Tales of a Failed Foreign Foodie

In Bolivia, they have a proud saying, "No comemos para vivir. Vivimos para comer," which means "We don't eat to live. We live to eat." They love their food and they eat for the enjoyment of it as much as for the sustenance. In sharp contrast, the food in Africa holds no joy for me.

The last time I was in Ghana, I was staying up north and totally at the mercy of the kitchen ladies who cooked for our volunteer group. I'd been a little sick, but everyone gets a little sick. Then one day, I saw the kitchen ladies washing slaughtered chickens in the irrigation ditch water (downstream from the people bathing, bathrooming, and laundering), then they left the raw, wet, half-plucked chickens in a heap outside for the remainder of the sweltering, fly-buzzing afternoon. I'm honestly not a picky eater, and I really do like to try everything when I'm traveling, but in that moment I suddenly reached a limit. My mind told me that I wanted to be truly immersed in the lifestyle there, but my colon was terrified by the sight of those chicken carcasses wavering somewhere between dessication and decomposition under the afternoon sun. Thus, my colon and I stayed in my room that night and had a bagel for supper instead.

When I didn't show up for dinner, the kitchen ladies formed a vigilante search party that came and found me, weilding weapons of guilt and plates of chicken (panic sets in), fufu (balls made of boiled starchy yam paste, with a consistency like Play Dough admixed with Gak) swimming in shit-o (oily red sauce, which really does have a pleasant flavor but enough palm oil to grease all 20 feet of your intestines. And no, I'm not kidding about the name.) They sat and watched me like prison guards to make sure I would eat. Cornered and defeated fair and square, I embraced my Salmonella-laced destiny and ate it.

Their mercenary tactics continued for the remainder of my stay. I could run but I couldn't hide. They'd hunt me down. It was a vanishingly rare victory when I managed to dodge their oily red vendetta. Meals became a scheduled ritualistic torment of calorie intake and silent prayers to the food poisoning gods. ("Please subvert the laws of the universe in order to prevent me from getting dysentery. Amen.")

Whenever I found good food on that trip, it was such a big event that I usually took a picture of it! That happened exactly...twice.

Ground nut soup with goat and fufu

(Good, minus the fufu.)

Red-red (black-eyed beans in a mild curry) with fried plantain

and a plastic pouch of drinking water.

- - - - - - - -

The food on my more recent trip was better. In South Africa, our group went to an awesome traditional restaurant one night (the one with the face painting). We each got something different and then shared it around the table.

Curried crocodile. Looks like pork, tastes like chicken, textured like beef.

Gourd (pumpkin) dumplings in tomato cream sauce, with naan bread.

Sometimes, you just want to skip the jollof rice and starchy pasty banku and the tilapia whose eyes stare back at you as you eat it. Sometimes you want something familiar. That's why, at a seaside restaurant in Cape Coast, Ghana, I ordered chicken nuggets. That's how I found out that "chicken nuggets" there are actually "chicken balls" which are actually a mash of unidentified leftover chicken "bits," veggies, and a heaping scoop of salt, mashed together then breaded and fried.

Exactly what part of the chicken is the nugget, anyway?

But the niftiest new food of the whole trip was this little lovely, which one of our in-country friends picked off a tree on a roadside in Ghana:

Fresh cocoa pod

Fresh raw cocoa is not what I expected at all. It's not that I thought we'd break open the pod and find Hershey bars inside, but I did sort of expect something vaguely chocolate-flavored or at least brownish-colored. Instead, it was full of pulpy white kernels suspended in stickysweet slime. The texture can only be described as alien autopsy, but the flavor was really nice -- kind of banana/pear/mango/mucous.

If you bit into the white kernels, you could see a dark brown paste inside, but it still tasted nothing like chocolate. How or why anyone ever came up with the process of harvesting, fermenting, roasting, sweetening, and somehow 'chocolatizing' those pulpy goobers is beyond my imagination, but I admired their ingenuity and perseverance as I gagged on my cocoa kernel and looked for the nearest place to spit it out.

Delicious.