Food shortage became a daily fact of life. Sorghum and cassavas were often substituted for rice in people’s diet. Salt, sugar, and MSG were rationed. Fish sauce turned into salt water. Wine was made by fermenting the core of a pineapple. Phan Nhien Hao recalls his student days in the late 80’s: “I was hungry all the time. All the students living in the dormitories were really walking skeletons. Most of the time you could think of nothing but food.”
Nguyen Quoc Chanh remembers: “Before 1975, our family grew sugarcanes. Then my father was intimidated into giving much of his land to the government. They would have taken it away from him anyway. It didn’t take long for the entire country to become destitute. We would eat this yellow sorgum, imported from India, which tasted really rubbery, for months at a time. And once a week we had to hear some idiot stuttering and lisping his way through an incoherent lecture on the glories of Marxism.”

My best guess is that the Vietnamese use all these eating metaphors simply because most of them were farmers and fishermen until very recently, all they did was cultivate food then eat it. Even today, eating is a huge and drawn out passion. Like everybody else, poets would meet to drink, eat and talk for hours on end. Unlike the country’s architecture, painting, sculpture and, frankly, literature, Vietnamese cooking is truly sophisticated and can make a valid claim to being world class. I remember a New York Times critic saying that Saigon’s Bến Thành market was the greatest food market she has ever set foot in, The variety and fragrant or pungent freshness of a Vietnamese market is truly astounding. Just writing about it makes me want to beam myself over there!