Food When We Were Poor

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Cabbage soup is popular in countries like Poland, Ukraine and Russia.

old blog, 14 January 2022.

There’s a YouTube video about some people in China eating chicken legs. It was reassuring because I thought it was only poor people like mama that ate them. 

I don’t like coleslaw. You can call it what you like, but it’s still cabbage. It has painful memories because we ate it a lot growing up, when mama was between jobs, low paying jobs.

We grew up, things got better but memories linger. One day my sister-in-law said: You can eat it now sisi. Sisi means sister and that’s what women call each other in South Africa. Adults call kids as little as five, sisi. They love it, makes them think they are grown-ups.

It was not only cabbage. Chicken legs as well. Painful memories of food hit me a few years ago in a Johannesburg butchery. Women were buying big bags of chicken legs. Were they going to sell them in smaller packets or did they have large families?

Mental rewind. Mama made chicken soup from chicken legs. We also had chicken gizzards with grits. They are a full meal if you cannot afford a whole chicken. Things got better and mama was able to afford not only chicken, but chicken that goes round and round: rotisserie chicken.

I was very sad in that butchery. Whatever made me think that because things got better for mama, hardship to feed families no longer exists?

By: Nonqaba waka Msimang. 

 

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