Our dearest polony

could measure their height with a ruler.

Although I cannot fit the distinctive taste of polony into a taste box, I remember how with every bite my tongue would greet it with warm, expectant taste buds, to which it would respond with a smooth, cold, easy to chew, almost melt-in-yourmouth taste of mild saltiness and a slight sourness.

This also depended on which ingredients it was hanging out with that day.

Those who weren’t familiar with polony on an intimate level, like I was, only knew it as the processed meat to serve if they did not want to compromise. But I knew the full you, dear French.

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In my middle-class home, your variety, accessibility and loyalty earned you your stripes. Every month-end, you

were the last standing edible item in the fridge, making you the envy of cold water in Oros bottles and half-used onions and peppers that had lost their taste and crunch.

My nephew has just grown old and tall enough to reach for you — and cut his own thin slices like Mama taught him. You were a part of the family and fittingly earned yourself the nickname that I address you with today, French.

Your ancestor, bologna or what Americans call baloney, is a finely ground pork sausage containing cubes of pork fat, originally from the Italian city of Bologna. Her relatives, with the same name, are made using chicken, turkey, beef, venison, soy protein, or a combination of the above.

Gogo Bologna was brought to us after Sir David Pieter de Villiers Graaff, a cold storage tycoon and politician who transformed Africa’s cold storage industry and founded your first home here: Imperial Cold Storage and Supply Company.

Somewhere on the way here, your name changed to French polony. He ran the company aggressively until he retired from business to serve in the government.

In the late 1990s, your current home, Tiger Brands, went through a period of rapid growth that led the company to purchase Imperial Cold Storage and Supply Company, which they rebranded to your current family name, Enterprise Foods.

To us, your dear friends, you were our first taste of cold meats. You were the affordable friend who could be rocked in anything — you moved between varying spaces, from a sandwich to a potato salad. You were eaten raw as a cold meat, fried for breakfast as a bacon substitute — whenever, in whatever form you boasted, your real tagline, “Never ong confirme”.

In my late primary school years, after becoming too cool for you because any version of you wasn’t as cool as fish fingers, mini pies, those tiny Melrose cheese pyramids, meatballs — or anything else that I could floss with in the school quad — I began to mock you. My older brothers and I began to joke about you being Pinky Pinky or the Dragon Ball Z character Majin Buu, in a sausage casing, because of your hazardously pink colour and our unawareness of what you were made of and where you came from — excuses that we used to all of a sudden justify why you were not good enough for us.

We were unaware that you would fulfil the prophecy, and like those fictional characters we grow up on, you too would spread fear.

I had forgotten how frequently I would visit the snacks table when Sesi Holly hosted the family Christmas lunch. It was the one where she had added you to her potato salad “for the pop of colour” and you featured in cube form on her toothpick kebabs, alternating with cheese and cherry tomatoes, to make a sandwich on a stick.

I no longer cared for the almost bacon-like taste you had when you bathed in a shallow pan of hot oil. There were now healthier, less processed snacks for me to devour on late nights. Is this why you turned on us?

To your good companions in black households, abo atchar, mayonnaise, cheddar cheese, magwinya, dikota, Albany and Sasko, I say tswarellang. The storm is temporary and soon our good friend will return to feed us and turn from her infected ways.