World Wise Schools program, Letter #2
Food

December, 1997

One of my greater fears in life was realized yesterday. While making an omelette, I cracked an egg into a bowl and, mixed in with yolk and egg-white, was the beginnings of a tiny chick. Gross, right? Well the point of this wasn't to gross you out (though I probably did that, too!), but rather to show you how drastically different food is here in Africa.

In the U.S., it's highly unlikely that chick would have found its way to my breakfast table. Your eggs are laid by rows upon rows of caged egg-laying hens. Those hens are specially bred and are fed a special diet so that they'll produce good eggs. The resulting eggs are tested, sorted, packaged, and shipped. You'll find them on your supermarket shelf in those cute little boxes, stamped with an expiration date.

Here, things work quite a bit differently. The hen that laid my egg spent its life scratching for food scraps around some thatched huts in a family compound. When the family found the egg, they set it aside for market day. On Sunday (the day of the market), the mother of the house gathered up all the eggs, plus perhaps some onions and eggplant from the garden and tied it all into a bundle which she carried on her head the 3 miles in town. She sold small eggs for about 10 cents, larger for 15 cents. Inspection, if I was lucky (and I wasn't) would have consisted of her tapping the egg to listen for a hollow sound. At home, I tested the eggs for freshness by seeing if it would float in water. I guarded myself against food poisoning, at least if not would-be chicks.

But it's not just eggs that are different here. A lot of work goes into stocking your supermarket with grapefruit and Twinkies. First, the food has to be grown. Then someone inspects it to make sure that it's good. Processed food (like Twinkies) is sent to the factory to be made. Then it needs to get to the store, and that's what all those big trucks on the highway are for. The store sells it and we eat it. It's not quite like that here.

Growing food

Eighty percent of Guineans are agricultural workers and here is what that means: Everybody is out working in the family's fields to produce a list of food which wouldn't even fill a quarter of your average supermarket. From the fields come rice, millet, cassava, manioc, farina, peanuts, and sweet potatoes. Smaller gardens produce a few vegetables such as onions, eggplant, and cucumbers, plus perhaps eggs and chicken. Milk and beef can be found on occasion, as well as goat and wild boar. Manios leaves make a tasty sauce. And there's lots of fish from the river. Seasonal fruit is abundant. Last month was guava season. Now it's bananas, papayas, and oranges. In May we'll get mangoes.

There are no employees. Everyone does what they can and they get by. My friend Sembaya took me out to his rice field last month. Rice plants here look a lot like wheat -- long waving stems with grain on top. We worked for a few hours cutting bundles of rice on the side of a hill dotted with palm trees. After a while his first wife (he has two) brought us lunch. Surprise! Rice for lunch! As we ate, she started cutting rice herself. Sembaya told me that last week my neighbor's wife, who has no fields, came to help him. I know that he will probably do something for her in return. And I also know that if something happened to his rice harvest (fire, insects, etc.), his family might not have enough to eat this year. When he's not working in his fields, an hour from town, he works in the village as a tailor. It's not an easy life. Here there is no California, exporting food by the ton. You grow what you eat, and you eat what you grow. There are no tax cuts for farmers, and no piped water.

There are also no factories turning peanuts into peanut butter (they do it by hand and it's so good), or goodness-knows-what into Kraft Macaroni & Cheese. Most food comes straight from the fields into the cook-pot. What little processed food is available in the little stores is relatively expensive and 100% imported. Among these: fake cheese, powdered and tinned milk, cooking oil, sardines, sugar, and cookies. In the bigger towns you can get some really fancy stuff: hot chocolate, real cheese, real chocolate, canned food, Coca Cola. OK, now sit back and imagine putting together meals every day with just the above ingredients. I'll tell you, I've been struggling with food fantasies, mostly centered around bagels, cream cheese, and coffee.

On the other hand, what my diet lacks in variety, it almost makes up in quality. My food is fresh, hand processed and with no chemicals added. Even the rice is good and sweet. I sometimes just eat it plain.

