Rice, beef stew containing carrots and potatoes, cabbage, meshed potatoes, pumpkin, potato salad, meshed potatoes mixed with green peas, chakalaka, baked beans mixed with mayonaisse, beetroot and green salad. This is the kind of food eaten by the multitudes of Black people (on a Sunday) who know the depths of poverty, and who therefore measure the quality of the food by the quantity of it. Concepts like 7 colours are concepts of poor people who, for only one day in a week, can afford to eat food that is diversified. But even that diversity becomes vulgarised when one realises that in fact, it is the colour of the plate that is diverse, not the nutritional value of the food on the plate. The struggle for land must remain fundamental, because unless we own our own land, Black people will have no food sovereignty and therefore, no choice in what gets produced and consumed. The market for proper food will remain exclusive to those with a lot of resources (ie Whites and the Black middle class that is suffocating in debt) while our plates get filled with the kind of junk we look forward to on Sundays (7 colours). Food security is one of the many potential gains of land reposession and agrarian reform. And it is one of the things that made the idea of EFF so appealing to me. Ive always believed land expropriation to be the panacea to South Afrikas growth prospects. When you control food security, you also control diseases people get exposed to. The land question has the potential to respond even to the health crisis of our country. When people eat genetically modified organisms and crops that are not diversified (as is currently the case), they become susceptible to illnesses. This creates a demand for healthcare facilities, which the government then fails to deliver upon adequately. Then people protest for lack of service delivery and police unleash brutality and kill them...and so on the cycle continues. Landlessness is in fact the root of all service delivery crises in our country. #DeepInThought
Posted on: Sun, 29 Jun 2014 19:48:51 +0000
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