Bordering on food aggression!

The economy, fires, drought, Russians, fuel prices, and politicians, dictated what we ate in my youth. The only exception was that Eskom worked...

- Anna Cellliers

While sitting on the stoep moaning about life’s difficulties (after a communal reading of the Sunday newspapers with each other’s reading glasses and acid commentary on its content, and especially the price of food nowadays), our old friend’s eyes closed as if in prayer. We respectfully shut up, thinking that he was in conversation with the Higher Order, but then he opened them up and said with a heavy sigh: “I so long for my mother’s lightly curried tripe!” I replied that I would rather eat freshly mown kikuyu grass than the organs and other odds and sods just before the tail end of any food animal – thereby reserving my favourites, oxtail and fatty sheep tails.

We then moved on to ‘smileys’ – whole sheep heads – which he regards as the next best thing to eat, mentioning all its parts like the brains, the tongue, the eyes and the cheeks in gory detail. I shivered in abhorrence and told him that I once dumped a boyfriend (who I thought could be a future husband), due to his uncle’s habit of eating a sheep’s head every day for lunch, and requesting afterwards that I scratch his hairy back for a fee of 10 cents before he takes his afternoon nap.

My current husband drily remarked that he only remembers government bread and Koo’s apricot jam as a measure of keeping the ‘wolf at the door of poverty’ away, day in and day out. Not to be outdone, I regaled them with my Grandma’s tricks to feed a family in the 50s and early 60s when money was tight. Since Grandpa worked at an abattoir, he came home with things which in those days were regarded as ‘waste’.