Eating is Believing

  " Welcome" in both Lithuanian and Yiddish (or so we hope!) These 550+ days of lockdown has me obsessed about a few things: One of them   is  Making do The other is  thanking Gary Sussman  a million times And lastly, to keep on  looking for the spaces in between , the grey areas, the places where darkness and light might exist in the same spot. Places where the stereotype might be turned on its head.    Making do : This Heritage Weekend we visited The Farm again. Yes, that one. The one our friends left behind when they emigrated to England. We keep on thinking that it is  our farm , a humble farm with something like eight sheep and a small patch of mielies and a brick dam next to a decaying  kraal muur .  A make-do farm for a make-do travel through food club.  Last time we were there, there wasn’t any hot water, and we braved the outside shower. This time we made do. We stayed dirty.    We stayed dirty like our ...

Inviting the gorgeous Nico Tortorella and his Italian ancestors to our lunch would be easy to write about, so I thought. It was indeed a spectacular setting, and the lunch that went on for hours was like sitting in an old Italian village with people you love. Food, wine, music, deep thought, frivolous giggles and more food kept on rolling in. But to write about Nico and our conversation was hard. Mostly I think because I don't belong to Nico's world. I understand it, and love it, and will stand up for anyone who needs me, but it's not my battle. And so I tried writing about it humbly, over here:  Nico Tortorella with his Italian blood and our South African landscape The Threshold So, we all arrived on The Farm. The one that belong to our dear friends Catherine and Herman. (They had emigrated to the UK, but had left their little farm in South-Africa behind, like an orphan or a gemstone.) I’ve refused to go back there. Without Catherine who always put  stronke  in the old...