DELORIS KOAN | We need to get bumptious about making state feed the children

I am hungry. I have swum 1.5km. I want this chow.

But there is this wraith, with his shabby takkies, grubby dark Tee and broeks falling off.

I am ensconced in my favourite street hidey-hole, those desultory picnic tables behind the fence in the corner of the supermarket parking lot down on the Esplanade.

Deloris and I spend a lot of time on the streets and we see things.

Like the jolly advert above the store’s tills. It’s a real-life Photoshopped picture of Lighthouse Spar with the sea roiling right up to its doorstep — when it comes to rising sea levels and climate change, Spar creatives are ahead of the game.

Do they know something we don’t? Is it subliminal advertising on the good side, not that wicked “carbon footprint” stinky propaganda emission one fuel company put out?

Anyway, I have stood patiently in the line at the food counter, watching all the drunks and drivers and people who look like life is a perpetual holiday order their brekkie until it’s my turn.

Then it’s a scoop or three of rice, beans, fried mushrooms, spinach.

I am about to hit my ninth month of sort-of veganism. I give myself a score of 95% vegan, 4% vegetarian and 1% seafood. 

It feels lekker. I never have bloat, I sleep through the night, the asthma is back to normal — a faint wheeze, not an angry choke.

It’s all good for a regular, home-grown, meat-shovelling Eastern Cape Philistine.

That might sound a bit judgy, and I often crave a pink prawn or piece of squid in my beans.

It’s all about moving along towards better behaviour.

But now I need to chow down, yet there is that high-edged keening going on outside the fence as the wraith walks up and down, shouting, in the bin, chased out by the security guard, back like a fly looking for a resting place.

The demented hack I live with is writing a lot about hunger, dying children, all the dark, terrible tragedy we have carefully placed in a box in our heads.

My boxes go thus: Deloris, the 650 Kawa, Hetty, the 1200 GSA, and Pandora, the ... OK, let’s not look too closely.

So I have a new awareness that the people of the province are hungry to starving.

Our unemployment is at 41%, not far off from one person per job for every person without, babies are dying by the score from starvation — 116 in the year ending mid-2022, and it has only become worse, so with some rough computing, that could be more than 300 by now, all of it since Covid-19, as if the pandemic is an excuse enough.

The hack says emotional responses to feeding the poor as acts of charity are lekker, but leading lights like Prof Thuli Madonsela are saying food is about social justice.

It is guaranteed in the constitution and, in terms of Section 28(1)(c), in the Bill of Rights, is a legally enforceable right. 28 (1)(c). Practise it. Make it your ear worm. It’s easy.

So now when this laaitie literally creeps up inside the fence line and looks at the little 10% I have left in the corner of my punnet as I debate the options and the phone rings, does he not leap in and literally snatch the food from the table.

Now I could take out my wet shoelace and whip him across the nethers, but I was already decided: I had eaten enough, he was clearly out of his mind with hunger and possibly drugs, but that is for another day. 

It was the intensity of his reach that struck me.

Later in the day, as is my wont, I am wafting home on Deloris and stop off for some veg at the Fresh Stop at the entrance to Gonubie.

We veggies eat a lot of ... veggies.

But as I approached the counter, past all the pies which are never for us, those clever garage owners had snuck in a “vegetarian pizza slice”.

It is my understanding that the world is against us vegetarians, even those of us with looser morals than the puritans on both sides of the issue — I love it when carnivores start setting up my eating regimen for me as if I need to pass their test and only then may I be regarded as, what, a credible edible?

Please keep in mind that I am never really free to shout my mouth off; everything I write here gets tested in private by a clever person trained in corporate warfare — there is always countermand in life.

I am talking to the good people here, not the empty drums, those who keep filling themselves with chow, resources, tenders and it all just runs out the bottoms.

I look at the pizza slice — you buggah! You put cheese on it! I take it, pay, stand next to the bike, veggies strapped on and out of sight and mind, and lean into the slice. 

When we are “mounding”, as we refer to civil serpents shovelling taxpayers’ money at some catered event, we say absolutely nothing. We just chow.

I look up and no, not another young okie sneaking through this secured space, dipping into the bin and looking at me!

I glance at my thick, bready slice. Ya, that’s about 10%, and I reach over the tank and give it to him.

He locks eyes with me and says, with such desperation in his voice, “thank you”.

I just broke. So sincere. True story.

Earlier in the day as I went through my paces, it struck me that I had actually known hunger.

Even as a middle-class son of middle management, I often found myself surfed out and pap with hunger at the café down at Nahoon river mouth next to Beach Break, now occupied by the Buffalo City Metro.

We, the 14-year-old surfer boys from Cambridge and Quigney, would joyfully buy a small packet of crisps, a Coke and half a cuttie of white bread and gobble it, while a few of the boys from the wealthier suburb nearby would be letting their faces fall into hamburgers, with onion rings falling out the side, tomato sauce slathered on their mounded cheeks.

If our rand or two ran out during a long day of surfing in 1973 then that was it: 10 kays to hitchhike or walk home and your next meal.

It was at this time that one of Mrs Shaw’s boys let us into her house just above the Dolphin Hotel and showed gratitude by stealing a potato. Not a cooked one, but straight out the veggie rack.

I bit into it and it was crisp and fantastic. I know, most of you are gagging, but food is all about context. We were really hungry boys. To this day, you can offer me a fresh, raw potato, I do take it with a hint of salt and pepper but no truffles, thanks.

My hunger was momentary, and I finally got caught stealing food and got a hiding with a belt on my bum cheeks from my dad. Yes, that was humbling, not the pain, but the humility of it.

And, well it worked. Today, all I am stealing is a moment of your time to reflect, as adults who believe in the constitution, about matters of charity, social justice, rights, children, dumping of food, misspent and returned millions when infants are starving to death in our hospitals, all that horrifying reality banging against the lid of Pandora’s box demanding to be let out.

Is it that complex? Some say so — there are economic risks but others in this field say there are enough tax rands to feed the children if the government stopped blowing billions on junk civil servant jobs and corruption-drained projects and the like.

But I can tell you one thing, regardless of who you are, it is going to take a united public to do the right thing and force the National Treasury to get off the pot and dish out food to the kids.

That is all. No buts.