Bone and Meat: Scattered Reflections on Consumption and Poverty
Bone is the perfect anatomical metaphor for poverty and lack. Barren, dry, and unappealing, it represents absence, the absence of meat — the absence of desirable, edible flesh, the absence of usable, edifying substance. Bone also represents presence and possibility. Presence because, even in the midst of the barrenness, a resourceful eater and seeker can salvage some meat, some muscle meat, cartilage, fat, or skin from a piece of bone. To the rich and wasteful, bone bespeaks uselessness and futility; to the poor and frugal it represents possibilities.
How can we locate poverty in bone or vice versa? The thing with bone is that when you’re poor, you have a culinary familiarity with it — chicken bone, fish bone, cow bone, goat bone. Unable to afford meat, the bony, cheaper part of the butcher’s ware is the poor man’s option. The bone is a necessity but one laden with opportunity. It is this prospect for salving what little meat is left on the bone that forges the connection between poverty and yearning on one hand, and the metaphor of the bone.
This window of meaty opportunity is possible because bone is rarely completely bare. It often carries little pieces of meat, of protein. Eating bony meat is thus a delight for the poor. It makes him appreciate meat more because getting meat off bone is hard work. With the bone, you earn your meat. You savor it more as a result. You caress the bone, you master salvaging techniques, techniques for denuding bone of any soft matter — muscle, marrow, or cartilage. It is a lesson in resourcefulness; it sharpens your aptitude for problem solving, tenacity, and persistence. Bone eating teaches you not to give up. It teaches you that what seems bare and useless may hold treasures profitable to the patient and determined.
Not to romanticize poverty and bone eating, but there is something alluring about poverty, and bone eating. In the moment, poverty and bone eating may seem like compulsive conditions that no one would willfully embrace, a condition thrust upon the unlucky from which he is desperate to escape. But bone eating, as well as the poverty that often spawns it, acquire a distant, historical charm when one no longer has to eat bone and can afford real meat.
In the moment of poverty, you think bone eating is undignifying but inevitable. You envy those who eat meats and do not have to pick bones clean of their residual flesh — until you too join the meat eating class, until you are awash with meats of every kind and can choose which animal’s flesh you want for dinner. Then bone becomes something you miss, bone eating a rare, longed-for privilege, a privilege that gives you a different appreciation for man’s quest for meaty proteins.
Once you are in meaty abundance or have regular access to meat, you miss the quest for meat, the serendipitous discovery of meat, and the reward you get from probing a piece of bone. All of these pleasures can only come from bone eating, and poverty, not from meat eating and abundance. If you no longer have to work for your meat, meat eating becomes a perfunctory, banal dietary routine, a mechanical observance of the need for protein in one’s diet. Abundance and access are killers of appetites and dullers of palates. Lack and scarcity enable you to savor that which is scarce on the few occasions when you can taste it.
The allure of poverty, along with its quotidian expressions, is not only expressed in the dietary domain, and it is not only those who used to eat bone, who used to eat poor, that now romanticize and glamorize the sights and sounds of poverty. Poverty tourism, whether to the townships of South Africa, Ajegunle in Nigeria, or to the favelas of Brazil, is a feel good, almost nostalgic attempt to connect or reconnect to poverty. Only the well off indulges in this kind of tourism. Romanticized, sexy poverty is a construct of privilege.
Poverty porn comes in many forms. Save-the children commercials on US cable TV requires that poor children and sometimes adults be filmed at the site of poverty, whether this is the Kibera slum of Nairobi or a garbage dump in Guatemala. They also require that poor children be shown to be doing things that poor people purportedly do, including scavenging for food or licking a piece of bone for shards of meat.
Whether we grew up privileged or poor, once we find ourselves as adults in positions of relative socioeconomic privilege, we begin to participate consciously or subconsciously in memorializing the objects we associate experientially or vicariously with poverty. It is as though we resent our current privilege or are haunted by the guilt it produces. Poverty and its quotidian markers suddenly become for us elements of a deeper humanity unmoored to the tyranny of capitalist consumerism, of which we have become a part. Our newfound fondness for the sights, sounds, smells, and tastes of poverty is a product, ironically, of cornucopia. From this vantage point of privilege, vicarious poverty and excursions to the emotions and practices we associate with hardship can assuage and edify in equal measures.
For those who grew up in lack, the journey back to romanticized moments of poverty can be particularly satisfying, whether the return is dietary or otherwise.
I grew up eating a lot of bone and cartilage because we could not regularly afford muscle meat except on special occasions — Christmas, Easter, and New Year celebrations, and when we had important visitors deemed deserving of a meaty treat. We counted on the visitor not to eat all the meat on offer and we were almost always right in our expectation.
As children, we dreamt of a time in the future when we would no longer fight with bone to get some meat off it — when we would eat meat boneless and without much effort, and whenever we wanted. In fact we constructed elaborate fantasies of a future of meaty abundance. Poverty has a way of producing daydreams of possibilities. Poverty, I would argue, is perhaps the biggest muse of them all. For when you’re poor, the future and the expectations you have for it become a blank, inviting canvas upon which you can graft all manner of stories that take you away from your present conditions and to an imagined, escapist future.
As a child I had my own fantastical stories actuated by lack and scarcity, and almost all of them were structured by one thing: food. I imagined what foods the rich folks were eating. I fantasized about how I might someday be eating the same things. Fantastical stories of dietary revelry and indulgence flowed with particular torrential fervor when one ate a bone. You never got enough meat off the bone from your striving to satisfy your craving for meat. Fantasies replaced that which was unavailable, filled the gap, the absence. You wished you could get more meat from the bone, so your imagination produced a futuristic fantasy where eating meat would not require the presence or intrusion of bone. Fantasies filled the void of scarcity.
Growing up, I encountered other fantastical stories of poverty, which were told in the binary lexicon of lack and abundance, in the vernacular of scanty eating and gluttonous indulgence. I remember a particular distant cousin of ours who came from the village to live with us for a while. He told a lot of stories, most of them flavored with the tantalizing metaphors of food. Some of his stories were not stories but profound philosophical commentaries on the themes of poverty and wealth. His musings were all borne of poverty, a conclusion I came to in later years. He seemed preoccupied with making sense of his condition relative to that of his imagined, richer and more well nourished Others.
My cousin was older than us and so we gravitated to his stories because we thought they came from a place of experience. Moreover, the stories spoke to our inner anxieties and yearnings. Once, in a moment of hunger, he uttered one of the most melodramatic yet insightful philosophical statements on the relationship between wealth and consumption I have ever heard. It’s much funnier and profound when said in our dialect of the Idoma language, but I’ll give translation a shot. Essentially, my cousin said the rich had so much food and so little appetite that all they did was peck at the food like a bird pecks at grain with her beak. He went on to mention a bewildering variety of foods and meats, including drinks and cigarettes, which he smoked. The rich, he concluded were routinely guilty of under-eating, of wasting food.