Four decades ago, in the wake of the drying up of wheaten flour imports into Guyana, a function of our foreign exchange travails and amidst a surfeit of political uproar and public grumbling, a government-invoked ‘buy local’ mantra spawned an outbreak of ‘inventiveness’ that spawned a new cooking culture that gave rise to the pursuits of a new culinary culture resulting in the emergence of a host of substitute ‘flours,’ two of the best-known of which were breadfruit ‘flour’ and rice ‘flour.’ Not only were these alternatives far from popular, they also lacked the sheer versatility required to manufacture the bewildering array of substantive foods and snacks which local consumers created from wheaten flour.
That notwithstanding, they were a response to the ‘make do’ mindset that had gradually – and frankly, only to a limited extent – the emerged as part of the ‘coming to terms’ with the reality that flour, at least for a period of time, was a ‘lost cause.’
Fast forward all those decades…….. the shoe would now appear to be on the foot of our sister CARICOM country, Trinidad and Tobago, where the country’s National Flour Mill announced recently that an increase, apparently a significant one, in the price of wheaten flour, is imminent.
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