That R20 pensioner’s diet may come in handy 32 years later
THERE’S something about R20 that strikes a note, as it were, with pensioners.
The most recent manifestation of this was the offer by a Durban grandmother to donate R20 a month (the remaining R20 she had left after paying all her other expenses) to help a Free State medical student through her studies after having been raped by an uncle and witnessed her father beating her mother to death.
I’m sure the traumatised student was suitably grateful.
Perhaps Dr Lapa Munnik, the then minister of health, welfare and pensions, was equally moved by the plight of pensioners 32 years ago when he issued a R20-a-month diet that he claimed would keep the elderly in good health if they stuck to it.
Admittedly you could buy a bit more with R20 then than you can now. The other evening a Cape Town street beggar specified he wanted R20 and when I asked him why he wanted so much he explained you couldn’t buy much for less. “I gotta cover my expenses.”
He was far too young to be a pensioner, but maybe he recognised me as one. Anyway, I almost gave him R20 for his chutzpah.
In 1981 the rand was worth 1.4 US dollars. Advertised in a 1981 Cape Times that I managed to dig up were a six-piece lounge suite for R189, woollen blankets for R3.99, stewing lamb for R1.60/kg, beef sausage at R2.28/kg, and if you wanted to eat out, a lasagne would set you back R2.60.
The paper also carried this correction: “A report in the Cape Times on January 21 said that Dr DG Nelson, the state veterinarian in Cape Town, was at the abattoir on the day that one of the workers kissed an ox that was alleged to be rabid. Dr Nelson was not there that day.”
It had nothing to do with the price of food, but perhaps older readers should be reassured that Dr Nelson, had he been present, would never have put up with the kissing of rabid oxen.
To return to the subject in hand.
Even in 1981 R20 seemed a ridiculously small amount to feed a pensioner for a whole month and, as is my wont, I poked fun at the idea in a column. Dr Munnik responded by sending me a 12page outline of the diet, with itemised costs, daily menus and recipes.
His covering letter said, among other things: “I always enjoy your sense of humour and I am sure that a good health diet could sharpen even this commendable attribute of yours.”
One day’s food came to 76 cents. It included skim-milk powder, meat, fish, eggs or cheese, soybean products or peanut butter, fresh vegetables and fruit, margarine, brown bread, cereal, sugar, jam, coffee and tea, salt, and spices or flavourings, each measured out in grams.
It was intended, said the heading, “for a woman of 60 years and over, of average height and weight, who does light work”.
Fortunately I never had occasion to resort to the diet myself, and facetiously wrote that on R20 a month I could have a beer with every meal if I missed out breakfast and lunch and didn’t have anything to eat with my dinner. On R20 I could also travel by train from Claremont to Cape Town and return each day for a whole month, so long as I gave up eating during that period.
But I’ve kept the diet all these years just in case things go from bad to worse. With luck, and by cutting out a few of the items listed above, I might manage on R20 a day.