yield is amazing, and one acre of land is two or three thousand catties. Our production team will plant one or twenty acres of land every year. When it comes to the potato season, the burden is picked, the cart is pushed, and every house is placed in front of the door like a hill. My family of seven people at that time was able to divide 2,000 catties every year.
The potato cellar has been dug a long time ago, as deep as two people, and a few handfuls of ash are sprinkled for disinfection. Choose those who have not been bitten by external injuries or mole crickets to store in the cellar and keep them to eat slowly. At that time, every household dried potato chips and potato shavings, and dried them as "dry food".
Potato porridge, which once filled the stomach, has now become a healthy food
Hometown people have the custom of drinking rice porridge, when boiling porridge in the morning, cut a few yams, cut into pieces, boil together, the yams are very sweet, even the porridge boiled out is sweet, pick a bowl of dried carrots pickled at home, to ensure that you can pour three bowls. As soon as the dishes and chopsticks were washed, the captain's whistle was blown, and after a while, the trumpet sounded in the field.
In the era of rice tension, cooking potato crumbs rice at noon, potato crumbs are the mainstay, rice is just a "medicine primer", cooking a pot of rice, burning half a bowl of Chinese cabbage, or stir-frying a bowl of old pickles, it becomes a meal. At that time, I always fantasized about being able to pick up a lard with chopsticks, and the lard bibimbap was called fragrant. There is lard, almost every family has it, and it has to be left for the children to eat.
At night, I eat boiled yams, called "yam tea", half water and half yams, eating yams and drinking tea, and living a life of "skin bag water". When my grandmother was alive, she liked to put the potato outside the door, the sun was shining during the day, and the frost was frost at night, and the potato was particularly sweet, so it was washed directly, and the whole pot was cooked, peeled and eaten, so sweet that the throat and mouth were full of honey. In the morning, when his wife cooks breakfast, she picks up a few potatoes and throws them in the pot, cooks them with Mars, and lets the children take them to school as snacks.
Carrot rice, taro sour porridge, vegetable rice, sorghum rice and yam crumbs rice are similar, and rice is also a "medicine primer". As for pork is a luxury, although you can buy it without meat tickets in the countryside, you have no money in hand, so you have to sigh at the meat. It is only when it is in season, or when relatives come to the family, they are willing to cut two catties of meat and come back. Usually, I will weigh some meat and cook it for children, but adults don't use chopsticks.
Therefore, during the period of the production team, poor food does exist, and under the condition of arable land, there may be very few families who do not have enough to eat, unless their production team is from Xiaogang Village. There are always people who say that children in those days had no meat to eat, their faces were yellow, hungry and thin, and their bones were as thin as firewood. In fact, there are fat people in every era, and they are also thin people. Let's ask, the monk has been a vegetarian all his life, why is he fat and big-eared?
In those days, the food that rural people lived for was now a healthy ingredient, and it was sold at a high price. I often joke that we ate green food when we were in the production team.
A few children during the production team were skinny
◆ Only lazy people are not lazy, and hungry are thinking about change
In those days, people's mantra was "only lazy people are not lazy". Take our production team as an example, at that time, one mu and two points of cultivated land per capita belonged to a typical production team of "more people and less land". On the east side is a wasteland, and the sand and soil accumulated during the 65-year period when the river port was opened is called "weizi", which cannot be used for farming, and on the west side is the large and small ditch river, which cannot be cultivated.
At that time, it was popular to "learn from Dazhai", and the commune was typical in our production team, and during the production team period, the typical power was infinite, and the members were willing to accept it, which was a kind of honor. At the member meeting, everyone talked and proposed the transformation of the grain field, moving the soil from the east polder to the west to fill the ditch river in the west, and expanding the grain field area of the production team. This goal of learning Dazhai was reported to the county, and the county publicized it as a model.
This winter and next spring, it is the time when the countryside is idle, and there is indeed no river engineering task that year, and it is idle to be idle, so start immediately. The car is pushing, the burden is picked, scrambling, and the horn is loud, which can be described as energetic. At the site of soil transportation, the banners of "Agricultural Dazhai" and "Dare to call the sun and the moon for a new day" were raised, and red flags were planted along the way, singing and laughing, and the voices of people were boiling.
Some people denied the enthusiasm of the peasants in that era, saying that it was a foreign worker. Negative people, you come to pick up a few loads, come to push a few carts to try, purely against the will of the people are not afraid to flash their tongues. After a winter and spring of hard work, the production team increased nearly 20 acres of grain fields, and these two pieces of land were named "Dazhai Fields" by the county. In that year, at the county's "Agricultural Science Dazhai" meeting, our production team became an advanced collective, and I was personally praised for becoming an advanced individual, and the prizes were a Tang porcelain tea jar and a towel.
What is more important is that these 20 acres of farmland do not belong to the scope of handing over public grain, and are treated as "barren land" in the basic farmland statistics. In those days, there were no good seeds, no chemical fertilizers and pesticides, and the grain output was very low, and one season of wheat and one season of rice would harvest seven or eight hundred catties of grain, but a peasant could get an extra hundred and ten catties of grain, and at least one week he could eat rice and roll noodles.
Some people say that the grain yield per mu in Xiaogang Village was only more than 30 catties at that time, but the author has never been able to figure out how this field was planted? Who is hungry if they are not hungry?
