Chronicle Editor
Simba Jemwa, Showbiz Correspondent
THE received wisdom is that the middle classes eat well and can cook.
Poorer people are more likely to be overweight and live on ready meals.
But is it really true?
At any supermarket checkout, people recognise each other from school runs, church events, etc.
Instinctively they look at each other’s trolleys.
On the top of one sat a bag of revolting frozen chicken bits, bought for the dog, and a giant bag of steak cut chips, bought for the husband (to eat with a rump steak).
All the lovely fruit and vegetables are buried below, out of sight.
Fearful that one be cast as the kind of mother who serves their children cheap chicken and chips, it is never a surprise to see them begin scrabbling around trying to hide them from view.
Why should one care what anyone else thinks? But they do.
If truth be told, many are ashamed to say they sometimes pass judgment on other people’s shopping trolleys themselves.
As a result of Jamie Oliver sticking his head into the people’s mostly poorly stocked fridges, food is today, still inextricably linked with both class and morality.
Perhaps it has always been this way.
As Sheila Nkala, a working mother of two recalls her working-class Methodist upbringing: “My grandmother would actually say, ‘We are better than those people who go to the fish and chip shop’.”
And so it is now.
Feed your family junk and you’re a bad parent as well as a bad cook. Feed them well, and you’re the parent of the year.
As part of this article, this publication studied the weekly food shop and expenditure of three working-class families in Bulawayo and three “servant-keeping” families.
In short, we found that the working-class families were underfed and experiencing poverty equal to that in Bulawayo, and not previously associated with urban centres.
There was further proof of the class disparity, once again made apparent without recourse to finger-pointing: ex-public-school boys are on average bigger and taller than the rest of the male population.
Diet is a crucial factor in this, as we know from a child from a relatively poor background who gets the opportunity to attend boarding school and found dining hall food unexpectedly lavish.
Today, a time when the UN food price index has risen for six months in a row to the highest since records began in 1990, and when the juxtaposition of food and class recalls an easy cache of cliches – from mothers shoving burgers and takeouts at their obese children to rich families browsing Bulawayo’s upmarket supermarkets blowing hundreds of US dollars on a tiny basket of organic produce – it seems pertinent to repeat the questions: What are we really eating?
Is a family’s approach to food shaped by economics and class or are other factors at work?
There’s a suburb in Bulawayo that is an ideal location to revisit our study in miniature.
Like many of the city’s low-density suburbs and shopping centres that serve them, within a few yards it encapsulates a broad socio-economic mix: lovely, ‘greened’ houses versus cottages constructed as workers’ quarters.
With various fruit and veg shops dotted in this setting; it is also far from a “food desert”.
The rules of this exercise were simple: families were asked what their food diaries looked like and receipts for one week.
No preconceived ideas are allowed. While it is obvious that such an exercise is not scientific, it can at least provide an illuminating snapshot of how people actually eat.
One family has been visiting these types of shops on and off for 13 years along with their children, one of whom, Tanya, is now a 15-year-old vegetarian (seven years without meat) and the other, Jonah, a 10-year-old gourmand.
Their house falls between the two extremes. Tony the father, who is by his own definition of the working class, was our starting point, having arrived in the neighbourhood some 15 years ago.
Apparently, Tony has always been a fabulous cook, taught from infancy by his mother and grandmother.
He remains baffled at the way the modern approach eating: “You have this middle-class culture of feeding the children rubbish at teatime and then sitting down to better food when they are in bed.
That strikes me as very peculiar.
Good food is an occasion for the family.”
It is a point reiterated by local chef, Brian Mgutsheni who believes class/food conflicts have clear historical origins, from Zimbabwe being a country with a clearly defined hierarchy during colonial times, not least the monarchy:
“I’ve seen people eating fresh artichokes for lunch – working-class people eating really fine food but being simple about it.”
Sheila Moyo blames the broken food system caused by industrialisation: “Creating a food culture is very difficult,” she says.
“The term “foodie” is nothing but divisive, indicative of the haves and have-nots,” she continues.
Tony cooks a meal for his family – chicken breast with artichoke and parsnip mash to start, followed by goulash made with organic shin of beef, served with rice and broccoli.
On the table is a whole pecorino, a gift from a family friend during a recent stay.
Tony is the “dinner lady” for a local nursery: he brings the principles of his own kitchen – strong flavours, exciting dishes, seasonal, local produce, refusing to offer children an alternative (his daughter eats the same dishes without the meat) – to the table of up to 60 children, many of them underprivileged and unused to his ingredients.
He is the epitome of society’s dream of collapsing class boundaries by bringing good food to all.
“He is fantastic,” says Anna Ncube the nursery school teacher, who sees him and he’s like this country’s only hope for closing the class gap by educating children to enjoy food.
By contrast, Jenny Mhlanga, who grew up in an upper-middle-class home in Hillside, cannot cook: “I really do not cook, literally never. My mum only cooked a very few dishes.
I don’t even cook the children’s tea if he’s not around.
Often, we’ll go to a take-out round the corner.
I’m not interested.”
Tony’s shopping bill for the week totals US$178, with organic produce bought at a farmers’ market and an organic butcher (he will only buy from one, the others he considers not good enough).
Two dishes – shin of beef on Saturday evening followed by pork belly for Sunday lunch – come to US$65 (although leftovers will do one meal during the week).
With the figure of US$65, this writer goes around the corner to the small cottage of Nichola and Vusa and their five children, all under 11.
Their budget for the month is US$60 – around US$70 at a push. Every item is laid out on the spreadsheet Nichola compiles in her diary.
The cottage has four main rooms, a kitchen just big enough for a table, where Nichola insists they eat together, a small sitting room area, and two bedrooms.
The five children share a room, the two youngest a bed.
Nichola, who is a full-time mother, had her first child at 17 and grew up on a diet of traditional dishes, mostly because only her mother worked and money was tight in the family. Vusa is from rural Lupane.
They eat stews, traditional meals like veggies in peanut butter, soups, and mackerel, all made from scratch with ingredients bought cheaply from Nichola’s insistence on finding the best deals.
They have themed weeks – vegetarian, meat, rice, etc – as a way of experimenting with different flavours and introducing the children to different foods.
None of the five children was fed by jars; sweets are a once-a-week treat; they sometimes get eggs from chickens belonging to a neighbour.
As they sit narrating all this, this writer is struck by three thoughts. The first is that they are doing better than the writer is.
The writer has a smaller family, and spends at least double: Nichola’s children eat anything and everything and would happily accept a dish such as sadza with okra as a relish.
Food for children – young children at least – is generally uncorrupted by notions of class.
They do not look at a friend’s lunchbox and see that the chocolate bar and salty crisps could mean more than the food itself.
They just think their friend is lucky to be given such treats. Food to a child is simple and if you’re lucky, it turns into a simple – and healthy – pleasure.
In every case, the parents were willing in spirit, but all expressed the sensation of a sinking heart at the idea of a chaotic kitchen that needed to be cleared up afterward.
Could it be true that our national well-being ultimately lies in educating and encouraging the children, rather than berating their parents? Hold on to that thought as your child spreads flour over your kitchen floor.
I know I am going to.
— @RealSimbaJemwa
Online Reporter