Letter from Prague

Letter from Prague

Accession talks with the European Union are continuing successfully, and if everything goes well, the Czech Republic will become an EU member in spring 2004. Although we are being assured that our lifestyle will not change, I'm pretty sure that it certainly will. In fact, it has changed a lot over the past few years.

When I was in Belgium in 1988, my friends served up bottled water with dinner, and I can clearly remember being surprised that they offered me just water! Now, I'm a 'heavy drinker' of bottled water as well. There are more such examples but put simply: Czech people now value their health more than they did before.

While in the West, bio-products have been popular for many years, in the formerly heavy polluted Czech lands, they are gaining popularity slowly, but surely. In the years of Communism, only party bosses in high posts could enjoy bio-products - special vegetables and fruits were grown for them in special greenhouses, where ordinary people had no access. At present, bio-products are available not only in special farms, but they've started appearing in super- and hyper-markets as well. Usually, they are around 10 percent more expensive than regular products, but I read that for instance in Austria or Germany, the price of bio milk or organic meat may be up to three times higher.

Photo: CzechTourism

Paradoxically, while bio products are produced in farms, it's people from big cities who are most interested in them. There's a whole nation-wide network of shops called Rational Foodstuff, popular with those who want to eat healthily. Surveys show that most of the customers are people under 30 years of age, followed by pensioners and ill people for whom health is more precious than the state of their finances. Also more interested are women, who dream about having healthy children, but it also shows that this does not come as a result of being brought up in this way by their parents. Rather it's a result of common sense, which now seems to prevail among most people. There's a bigger awareness of the fact that we have to do what we can to save the environment and behave better to animals.

Young people are again in the forefront - the Czech Agriculture University in Prague reports that the number of students at the department of environmental agriculture is rising steadily. And Sunday lunch for me is no longer stuffed goose and dumplings!