Water and salt.
It is not, unfortunately, Mina and Celentano's song.

It is the only side dish left for corn polenta.

And when even polenta on the market stalls is becoming a luxury, you begin to think that it is time to return to the habits of our fathers and fathers' fathers, who ground corn on the cob in the field behind the house and harvested the seasonal vegetables in their garden.
We have gone from food to pity.

We are no longer capable of waging wars and like Teresa Batista we are tired of wielding machetes and advancing towards the area commander's office.

Water and salt as a side dish, instead of sautéed spinach with tomato sauce or coconut beans, makes us even weaker and more submissive.

Then, like our ancestors, we should know how to recognise the leaves of the field that resist even this extraordinary drought, those of healing plants that give energy, like moringa, or that protect against diseases that attack the hungry, like neem.

We should look for healthy berries, crumble the seeds of the baobab and ask the goats for a glass of milk to melt them into, as was done with the children during the famine of eighty-five.

But today all this is gone. We sold our fields for motorbikes, we moved to cities where there is no public land, leaving the countryside where trees belonged to everyone.

We travel the internet to know how poor and derelict we are.

And we too, like you in Italy, vent on social networks to reiterate that we have been reduced to this state mainly through our own fault. We were not taught the necessary lessons and did not have the culture to understand that we were going too fast down a wrong path.

On closer inspection, however, those who had the tools are doing more or less the same.