ABSTRACT
After the KTL mill closed, the sorts of foods that widows, their worker husbands, and their children had become accustomed to eat became too expensive. Some resorted to farming to grow food crops on plots in the outskirts of Kaduna, while others stopped eating many types of food and reduced the number of times they would eat in a day. After their husbands’ deaths, many widows and their children experienced what is referred to as food insecurity—lack of food or as food poverty—which relates to their earlier experiences of eating in their home villages and to subsistence farming. Some widows subsequently travelled to the outskirts of the city to rent farm plots while others travelled back to their home villages in order to grow food for themselves and their families. Widows’ memories of farming with their husbands suggest another aspect of food, namely the ways by which food—growing, buying, selling, preparing, and consuming it—comes to characterize nostalgic memories of the past. These memories of the dead, which contrast with their present situation in Kaduna, characterized for many by poverty and hunger, give widows strength to continue in the absence of their husbands.
