Comida de pobre
Jorge Juan Rodríguez V takes stock of the essentials
Photo: Designed by topntp26
Reality
“Comida de Pobre,” Dad would jokingly say as he put the egg on top of my white rice. It was called “poor people’s food” because, with only a few dollars, you could at least buy rice for a family of three, the egg was sometimes a luxury.
I always asked for my egg scrambled---runny yolks made me itchy.
Courtesy of Jorge Juan Rodríguez V
As a kid, I didn’t necessarily understand the extent of it all. I knew my friends from the suburban elementary school I was bussed to had new toys, expensive sneakers, cars that looked much more put together than our Oldsmobile station wagon with the seat that flipped up in the trunk. We lived in this “co-op,” an affordable-housing complex of connected townhouses. When I was little, I would knock on the kitchen wall, and my abuela and tío, who lived next door, would knock back.
I was a happy kid. And also, I understood where we fit in the world. When we went to stores, I always ran to the toy section and grabbed something that made me smile. I’d run back to my parents to ask if we could buy it.
“En estos momentos no se puede, Bebo,” we can’t right now. So I would smile, play with it while we were in the store—careful not to break the packaging—and then put it back before we left.
When I was little, I hadn’t read Marx, Fanon, bell hooks. I just looked at my reality and had questions. Mami and Papi worked hard: dad left at five in the morning to be with me in the afternoon; mom came home in the evening. Occasionally, I would go to their work.
I didn’t understand why the other kids lived in huge houses with big yards while we ate rice and eggs. I just knew I preferred my egg scrambled because runny yolks made me itchy.
Revelation
I’ve come to realize that I’m not the only one who had to eat white rice with an egg on top. Indeed, each day, hundreds of thousands of people in this country work dozens of hours and can’t afford an egg for their rice. These people are your neighbors, your Uber drivers, your teachers, your grocery store workers, your chefs, your waiters and waitresses.
What a global pandemic has made clear, however, is that all of our lives wouldn’t function without workers like: my dad, the head chef in a series of magnet schools; my mom, a family advocate for Head Start; my partner, a New York City public school teacher; my cousin, a delivery driver; my neighbor, a building super; my bodega guy, a sandwich maker and store clerk.
Yet the economic system we have makes it so that many of these workers struggle to buy groceries, pay rent, cover medical bills—with or without a pandemic.
Apocalypse
The term apocalypse has historically referred to a cataclysmic ending of the world.
However, in its most original form, apocalypse means an ‘unveiling’ or ‘uncovering,’ a making plain of the world that surrounds us.
By this definition, we certainly are living through an apocalypse, as the realities of global pandemic are making plain the fault lines of our social systems. Being unveiled are the lies we tell ourselves every day about who and what we should value in the systems meant to sustain us.
In the days since the COVID-19 pandemic began, cities have taken drastic measures to quell the spread of disease. San Francisco officials mandated a full lockdown, during which all ‘non-essential personnel’ must stay home from work. Interestingly, the ‘essential workers’ do not just include doctors and nurses and scientists, but also grocery-store staff—some of the lowest paid workers in the country.
In New York City, it was teachers and parents who fought for weeks to have the public schools shut down. The Center for Disease Control had already made clear that we should not gather in groups of 50+ and should maintain six feet of distance—both physically impossible in school hallways, cafeterias, and classrooms packed with children, staff, teachers, and administrators.
Despite mounting calls for school closures, Mayor Bill de Blasio continued to argue that there would be students without access to meals and healthcare workers fighting the mounting pandemic left without a place to send their children. Teachers rebutted that we already have systems in place for feeding children when school is not in session and that healthcare workers would be at greater risk if their kids were kept in school.
Although schools were eventually shut down, the battle uncovered a crucial fact: public schools are essential for our society and, as currently conceived, perform a much greater social-service function than the already monumental task of teaching students.
