Odd attitudes in the Polish cabbage patch

The Baltic is Europe’s only inner sea, with 85 million people living in the member states on its shores.

Germany is the rich one, but Poland is also productive in many different ways. The Polish literally urinate into the common pond, cleaning only half of their waste waters. Sweden and Finland somehow manage to clean up more than 90% of theirs.

Most of the pollution can be traced to Polish agriculture. Nitrogen dioxide and phosphoric acid emissions into the Baltic are huge and getting worse as farming gets into more expert hands - international agribusiness - which is even keener on using plenty of fertilizer.

And why not? This is boom-time for Polish agriculture, which is now doing the hard-sell on the once-humble cabbage, something to wash down with the tanker-loads of Polish vodka exports. And it is more than merely good to eat. According to local scientists, sauerkraut is not only cheap, delicious, full of vitamins, good for lowering cholesterol … but can also be used to enhance the female embonpoint.

"For a month I have been eating sauerkraut every day," Karolina Pogorzla revealed to Fakt, the German Springer media group’s tabloid newspaper venture in Poland. "And every evening my boyfriend puts it on my breasts. I can see the effects! My boobs have got bigger, and my skin is sleek and firmer!"

Karolina’s boyfriend Robert Milewski was reported to be delighted by the results of his work. "They are growing rapidly," said the excited fellow, whose joy is all the greater, the down-to-earth Fakt said, because of the low cost of the raw materials, a mere 2.5 zlotys per kilo of sauerkraut.

He is a citizen of an increasingly curious country. Poland is determined to be part of modern Europe where economics (and vulgar nonsense about breast-enhancement) are concerned. But with crude Russophobia and gay-bashing both routine at the highest political levels it has problems with other European values.

In a way the two guys leading the country, Lech and Jaroslaw Kaczynski, the twin potato brothers, are themselves reminiscent of farm produce. Are they proof of what you get when you give Jesuits a Communist upbringing - a kind of Soviet sloppiness combined with French arrogance?

Let’s hope they can laugh at themselves. Otherwise they risk missing the best joke of our infant century.

The Baltic is Europe’s only inner sea, with 85 million people living in the member states on its shores.