My children throw away Vaseline containers while there’s still enough jelly clinging to the sides to lubricate the body for a few more days. They discard soap bars when they get thin. And my ultimate heartbreak: they toss away chicken bones with flesh still winking seductively at the teeth.
We never did that growing up in Nigeria. In fact, even as an adult here in the United States who can now afford to baptize himself daily in a whole tub of Vaseline, build a soap fortress in the bathroom, and roast a personal chicken for every meal, I still operate like the perpetual president-general of stingy men’s association.
I unfailingly squeeze out the last stubborn blob of jelly from Vaseline containers, weld soap slivers onto new bars like a mason laying bricks, and chew chicken bones until they resemble archaeological fossils, or disappear completely into my tummy.
I tell myself it’s thrift. I tell myself it’s moderation. But it’s really my Nigerian upbringing quietly whispering, “waste not, want not.”
Hard as I try, my children, however, are indifferent to my sermons on the culinary merit of doing justice to chicken thighs and wings, or the moral obligation of giving soap bars a proper burial only when they vanish completely.
The truth hit me recently: these habits aren’t really “Nigerian values.” They’re the result of poverty and deprivation. Scarcity is a stern teacher. It teaches you to scrape, to conserve, and to honor every morsel. Abundance, meanwhile, breeds the opposite: the casual tossing away of food, soap, Vaseline, and perhaps even common sense.
Our food culture bears this out. Eating ponmo, licking plates clean (my dad once told us the blessings of food dwell at the bottom of plates!), and making delicacies out of goat heads, fish heads, and cow entrails all sprang from necessity, not culinary genius. When you lack, you learn to love the “lesser parts.”
This also explains the gastronomic culture of our African-American cousins. Their celebrated “soul food” is the edible diary of slavery-era deprivation. Consider, for example, their famous “chitlins,” a deceptively cute name for pig intestines. It was survival food in slavery times.
Today, long after slavery ended, chitlins have become a delicacy. It’s not so different from the Yoruba orisirisi that we now fondly and simply call “assorted” in Nigerian English, that is, the cooked entrails of a cow presented as fine dining. A culture drowning in abundance doesn’t build delicacies out of offal.
What we often romanticize as our “cultural values,” especially in matters of food, may simply be the scarcity-induced survival strategies of our ancestors.
We sanctify them as tradition because they are age-old. But it is poverty that gave us plate-licking, bone-crunching, soap-fusing, Vaseline-scraping habits that masquerade as virtues.
Abundance, on the other hand, lets people, particularly in the first world, waste without guilt. I once wrote in a column that America wastes more food in a day than many poor countries eat in months.
The sweet spot, for me, is the meeting point between what I call Third World parsimony and first-world profligacy.
I tell my children that just because they’re fortunate enough to live in abundance, they shouldn’t lose the wisdom that scarcity once forced on their ancestors, which still manifests in my judicious (they call it “stingy”) consumption habits.
I know many diasporan and home-based middle-class Nigerians can relate to my gripe.
