The other day, I paid R30 for one lamb chop.
It wasn’t Wagyu, or particularly big, or imported from a free range farm in central Australia and expertly prepared in truffle caviar by Gordon Ramsay. Oh no!
You see, I was really lus for a lekker lamb choppie, so I decided to treat the family, since we hadn’t had any in a long while.
I picked five nice-looking ones at the counter and was too embarrassed to give it back when I saw the price; so I sheepishly paid the painful R160.
I know I write about food prices often, but I can’t help wondering how people are affording to even eat these days.
And considering the cost-of-living crisis, what exactly are they eating?
The various high prices that I have been highlighting over the past few months, now appear to have finally converged on a singularity – a full-blown economic crisis that everybody is acknowledging. And while I am managing, I feel for people at the bottom of the food chain – the elderly and the desperately poor.
That’s if they can even get their hands on any money, considering the ongoing problems at Sassa that has left recipients broke and desperately fending off the wolf at the door.
Supposedly a technical problem caused payments to be reversed, throwing the most vulnerable among us into an immediate hunger crisis.
The question is, how long would politicians tolerate a technical glitch if it was affecting their own salaries?
Would they patiently wait for the problem to be sorted out, or would heads roll very quickly?
Let’s make that a thought for another day.
While prices generally seem to be coming down slowly, food inflation is remaining stubbornly high.
Recently the Competition Commission noted that when the markets call for it, retailers don’t drop food prices as quickly as when they raise it in bad times.
They also noted that we are paying more for some food than we should, which is why government has tasked ministers to come up with a plan to keep food affordable.
But even government is feeling the pinch, introducing spending cuts and austerity measures across departments.
The economic distress has resulted in a sharp increase in people buying waste food.
I have written about this many times before, since I first started noticing this phenomenon.
At first people would shyly take one or two items, embarrassed by the fact that their finances are forcing them to take it.
These days the embarrassment has given way to desperate expectation and people now grab as much as they can the moment the prices are reduced.
Last week, one gentleman grabbed all the packs of viennas that had reached their sell-by dates, before anyone else could get any.
And these are not conventionally poor people, struggling to make a living.
In fact, they drive nice cars and look like they hold down respectable jobs.
It’s just that the cost of a basket of basic food continues to increase every month, while we still have the exact same income.
I call us the working indigent.
Last week I had to be at the CTICC and noticed a queue of young people snaking around a building on the Foreshore.
It turns out they had been waiting there since before sunrise to apply for a handful of call centre jobs that had been advertised.
By the time I left in the afternoon, there were still about 150 people in the line, hoping that they would get one of the jobs.
As I have noted before, having this many unemployed and hopeless young people in our midst is a ticking time bomb.
Even those who did manage to get employed, would still have to struggle with the sky-high prices of transport, utilities and basic foodstuffs.
It’s going to be felt even more when it comes to staples like eggs and chicken.
The combination of load shedding and a bird flu outbreak means a looming catastrophic shortage of all poultry products, shooting chicken and egg prices through the roof.
And this could mean that I won’t see a lamb choppie on my plate again for some time, because red meat producers will inevitably seize the opportunity to hike their own prices to make a buck.
Let’s hope those ministers’ plan works, because we desperately need a break.