Sandwich stories by columnist Stephen Bush, was in the Financial Times last week in response to Kemi Badenoch’s Spectator statement that she doesn’t eat them. Somehow Grandmother was mentioned, too, so Grandmother determined to write her own stories about sandwiches – here they are. Read at your peril if you don’t eat or do eat Bread.

Padkos or Road Food

Sandwiches are a food you can eat while marching off to war – or to anywhere. Sandwiches are Padkos, the Afrikaans term for Road Food, but their English name comes from the Earl of Sandwich who ate one while gambling, so he that didn’t have to stop.  Sandwiches of matzo and bitter herbs are part of the story of Passover and were eaten when Grandmother made Passover meals for her children. Passover bread – matzo – was road food eaten in on the biblical journey from Egypt to Palestine. Bread is the edible packet that holds the nourishing protein anyone needs to live, however white bread has very little food value on its own and it doesn’t keep like wholegrain, rye and brown breads do.

Grandmother doubts that the first sandwiches were made of fresh or white bread. Grandmother’s preferred Padkos is biltong, bananas, nuts, dried fruit and delicious mebos. Grandmother prefers to travel with Padkos, water, fuel for the car, and shoes that she can run away in, because that’s how it had to be until she was fifty years old. Grandmother also loves Pita bread and Naan – both bread envelopes that hold real food from food cultures that she enjoys.

No Sandwich Shops

Grandmother’s generation did not buy sandwiches, because there were no sandwich shops or fast food. Pizza – a flat one-sided version of a sandwich – was not available, either. The Grandmother’s mother made sandwiches for her school breaks, as did every mother who could afford bread, and spread it with homemade jam or peanut butter. Grandmother’s mother sold bread in her African store and Grandmother, locked into the suffocating, dark and dusty back of her parent’s tiny Austin van nibbled at the bread crusts to stop feeling carsick on her windowless journey back from school. Grandmother, the artist, later made a drawing of this journey for an installation about her colonial history.

School Sandwiches

Grandmother at boarding school with other girls, who are probably grandmothers or dead, ate as much brown bread spread with margarine as she could get at supper because the girls were always hungry for home and for food. In the winter they sneaked the bread and marge out of the dining room and toasted it greasily on top of the paraffin heaters in the prep room before the teacher appeared. Bread came in a square white loaf at home and seemed a luxury. A Dagwood sandwich tower was an American greedy joke and has since degenerated into a MacDonald’s Burger that is not good or food – just body filler-outer. Of course, that’s just her opinion! Manger et bouger is not a French life style yet and is why the French are slim and fit.

Bread and Meat

Grandmother as a teenager did Red Cross and was told by a health worker that African workers and maids ate buns and addictive Coca-Cola and fed it to their children because it was all that was available and cheap, but it was such poor nutrition that it made them vulnerable to tuberculosis. Grandmother learned at university that poor people on the Cape Flats could not afford nutritious food and fed their babies cooked pumpkin squashes. Grandmother knew a doctor who worked in Baragwanath Hospital in Jo’burg in apartheid days who told her that maize meal has no food value unless it has a protein accompaniment and the poor women who ate only mealie pap became huge and swollen, but had no strength. Bread eases hunger, but does not feed one’s body so Kemi may be right to disdain the outside of a sandwich, but Grandmother asks – does her steak come on a plate that requires washing by a staff member? Grandmother loved to make and devour a Hunter’s sandwich, which is a disemboweled loaf of fresh bread stuffed with a juicy peppered steak and garlic mushrooms. It is picnic food and doesn’t need a plate. Grandmother hates soft sandwiches filled with pale battery chicken or ham, processed salad creams, flavourless tomatoes and limp salad. Even that onetime gem, a BTL is longer tasty as it used to be. Sandwiches are costly in every sense.

Bread and Roses

Grandmother is a feminist who believes in Bread and Roses and first saw those words graffiti-ed up on the De Waal motorway in Cape Town in the ’60s. She believes that bread must be good bread. The now traditional French baguette was an invention designed to be mass-produced for the hungry (masses of course!) in about 1920. Before that, people had eaten round, hard loaves of black bread that took too long to make and bake. That’s why bakeries in French are called ‘boulangeries’, because the bread came in ‘boules’ or round loaves. The steam ovens used to bake the long white light and transportable baguettes provided almost instant food and so helped prevent the bread riots, that most common cause of revolutions and war.

Breaking Bread

Grandmother loves the breaking of bread together as a family that is a sacrament for so many peoples. It is also a time to share memories of where a family comes from – what makes us into the people we are – and it helps us understand each other. Refusing to break bread and share it together is to side with the dividers, warmongers and destroyers of hope and humanity. Grandmother is forever grateful to her mother and father who did not disown her for her politics or the harm she did them. Brave people!

Grandmother’s family notes – her family is one of many mixed heritages, one race and multiple migrations – it is German and English, Russian and Polish, Indian, Indonesian (Malay), African, Shona, British and French. She advises that generation, class, culture, religion, politics, education and tribal affiliations are ways to either join or divide families and she wonders what bits, or which wholes, might be selected to be cancelled and cut off. What riches and tragedies could be lost instead of being courageously and lovingly sustained as Grandmother’s parents did.