My maternal grandfather used to say,

“If we had some bacon, we could have bacon and eggs. If we had some eggs.”

Having assumed this was his own invention, I now find that this goes back at least to Groucho, and perhaps to World War I. And bacon and eggs was only becoming an item around then, thanks to Freud’s nephew Edward Bernays (see here, and here, as well as The Full English).

Li Manshan likes my granddad’s line, identifying the sentiment with his memories of privation. Indeed, the photo above would have been taken in the late 1950s, just when Yanggao people were starving.