No manager has the right to tell people what to eat
Kaieteur News – The decision to ban wheat and wheat flour was typical of a backlash that characterized economic policy-making at the time of the ban’s implementation in Guyana. Flour was a basic staple in the Guyanese diet. You can’t extract flour from the national diet and you have no suitable place for bread, baking, roti, cakes and all the other nice things made from flour.
Rice flour never replaced boiled flour. Rice flour cannot be rolled into bread and is difficult to make in baking and roti. It does not have gluten and therefore does not hold a mixture together in the same way as boiled flour.
Asking Guyanese to replace rice flour with boiled flour was a crazy decision, because it meant that the things we eat for breakfast had to change as baking, bread and roti, couldn’t be made from flour rice only.
The best use of rice flour is as additives. Just as some biofuels are added to gasoline, so can rice flour added to wheat flour, but it can’t be the perfect substitute for wheat flour.
So the decision to ban the import of wheat flour and wheat severely disrupted Guyanese lifestyles. And Guyanese do not like to disrupt their lifestyles. Worse yet, they do not enjoy when changes are forced upon them.
When a rule was passed that employees in Government offices had to wear shirt jacks instead of a shirt and tie, there was resentment but because jobs were hard to get by and things were tight, and since those days there was a lack of compliance with official editorials seriously. results, employees complied but were never happy with that decision.
Their unhappiness did not stem from having to wear shirt jacks. That kind of dress is more suited to our climate than a shirt and tie. They were angry because they had no choice in the matter; it was a decision that was forced upon them.
Even to this day, the overwhelming majority of Guyanese in America still stick to their national diet. Most of those who live in the Tri-State area go to West India stores every week to buy their food supplies because even though so many have been living in America for more than 20 or 30 years, they still prefer to eat the things they grew up eating in Guyana.
When they come to Guyana for a vacation, they take back loads of local produce because it is not easy to separate people from their traditional culture. They want the foods they were weaned on.
Food bans of the 1970s and 1980s created real difficulties for all Guyanese, but they were particularly harsh on one group as many of the items that were part of their basic diet were restricted or banned. Not only flour was banned but also the splitting of peas and potatoes. These are part of the daily diet for all Guyanese, but have special significance for the East Indies.
Blackeye peas were also banned, but this bean was widely grown in Guyana, even on large farms by the Guyana National Service. So blackeye peas were available. But it is not split peas used by people of all persuasions but especially used for dhal by the East Indies. You can cook blackeye instead of cooking split peas but what substitute finger would you use to make dhal?
The flour ban was hard on everyone. You can thicken your stew with rice flour and cassava but you can’t make bread, baking and roti with rice flour. It does not get together and so the ban on flour created real hardship for everyone.
It came at a time when things were very difficult to make the problem worse. Many people today in the Diaspora are ashamed to remember that time since many of them had to exist on cassava bun and sugar cake for breakfast. These are snack foods but during the flour ban, parents were forced to give their children a cassava pone for breakfast and put sugar cake in their lunch kits for their midday meal.
When the children came home from school at 15:00, they would have a meal of rice and whatever else was cooked. Those were embarrassing days for families and this is why it is so unpleasant for the older generation to remember.
Guyana will never go back to those days.
But if the situation, at random, gets to where some government wants to reintroduce a ban on imported food items and impose rice flour on the population, Guyanese people will be even more angry than before because have become accustomed to deciding what to eat rather than before the governors dictating their tastes.
(The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of this newspaper.)