Water conservancy should be built and grain fields renovated for the benefit of future generations
◆ Eat well and eat well, not only diligently, but also capable
At that time, there were still some peasants who ate well and relied on their ability to eat. For example, five craftsmen, eat 100 family meals, and the daily salary is eight cents. Of course, hard-working people can also eat well, but only a minority. My cousin is the one who eats meat every day and fish every meal.
My cousin's family gave birth to six children, and in some words, there would definitely be children who starved to death, however, all six children were raised fat, which was mainly inseparable from the cousin's hard work. He goes to work during the day, and at night, when everyone is asleep, he goes out with a glass lamp to "hunt wild food" for his children.
At that time, there was no pollution from pesticides and chemicals, whether it was land or rivers, wild animals and wild fish, as long as you had the ability to get it, eating fish and meat was not a problem, and my cousin was the kind of person who had the ability.
Pheasants, hares, sparrows, weasels on land, and even cauliflower snakes, toads, wild cats and wild dogs, and field chickens, fish and shrimp, turtles, and yellow eels in the water are all my cousin's favorite prey. Every year during the seedling raising season, after dinner, the uncle would go out, carrying a glass lamp, no field stalks, and ditches to catch frogs, and in winter, the snow was covered with heavy snow, and he followed the footprints left by the snow to find a hiding place for hares......
In the era of meat shortage, cooking oil was also scarce, and my cousin supported the family's food by boiling oil from the game he caught. Many animals contain a lot of fats in their bodies, such as pheasant butter and bobcat intestinal oil. That year, my cousin smoked the first 20 catties of badgers in the cemetery, and the oil in that thing was called "eight catties of badgers, seven catties of oil", and boiled a bowl of oil for a month.
At present, most of the rural people in the Lixiahe area have fishing skills, which are the experience that they have developed during the production team.
Some people say that in the era of cutting the tail of capitalism, planting a few more vegetables had to be pulled out, and raising a few more chickens had to be trampled to death, but in fact, it was a false rumor and a spread of propaganda. Do you still remember that there was a slogan in those days called "Developing the Economy and Ensuring Supply"? At that time, there was a New Year's picture called "Comprehensive Development of Agriculture, Forestry, Animal Husbandry, Sideline and Fishery." If raising chickens and growing vegetables were the tail of capitalism, it is estimated that this New Year's picture would not have been published publicly, let alone posted in thousands of households.
The author lives in the countryside of northern Jiangsu, opened the spring, caught dozens of seedling chickens back, carefully raised, when the rooster grew to about two catties, killed for the child to eat. When the young chickens become old hens, they begin to lay eggs, and there are stewed eggs, scrambled eggs, raised eggs, and boiled eggs on the table, and when the children go to school, boil two eggs and put them in their pockets and let them take them to school to eat. Sometimes, I would bring some chicken to the commune food station and sell it for some foreign fire and foreign oil.
The food is right in front of you, and you refuse to bend down to pick it up, of course you won't be full, and you won't eat well.
New Year's painting in the sixties and seventies: agriculture, forestry, animal husbandry and sideline fishery have developed in an all-round way
◆ There was a short period of time in history when there was not enough to eat, but agricultural production was quickly restored, and not all production team periods were "three-year natural disasters"
If we insist on saying that there was not enough to eat during the production team, there are people, there are people who starved to death, and there are people who have eaten elm bark and Guanyin soil. As for having eaten coal, that's really not. At that time, there was no need for coal to burn firewood stoves in the countryside, and only the people in the city knew whether they ate it. What is not enough to eat is natural and man-made disasters, and it is a short three years, that is, the "three years of natural disasters" in history.
The three natural disasters were 1959, 1960 and 1961. Three-year natural disasters are also known as "three-year difficult periods". According to the "Report on the Disaster Situation in China from 1949 to 1995" compiled by the National Bureau of Statistics and the Ministry of Civil Affairs, in 1959 there was a "disaster (author's note: drought) on a large scale, which was an unprecedented serious natural disaster in the 1950s", with an area of 44.63 million hectares, concentrated in the main grain-producing areas of Henan, Shandong, Sichuan, Anhui, Hubei, Hunan, Heilongjiang and other provinces and regions. In 1960, the disaster continued to expand, and a severe drought continued to break out in the north. After entering 1961, the severe drought spread to the Yellow River, the Huai River, and the entire Yangtze River basin, and the wheat output in the three major grain-producing areas of Hebei, Shandong, and Henan fell by 50 percent from the lowest level of the previous year.
Some people have described this natural disaster as a "decision-making error" and as "a serious consequence of the 'anti-rightist' struggle." It can really be described as "there is no excuse for the crime that you want to add." If we had not strengthened the construction of water conservancy in farmland in the sixties and seventies (especially in the seventies) and achieved drought irrigation and flood discharge, it is estimated that such natural disasters (especially the floods of 1998) would have been more terrible than the "three-year natural disasters." Fortunately, under the correct leadership of the party, tens of millions of peasants quickly restored the normal order of agricultural production and did not allow the disaster to spread indefinitely.
We should not use the "three years of natural disasters" to completely negate the achievements of the peasants in the previous 30 years, and create the extreme remarks that the entire production team will "not have enough to eat." Remember that there is a term called "Chinese peasant", and remember that there is a spirit called "man conquers heaven".
Three years of natural disasters, severe drought
◆ Conclusion
History is always moving forward, and perhaps if you deny the historical contributions of the first 30 years now, your descendants will also deny your merits in another 30 years. Any period has the characteristics of the times at that time, and one-sidedly inferring the whole from local phenomena will naturally lead to erroneous conclusions.