The first peasant-boxes that have been delivered to both Cluj & Bucharest have been of baked goods – primarily bread with an addition of something sweet and/or something salty. They come in two sizes and most people ordered the smaller box. It includes two 1kg loafs of bread. Romanians eat a lot of bread so this amount is actually quite ordinary. However a few people let us know that it was just too much bread for them to consume!
We also purchased bread from Iulian and what happened is exactly what I wrote about in the „Food is not cheap” post. The bread is so rich and so fulfilling that we, and probably many others, ended up eating much less of it. When we are hungry we can go through 3 (or even 4) slices of regular bread each … but we have a hard time taking in 2 slices of Iulian’s bread. It is that much more nourishing than typical bread.
When Iulian (Cluj) and Lucian (Bucharest) chose their box sizes they did so based on „average consumption”. We didn’t take into consideration that due to the nourishing qualities of the bread people would need less of it. We also didn’t want it to appear that the box did not have enough bread to feed a family. So we ended up with a box that simply has too much bread for some people 🙂 It’s a great mistake to make 🙂
The people who experienced too much bread also experienced „the box is too expensive”. Iulian’s bread is a premium product and so it isn’t meant to be cheap … but if you have more then you can handle … then it surely can feel expensive. But what was actually unveiled was how expensive ordinary bread really is. It doesn’t feel expensive because you get quantitatively more of it … but nutrition wise you need to consume twice as much of it to satisfy your hunger (and again … I’m not even going into qualitative nutritional values which ordinary bread simple does not have … no matter how much of it you eat). So Iulian’s healthy nourishing bread only seems expensive but once you realize its true value you quickly realize it isn’t really expensive at all. In my mind Iulian’s bread is actually priceless … you will be hard pressed to find anything like it in Romania in anything but rare specialty shops. However those people who joined the box have this priceless food delivered to their doorstep freshly baked every week.
However, I expect we will soon be announcing a third smaller and cheaper box for people who need less of it but still want to enjoy the amazing nourishment of quality bread 🙂