From Ójé Ébécha to Foreign Rice: Food, Class and Memory.

As younglings, especially those of us from large families, there was a quiet formula to food in the home. It was so consistent that it became tradition without anyone needing to announce it. We would meet our mummies making rice for lunch, swallow for dinner, and leftovers (ébécha) for breakfast. That was the rhythm of life.

It was a formula so keenly maintained that only once in a blue moon would we have rice for dinner or breakfast. Maybe when yam was harvested and there was enough palm oil, we would have boiled yam and oil for breakfast or lunch. That meal was truly sumptuous, especially with ité  ( palm oil sludge), usually extracted from the bottom after the needed oil had been collected during processing.

Sometimes we roasted the yams. Fries were usually accompanied by Akamu (pap), with or without sugar. Good old days indeed.

We could also have égwa agugu (iron beans), “iron beans” because of how much heat and time it took before it softened enough to become edible. Yet when it was finally ready, it was fabulous, especially with okpiye and ugba  (our local substitute for modern maggi and locust beans) and of course, with plenty oil and ité. God have mercy on this tongue.

But to my main point: we rarely ate foreign rice.

Foreign rice was mostly food for celebrations and festivals like marriages, Eid, and special occasions. In many poor and average or middle-class homes, what we knew and ate was local rice from aja éga (Ega market) in Idah, aja Itobe, rice from Olukwudu, and Ibaji. God bless the efforts of our people and our farmers.

Back then, the rich class had foreign rice as though every day was celebration day. They even had it for dinner, and we found that odd. Even more puzzling was when it was cooked with all manner of ingredients, spices, carnage, salad, cucumber, green pepper, green beans, carrots, and sundry additions. Fried rice was almost unknown to some of us in those days. We would look at it and wonder: to what end is all this?

Yet looking back now, perhaps it was not merely about taste.

Some people who believed they had arrived, or were on their way to escaping the matrix, rejected local rice altogether. They looked down on it and dismissed it as “full of stones.” They did not appreciate our local methodologies, as though we were not all Africans, as though what came from our soil was somehow beneath dignity. In response, many of us claimed not to like foreign rice, saying it was tasteless on the tongue. Truthfully, some of us did not entirely mean it. It was part protest, part defense; a way of standing by what was available to us, and perhaps by extension, standing by ourselves.

And this is where the real question lies:

Did people truly choose foreign rice because they could not stand the local nature of our own rice? Or did foreign rice simply become one of the many tools by which classism deepened its roots in our society?

Today, things have changed.

Foreign rice is no longer as easily accessible to everyone, not even to many of the people who once performed wealth through it. Perhaps only the top 10% of our economic and social pyramid can afford to treat it casually now. Meanwhile, local rice has been rebagged, repackaged, and rebranded in customized sacks, often smaller and neater than the traditional sacks in markets like aja Itobe. And suddenly, the same local rice many once rejected has become acceptable, even desirable  to the majority, including those who would naturally have looked down on it in the past.

So one begins to wonder:

Is it better now because it is truly better, or because it is now packaged in a way that flatters modern taste and class aspiration?

Has scarcity made what is available more valuable?

Or have we only just begun to respect what should have been respected all along?

There is a lesson in all this.

We must learn to value our own resources, because the value we place on what is ours often determines how others will value it too. Still, honesty also demands that we say this clearly: our farmers and processors can do even better in processing, packaging, and storage. Better quality should not be a foreign language to local food.

And yet, beyond all the economics, all the class analysis, and all the food politics, there is something deeply personal that remains.

Now we are conditioned to appreciate very light meals for breakfast. I do not argue against the correctness of this civilization. But for some of us, there is still a longing that modernity cannot cure, the memory of leftover swallow cut into the pot of soup and warmed for breakfast (ójé ébécha).

That was not merely food.

That was home.

That was family.

That was a time when what we had was enough, and enough was rich in ways we only understand now.

God bless our parents.

®Ahmed Salim Jn ✍️ 

#Uloko