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1970 workers' revolt was the worsening shortage of meat throughout the country in the fall of that year. Painfully aware of the role of meat in the Polish diet and its importance to the people in determining their relative well-being, the Gierek regime immediately on taking office authorized large-scale imports of meat and initiated measures to stimulate domestic meat production in order to assure larger supplies in the future.

A notable postwar achievement has been the marked equalization of the urban and rural diet as compared with the prewar period. In 1938 the average peasant's consumption of meat and fats amounted to about one-fifth of that consumed by the urban dweller, but by the early 1960's rural consumption had reached and in many instances exceeded the level of the urban regions.

As distinct from shortages and maldistribution, marked seasonal variations in the availability of some foods are expected and accepted by the people. This tends to the prevalent practice of home storage and preservation of such periodically out-of-season foods as potatoes, fruit, vegetables, and even eggs. Although the increasing availability of home refrigerators is altering the traditional pattern of food purchasing, the continuing lack of refrigerated bulk transport of foods, together with outdated food processing, packaging, and distributing facilities, still necessitates frequent purchases of small quantities of perishables from local sources.

Although new self-service supermarket facilities and smaller outlets of the same type are gradually appearing in urban areas (Figures 29 and 30)—permitting shopping "under one-roof" and stimulating the demand for packaged, preprocessed foods—most retail purchases of food are still conducted through specialized shops or at open-air, private, peasant stalls (Figure 31). Sanitary supervision and control over foodstuffs is officially exercised in major municipal centers and is well-developed in food export enterprises. Elsewhere, however, existing controls at the wholesale level are often offset by poor handling at the retail level. As a result, the meticulousness of the Polish housewife in food purchasing and the prevalence of thoroughly cooked food in the diet remain the best safeguard of the consumer.

G. Religion (C)

Poland's 1,000-year-old Roman Catholic tradition and the consequent strong ties with Western Christian culture are the basic causes of the gulf between popular values and aspirations and the goals of the Communist regime. Moreover, the conceptual unity of the church and nation, the link between Polish patriotism and Roman Catholicism, is explicit in such expressions as "Hail Mary, Queen of Poland." This refers to the defeat of the Swedes at Czestochowa in 1655 through the alleged miraculous intervention of the holy painting known since as the Black Madonna, so called because of its charred color which is said to have resulted from a fire set by the besieging Swedish forces (but is in fact the result of a patina of old varnish). A grateful Polish king, restored to his throne,

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