Bread Riot

• Through history peasant populations have revolted whenever whatever basic starchy staple gets expensive. In European history this phenomenon was always manifested in the form of bread riots (the problem is still with us, read about the recent “tortilla riots” that took place in Mexico City recently). I intend to organize my own bread riot, not because there is enough but because there is too much. Annoyed, I snapped at my host family last week that I will no long accept bread for lunch or dinner. I just don’t understand the Senegalese obsession with bread. It is cheap and filling, but the Senegalese have had millet (and the couscous made from it) to fulfill that function for centuries now. And they seriously just eat bread as an accompaniment for everything. Once last week dinner was macaroni, onions, and fries and then they handed me bread! I see now how the French have done a marvelous job mentally colonizing the Senegalese. People here love bread, love smoking everywhere, love coffee and love mayonnaise.

• The last example is particularly egregious (although coming home smelling like an ashtray whenever I got out anywhere gets annoying too). It just shows the silliness of stereotypes. In the US, mayonnaise is associated with whiteness (it’s so whitebread) to the point where in the film “Undercover Brother,” “The Man” sent a white woman to give the black male superhero mayonnaise as a kind of black “kryptonite.” The stereotype seemed true when I remembered that my brother-in-law Jashaun, one of the blackest people I know, is fatally allergic to mayonnaise. Sorry to disappoint people, but the Senegalese LOVE mayonnaise. Almost every restaurant I have been to here has put out baskets of bread and mayonnaise as an appetizer. I will hold on to the stereotype and blame mayonnaise (and the watery, sugary, diabetes-inducing tomato puree they call ketchup here) on the French and their ways, rather than admit that black folks could legitimately like to eat a substance like mayonnaise.