CHARMAIN NAIDOO: How 'sugar' has become a rude word
'What is clear is that sugar is out of fashion. Not just that. It’s vilified as an addictive killer and the new fad is to cut it from one’s diet altogether'
My grandpa, Frank Sewlall Maharaj, was a mechanic. His mocca hands were covered with patches of pale pink – Vitiligo it’s called, where there is a loss of pigment in the skin – and a film of brown/black. The oil from the engines he took apart and put back together again had seeped into those calloused hands, the thick wodges of squidgy black stuff that he smeared onto the turning parts under the bonnet had joined with the pink and brown bits to add its own pigment, an indeterminate colour that is at once dark, and not. Some people called my grandpa a grease monkey; it annoyed him. He thought it a pejorative term.Disrespectful, he’d say, about the noble art of work. Grandpa thought work, all work, noble. Work gave people a sense of their place in the world, a sense of importance and of belonging. But Granny doesn’t work, we’d say. Then he’d take us by the hand to the rickety old wooden table on the stoep and show us the well-worn stone slab with a dent where Granny used the large rou...
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