Both the grocery-store staff member and the public-school teacher make clear that, without them, the quotidian, everyday systems that help sustain our lives would not function. Yet grocery store staff members often do not earn a living wage. And, as teachers across the country have argued, their salaries do not account for the 12-hour days many put into teaching our children, for earnings that are often insufficient to cover rent, healthcare, and pay off the thousands of dollars in student-loan debt acquired in order to become teachers in the first place.
Our quotidian lives depend on a deep interconnection with thousands of workers we don’t know—workers whose labor within and outside of a time of crisis is not considered worth a living wage. There are the janitors, who keep clean the buildings of doctors, who, in turn, depend on grocery-store staff to access food, which depends on the labor of farmers and farm workers, all of whom send their children to schools that function as far more than sites of education. Jeff Bezos, the CEO of Amazon, would quite literally not survive if farm workers earning less than five dollars a day did not pick the food he eats.
Photo: Pijarn Jangsawang
We watch the stock market fall day by day, as fears of global pandemic rip through people’s retirement accounts. We watch ‘essential’ workers themselves losing their jobs, unable to pay rent and and without disposable income to spend on food. We hear many, including former U.S. Vice President and current presidential candidate Joe Biden, argue that this struggle is just the result of the pandemic.
But we know.
Those of us who grew up poor/working-class and who continue to build with poor/working-class folks know that these class disparities did not begin with the pandemic but were merely made plain by the pandemic.
While the full effects of this pandemic are yet to be known, a minimum outcome of this global crisis must include critical assessment of those social fault lines exposed by COVID-19.
Central to this is asking a question I felt, but could not articulate, as a child:
How viable is our capitalist system, which necessitates that some workers—now considered “essential”—live in poverty, exploited of their labor, so that only a few can earn billions?
Black Panther Free Breakfast for Children Program, St. Augustine’s Episcopal Church, 1969. Source: University of California, Santa Cruz
Critical assessment of a more just society is lacking if it does not, as Cornel West says, defend people’s needs against the brutal forces of capitalism.
This apocalypse might finally convince us to push towards the vision of the Combahee River Collective and the Young Lords Party (YLP): a socialist society in which, to quote YLP’s 13-Point Program, “the needs of the people come first, and where we give solidarity and aid to the people of the world, not oppression and racism.”
In fact, it was the Black Panther Party and women’s organizations like the Committee on School Lunch Participation that fueled US American food policy, particularly the free school breakfast program we continue today.
Or, apocalypse might convince us to push for a society outside these economic labels entirely. At minimum, the very pandemic that has called for social distancing will also force us to sit at the table of those who eat white rice every day and ask what a world might look like where an egg is not a luxury.
Maybe, as we eat en conjunto—with one another—the vision of a radical new society will become clear.
Lo cotidiano
Mom carefully strained the can of corn over the kitchen sink, using the can’s aluminum lid to hold the kernels in place while draining out the liquid. Once complete, she threw out the lid and stuck a spoon directly into the can—one less dish to wash later. As soon as she brought it to the table, I took the spoon and put some corn on top of my rice—my scrambled egg was on the side tonight. There was ketchup on the table that dad had grabbed from the fridge earlier, so I squeezed a little on top of the corn and mixed it with the rice until the top grains turned ever so slightly pink.
Mami y Papi asked me how my day was, and I shared about this new electronic map we got in our classroom. When you pressed different buttons, it would give you facts about a corresponding location.
Then I took a big fork full of rice with corn and a touch of ketchup, followed by a piece of egg, and we laughed at the sound of my abuela bickering with my tío next door.
I think about that classroom map often: about what its fancy technology obfuscated, what it hid. None of the buttons corresponded to my kitchen table or kitchen tables like mine. None of the facts gave a rundown of people’s egg-to-rice ratio, whether they liked ketchup on top, or could afford to buy a can of corn. Most importantly, the map couldn’t calculate why some people didn’t have to eat white rice every day.
Maybe the map itself needed to undergo an apocalypse.
But I already knew where I fit on that map. I knew there were others sitting with me. I like to think that they knew I was sitting with them, too.
In either case, we all knew those eggs were delicious.
