Food

Food, Glorious Food!

One shares food not words. ~ Somali Proverb

 

Nosh! Tucker! Grub! Everybody loves food. Everyone I know, anyway.

November is World Vegan Month and this year I took the vegan pledge. I have dallied with veganism. I say dallied because pieces of cheese still magically found their way into my mouth and I devoured several dainty cakes at an afternoon tea. Apart from that, I was vegan this month. Oh, and there was a little bit of whipped cream on a scone, as well.

I’ve been vegetarian for over 20 years and so I found it easy to be virtually vegan. But this got me wondering about how we think about food. It would need an encyclopedic blog post to list every known faddish diet embarked on over the decades. I’m guilty of partaking in a few. Anyone remember the cabbage soup diet? What is the craziest food plan you have followed?

We’ve become food obsessed. Food channels. Food diaries. ‘Food porn’. Do we live to eat or eat to live?

Of course, some of the best food that you consume is when you’re travelling. I like the insight that you get, into the people and the place, when you stay with friends rather than at a hotel. Is dining a formal affair or casual? Early or late? Tapas or large plates? Men and women together or apart? How people eat, might just reveal a lot about a culture.

In Ethiopia we tried njera for the first time. It’s made from fermented teff flour, something only produced there. If you have never eaten it, it looks like a huge pancake, with neatly arranged blobs of vegetables about the place. Imagine a traditional artist’s palette. All were very undecided about this slightly spongy, damp pancake. Yet over time I have come to love njera. In Nairobi we were fortunate to have an Eritrean restaurant at the top of our street and we used to walk there every week to share njera. For me, the best plates of food are usually shared.

My favourite breakfast, hands down, is served at the Galle Face Hotel, a crumbling old dame, which offers fading, colonial charm in spades. It’s in Colombo, Sri Lanka and looks out over the Indian Ocean.

When you go to breakfast, you walk down a small flight of stairs and turn right for cornflakes and muffins or go left for fresh hoppers, sambal, curries, roti, eggs and shredded coconut. Always turn left! We’ve gone back several times for that view and those hoppers!

In Zambia, cheese was a big deal for us. In our small, provincial town there was just one budget supermarket. The only cheese being sold there was processed, the stuff that tastes like you are chewing someone’s shoe.

On each and every trip through the capital, Lusaka, we would buy fresh cheese. We would refrigerate it at the backpackers until the very last moment before leaving for the bus.  Then our precious fromage would be transported, wrapped in pieces of newspaper on the coach journey back to Zambia’s N.W province, an odyssey that would take anything between 9 -12 hours, bouncing over pot holes. When we got back to our house, we would diligently cut our treasured cheese into portions and freeze.

So imagine our reaction when we invited a colleague to lunch and he snubbed our cheese! My emmental was officially offended! We offered our guest fresh pasta, cooked with a quarter of our prized cheese stash. He ate it but looked mildly unimpressed. When I asked if I could get him anything else he politely asked, “do you have any nshima?”

It took me a while to understand the appeal of nshima. It’s made from a lengthy process of drying maize, refining it at a mill until it’s like a fine powder and then boiling it with water until becomes a big, hot, pliable ‘cake’. It looks a bit like mashed potato. It takes on the flavor of whatever you serve it with.

Ten years after we had moved to Zambia, we made a nostalgic trip back. We re-visited the immensely beautiful Victoria Falls, the mighty ‘Mosi Oa Tunya’ or ‘Smoke that thunders’. It’s a place we can never tire of.

We stayed at the hotel next to the falls and requested a room at the back, where you can hear the whoosh and roar of the Zambezi cascading over the edge. It’s special place. And on our first night back, we didn’t order room service or go out to a fancy restaurant. I made a beeline for the nshima station. It was hidden around a corner from the main buffet, for the handful of Zambian guests staying at the hotel.

I called a waiter over and requested a finger bowl. He looked a little surprised at my request but attentively returned with the bowl of warm water, plus soap and a small towel. I rolled up my sleeves, washed my hands and dived in, balling up the nshima and forming a little ‘spoon’ with my thumb. I felt several pairs of eyes on me, all intriqued at the somewhat strange behavior of this ‘mzungu’. After a little while, the restaurant manager came over to introduce himself and asked “how are you enjoying the nshima Madam?” We explained that we used to live in Zambia and the conversation flowed. We ranted about politics, especially Zimbabwe’s Mugabe, we discussed the kwacha* and praised the Zambian President at the time, Mwanawasa.

That was the tastiest bowl of nshima I had ever eaten. But it wasn’t about the flavour. That bowl of food transported me to a time in our life when we enjoyed a particular kind of freedom, working across the province and travelling all over Southern Africa. Our life was simple. We appreciated space, the red earth, time with special friends, a tiny ginger and white cat and the smell of the first rains.

I savoured all of that, in that unpretentious steaming bowl of nshima.

Food can transport us back to a person, a place, a time. I recall a powerful documentary exhibit at the Kigale Genocide Memorial in Rwanda. A man who survived, shared his story. He told how he would remember his late mother every time he saw a humble plate of fresh, orange slices. That was his childhood memory; the smell, the colour, the taste of that fruit. Every time, it took him back to her.

We started this year at The Test Kitchen, a fantastic place rated the Best Restaurant in Africa. It’s in the Mother City. I can remember leaving the restaurant that day thinking, imagine if every day was that decadent, that delicious, that delectable?

But then we’ve also eaten street food at Hawker centres in S. E Asia which was off the scale tasty; Scrumptious fried banana fritters in Singapore, mouthwatering vegetable tempura in Penang, lip-smacking spring rolls by the Sarawak river in Borneo. I’d go back for more!

Eating can be such an occasion.  So why do we so often rush what we eat? Why do we gobble lunches at our desks at work? When did we allow the absolute pleasure to be taken out of eating?

Today many people around the world will be celebrating thanksgiving. And we should give thanks for our food and for each other. What we eat is pretty important and our health usually stems comes from the food that we consume.

I’m not sure if we need to count the calories or the carbs. Personally I don’t really care. But I do know that we are lucky if we have lots of food in our bellies and our homes. We are really lucky if it’s good food, organic and not processed.

Food equals comfort for many, in various guises. And there may be nothing better than an exceptional meal shared with extraordinary people. Enjoy!

 

* Zambian currency

 

 

© Maggie M / Mother City Time