Words for food
Talking to friends, our parents had euphemisms for the nights when we had little to eat, and the parent wouldn’t or couldn’t cook. F’s parents called it “scratch” K’s “catch and kill’ my mum “bread and grabbit”. Basically, there may have been one staple (maybe) and you could scrounge up the rest, without supervision or regard.
Specialities of my sister and I included cornflake and tomato sauce sammies. ‘Treat’ - which was basically some sort of sugar and butter mixed together into an icing type food. Maybe popcorn - which one time my sister and I started a fire. Grabbit hardly ever involved vegetables, unless we were marauding in the back yard and literally ate weeds and flowers (EDIBLE KIND according to my mum).
Sometimes killed meats like roo or rabbitt. Yabbies when we went to the dam.
You come to hoard food - bread rolls. One times I had a salad roll, bought for me for lunch when I was about five. I hated all the salad and threw it under the big rainwater tank at school.
Spanking for that, with the vacuum cleaner.
Food is a necessity, its a treat, it is discarded, its anything you can find.
This was common. Even now my mum has anxiety, and asks my sister and I “at least you girls had food right??” and we nod, complicit in the lie that we always did.
