BLACK MARKET AND FREEDOM
Black market…? That sounds like something bad, doesn't it?… Well, let me tell you:
In the post-war period, with controlled markets and rationing cards, cheese, sugar, flour, and many other things travelled hidden in saddlebags, underclothing, at night or along impassable roads. They were transported by many women, widows, mothers of many mouths and men, fathers, who despite working from sunrise to sunset, could not feed their children or themselves…
The law said it was a crime, but I tell you that the crime is to watch your neighbour go hungry and do nothing.
The black market was not a crime, it was dignity. It was the network our grandparents wove when from above only hunger and prohibition reached them. It was the silent barter of people who refused to resign themselves. It was life.
Those men and women didn't want to break the law; they wanted to live. They wanted the fruit of their effort, from their garden, from their farm, to feed their family and their neighbours. It was survival, ingenuity and, above all, freedom.
Freedom, friends, is not a grand speech or a flag waving in the wind. Freedom is something more intimate, simpler: being able to share what you have, to decide what you eat, how you live, whom you love.
But we must not forget that not all black market trading was the same. There were those who, with contacts and privileges, moved tons, bribed and got rich on a grand scale, without fear of punishment. And meanwhile, the small ones ---those who hid a cheese, a handful of flour, a loaf of bread--- were the ones who suffered the harshest sentences.
History punished the weak and forgave the powerful. But it was those small black marketeers, and not the big ones, who kept the people alive. Those who shared dignity in times of misery.
Today, of course, there is no such scarcity. But there is a scarcity of channels, of simple paths for small producers, the artisanal, the local, to flow naturally.
The black market is alive, it's a modern black market. Today, it's the grandmother who plants potatoes in her garden and sells them at the market without papers, and the neighbour who brings me eggs, and my friend who tends his wonderful tomatoes.
Ana, who believes all this is possible and never tires of dancing through the terraces and irrigation channels, almost always with a smile, and my neighbours who believed in me when I had nothing but pockets full of hope.
What I have here is not just a cheese. This is an act of resistance. It's milk curdled with patience, it's salt from our land, it's time transformed into food. This territory, my fortress and this stall, my trench. It's a tribute to all those who, before me, understood that feeding your community with what you raise is the most honest act that exists.
And I tell you one thing: better to buy from the one who sweats in the garden than from the one who signs checks in an office.
Here there's no barcode or label with fine print. Here there's freshly milked milk, tomatoes that smell of summer, honey that tastes of spring and wine that's opened among friends. I give you my effort and you give me your smile and my sustenance. There's no intermediary greater than our trust.
We don't sell a product, we share a piece of this territory, of time, of crafts that are heritage. It's something so simple but so profound that it doesn't fit in this world of papers, numbers and regulations. Our world is another: the smell of flood-irrigated earth, the morning cold, the weight of the milk jugs. Our legislature is the seasons and our rules, the sun and the rain.
Today they put before us a wall, a labyrinth of papers. Not a clear prohibition, but a silence that suffocates the small, the local, what doesn't fit into their grinding and packaging machine.
We are not criminals. We are those who believe that the first permission is given by the land, and the second, by the clear conscience of doing things right.
Every time you buy directly from the producer, every time you choose ours over the anonymous and packaged, you don't just take home food. You take a piece of our freedom and sow your own. You tell the system that there's another way.
So here I am, selling what's mine, what's from my land, with pride and with my head held high. Practicing the modern black market: the beautiful and rebellious act of feeding my community.
Try it! May each bite be memory and future, the taste of freedom. Good livestock and good harvest!