Inspecting Food

We have all sorts of handy tips in our Peace Corps Cookbook to deal with this issue. To get rocks out of the market rice, swish rice and water around in a bowl and slooowwwllly pour it into another container. The rocks will stay in the bottom of the first bowl. Home-made fridge: immerse food in water in a ceramic jug. To preserve meat, put it in a mixture of soy sauce and wine. Even with such precautions, we still get sick. Africans get sick, too. However, I would guess that most of our sicknesses are not because of uninspected food, but rather because of food that has gone bad because we have no way to keep it cold, or vegetables that weren't washed well. And to tell the truth, we Peace Corps volunteers get sick much more than do the Africans. The Africans are used to it. Our American digestive systems are wimpy.

And, really, that would-be chick didn't hurt anything...except my appetite.

Getting food from here to there

Guinea has no interstate trucking lines. In fact, the roads that are here are terrible. What we eat is generally grown next door. It's rather maddening, because my friend 60 miles away has pineapples, but I have none and no way to get any. Locally grown = locally sold, which really cuts down on the possibilities of what to cook for dinner. It also means it's more difficult to get a balanced diet. However, everything I eat is absolutely fresh -- no wax-coated cucumbers or green-peppers for me!

They do manage to transport the basic processed-food items, so I'm not certain why the same isn't true for vegetables and fruits. Most likely because there are no large farms producing mass quantities to ship across country. And refrigerated trucks don't exist, either.

Selling food

The African market is a sight to behold. Try to find a picture somewhere. It is a hodge-podge of rickety wooden stalls and straw mats, with everything laid out to be seen: plastic shoes, used clothing, vegetables, small bags of iced kool-aid, half-gourds of milk, hardware, fried bread, plastic buckets, and cloth. Weaving through the maze of stalls are hundreds of talking, yelling Guineans, bargaining for prices and trying to make a sale. The air is exciting, dusty and colorful.

But in my dreams I am in the cool whiteness of Shop & Save where, amidst the sleepy sounds of musak and bleary-eyed clerks, I calmly reach for a pack of Pringles, which has the price clearly marked on the side.

But no such sterility here. Here I approach the woman who grew the onions or the eggs. I negotiate a price with her. I put them in my bag. She doesn't provide plastic sacks.

In truth, supermarkets would probably ruin the structure of Guinean life as we know it. Everything happens here on market day. And it is very satisfying to put money in the hands of the person who grew it. There are no middlemen and food is cheaper.

Let's eat!

What it all comes down to is putting food in your mouth. Eating here is truly a joy. The food is really good. So what do I eat every day? Here's a sample:

Breakfast. Hot cocoa and cereal with powdered milk. The cereal is imported, and costs me about a day's salary. I may have a banana, as well.

Lunch. My neighbor cooks me rice and sauce. There are three basic types of sauce -- soup, leaf, and peanut. Soup sauce is a thin tomato sauce with fish and hot pepper mixed in. Leaf sauce is a thick spinach-like mixture made from manioc or sweet-potato leaves. Peanut sauce is like a thin peppery peanut butter. You put the sauce on the rice and mix it together until the rice is lightly coated. I prefer the leaf sauce, because it has a lot of vitamins. I eat with a spoon, but my neighbors eat with their hands, forming the rice into little balls in their palms and half-licking it off their palms. I've eaten with my hands several times, and I actually rather enjoy it except that it's hard not to burn your fingers or spill rice down your shirt.

Dinner. If nobody sends me rice (which they often do, as a gesture of respect), then I get to cook my favourite American dish. So far, I've made a really nice tomato and basil soup, spaghetti, french fries, stewed eggplant, and fish with ginger sauce. If I've been to town recently, I might have ingredients for a fresh salad. It all depends on what I have around.

What I would like in my food-life is a compromise between American and African styles. There's not enough variety here in Africa to suit my tastes. It's difficult to get enough nutrients. I see a lot of malnourished children, and many pregnant women are anemic (they don't get enough iron). However, in the U.S., there's really more variety than we need. And keeping supermarkets stocked with that many items makes them more expensive. Here food is cheaper. And as I keep saying, the food is fresher. You have not tasted a pineapple until you've had it the day it was picked. Or an egg the day it was laid. Hold the chick, please.