A game and an inquiry about the parcel from home

The country boot

Pack the parcel from home in a physical Tetris: two demijohns, fifteen jars of zacuscă, a sack of potatoes, a bucket of pickles and a frozen cockerel. Stow them all without breaking anything, and the ritual will tell you something about short food chains and the informal subsistence economy.

Deterministic game, same order every time · Sources: Romanian National Institute of Statistics, Household Budget Survey · Reading time: about 8 minutes

In brief. The parcel from home is a short supply chain: food grown by the family, for the family, with labour at both ends and unpaid transport. How much of an urban food basket depends on it? There is no public national statistic that isolates the home parcel inside the urban food basket. The official statistics offer two nearby reference points with clear limits: average food consumption per person regardless of origin (INS, indicator BUF110I), and food’s share of total household consumption expenditure, 27.6% in Romania in 2020 (Eurostat). The rest of this page shows what those references do and do not measure.

Load the boot

8 pieces · 8-by-5 grid · glass needs support, heavy pieces never sit on glass

Move the piece with the arrow keys or the buttons, rotate it with R, then press Place. Keys: arrows or WASD to move, R to rotate, Space or Enter to place, Escape to pause.

Without JavaScript the game will not start. The rules: pieces arrive in a fixed order and settle on an 8-by-5 grid. Every piece needs support underneath, from the floor or from other luggage. The sack of potatoes and the bucket of pickles are heavy and smash any jars or demijohns beneath them. The bag with the frozen cockerel is light and slips into the gap left over. The full load: one sack of potatoes, three bundles of five jars of zacuscă in newspaper, one bucket of pickles, two demijohns of red wine, one bag with a frozen cockerel. Keep reading below: the explanation does not depend on the game.

Next: —Pieces placed: 0 / 8Broken: 0

After the game

What just happened in the boot

You shifted a few kilos of food under kitchen physics: glass at the bottom, heavy weights never over glass, narrow gaps filled with whatever gives. In real life the same rules are negotiated at the kerb, with blankets between the demijohns and advice shouted from the pavement.

The food travels like this: a rural household grows or preserves it, an urban household receives it and sends back money, weekend labour or care for those who stayed behind. The chain is short, from family to family, and its links are gifts and reciprocal work rather than invoices.

Zacuscă is made in autumn, pickles alongside it, potatoes lifted once a year, and the cockerel reaches the freezer whenever there is one to spare. The parcel folds a year of seasons into a single boot. For the city it means money saved at the market. For the village it means work that never appears on a receipt.

The drive itself belongs in the basket too: fuel, hours at the wheel, backs bent over loading. Nobody puts it on a bill, so the food looks free. It is not. The cost has moved out of the price and into time and petrol.

How much of the basket comes from home

The parcel has no line in the statistics

The direct answer. There is no public national statistic that isolates the “parcel from home” inside the urban food basket. The Household Budget Survey counts own production, stocks, home preserves and gifts received together as “own resources”. The parcel sits inside that total, out of sight.

Two verified reference points help frame the question. They use different denominators, and neither is the parcel’s share:

First, the INS definition. Indicator BUF110I measures average monthly food consumption per person by social category and residence, from the Household Budget Survey. It covers the quantities entering a person’s diet regardless of origin or place of consumption. That is why it cannot isolate the parcel: a gift from the countryside enters the total alongside market purchases.

Second, the European context. Food and non-alcoholic beverages as a share of total household consumption expenditure, Romania, 2020:

Romania · 202027.6%

Source: Eurostat, structure of household consumption expenditure. Measure: food and non-alcoholic beverages as a share of total household consumption expenditure. The denominator is total consumption, not the urban food basket and not the parcel. Game scores are not an economic measure and cannot be compared with this percentage.

The European household-budget method also excludes own-account production given away from own consumption at both the producer’s and receiver’s end. The family transfer reaches the plate, but it remains invisible as a distinct national receiver-side line.

Work out your own basket

National statistics do not know your parcel, but you can work it out yourself. Enter your usual weekly amounts; the page keeps numerator and denominator visible. Worked example: 120 / (300 + 120) × 100 = 28.6%. The result describes your household, not the country.

Weekly purchased food basket, in lei Value of the parcel received, in lei

Method and limits

How it was measured, and what is missing

Who produced the data: The National Institute of Statistics, through the Household Budget Survey: household questionnaire and diary, monthly sample of private households.
What the indicator measures: INS, BUF110I: average monthly food consumption per person by social category and residence, regardless of origin or place of consumption. Eurostat: food and non-alcoholic beverages as a share of total household consumption expenditure, Romania, 2020 — 27.6%. No transformation: the page reproduces the published value with its year and denominator beside it.
Period: The European reference is 2020. BUF110I is the definition published by INS in the TEMPO interface. Sources accessed 8 September 2026.
Transformations: None: the page reproduces the Eurostat share and the INS definition, with the exact year, population and denominator beside them.
Limits: BUF110I does not identify the origin of food, so it cannot isolate the home parcel. The HBS manual excludes own-account production given away from own consumption at both ends, so the family transfer has no distinct national line. The 27.6% share is national, not urban, and its denominator is total consumption, not a food basket. The personal calculator is a worked example, not a national estimate.

Primary sources: INS, TEMPO BUF110I — average monthly food consumption per person; Eurostat, structure of household consumption expenditure (2020 PDF); Eurostat, HBS methodological manual 2026 (PDF). Rural context: FAO, family farming in Romania; EU, short food supply chains. The INS TEMPO page did not load from the working network on the access date; its published definition is preserved with the official link. The full claim register sits in the text version and in the project's SOURCES.md file.

A 1980 Dacia 1300 photographed front three-quarter — The car that carried generations of parcels: a 1980 Dacia 1300. Photograph by TrainSimFan, CC BY-SA 4.0 licence, via Wikimedia Commons. Its narrow boot taught a whole country the geometry of the parcel.

Sources

Where the figures come from

INS, Household Budget Survey — shares of consumption from own resources, 2021, 2023 and 2024 editions.
Eurostat, household consumption by purpose — food's share of total consumption, 2024.
FAO, family farming platform — semi-subsistence farms and short chains in Romania.

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