A warm acquaintance with rural Poland

Another wonderful experience of contact with the natural environment and eating habits, but also - as always - an experience of approach between European citizens from countries as far away as Greece and Finland, or Portugal and Estonia , was the recent, fifth in a row, trip by OIKIPA members under the European program Foodprint.eu. The place hosting us was the capital of Poland Warsaw and its rural periphery. The members of the organizations involved in the program, visited farms featuring multiple activities, from simple fruit and vegetable production to maintenance of a Botanical Garden, with a built in traditional hotel with areas for environmental education, and a herbal product factory. From OIKIPA, Giorgos Kanellis and Odysseas Xerizotis were the attendees. In a farm located about 140 kilometers away from Warsaw, members of the multinational company of Foodprint, had the opportunity to taste a variety of recipes with potatoes, soups (a meal Poles excel at!) and fruits of organic production. An interesting experience, despite the rain, was a visit to potato field during the time of harvest. The harvest was done in a traditional way, with horses plowing the field and villagers, most of them being women dressed in traditional costumes, collecting potatoes, a fundamental agricultural and nutritional item in Poland. Noticeable was the visit to a Museum of Agricultural Machinery, where the famous Polish URSUS tractors, produced during the first half of the 20th century, coexisted with improvised tools out of wood and iron, made by the farmers themselves for all kinds of rural work. A really noteworthy place was the Botanical Garden ZIOLONY ZAKATEK, near the village of Koryciny. It is truly a miracle, by and large due to the creativity of a single man, an agronomist who, beginning just out of the love of herbs he inherited from his grandmother, went so far as to create an exceptional botanical garden measuring tens of acres, which is both a field of herb production and preservation, as well as a host of recreational activities and environmental education. Next to that garden there is a traditional guesthouse, hosting many visitors, especially school groups. Most importantly, there lies a factory that produces and packages herbs of all kinds. The Dary Natury factory, utilizing a broad network of locals who collect or produce useful herbs, reached the point of employing 80 workers. The herbs are cleaned, their useful parts (leaves, fruit, roots) are sorted, dried and packaged to be sent not only to Poland, but also in other markets, especially in Germany. It is a great achievement, grounded in the passion, the love for nature and the organizational and entrepreneurial skills of its creator, an example of sustainable development offering a wide range of production and employment opportunities to the local community, and it deserves to constitute a model for our own country, one that is arguably wealthier than Poland in generally useful herbs.

George Kanellis