Value meals

Wednesday, 25 August 2010

Although I was bothered by the dearth of food at my home stay, I tried to give my family the benefit of the doubt. With 13 kids (11 of them age 10 and under) and eight or 10 adults, there were more mouths to feed than in any other host family. My family was middle class, to be sure. They had a nice house and a laptop, digital camera, and camcorder – all things that most Cameroonians can’t boast. Still, 20 to 25 people are a lot.

One night in the pantry room, my cousin had me help dole out that night’s provisions. She and I scooped rice, sauce, and bits of fish into sundry sizes of bowls. It was a mathematical challenge each day, she said, to figure out how to ration what was available. As the kids crowded the doorway, she’d hand one a big dish and say, “You, take this to share with your mother.” To one of the little ones, she’d give a smaller bowl, saying, “You, go and share this with your sisters,” and so on. Suddenly, I had a lot more compassion for their alimentary situation. And since I’d learned the joys of eating street food, I hadn’t lacked any good thing. Ca va aller (loosely: However it goes, it goes, and that’s OK).

I knew my post had a good market every day, and soon, I would be cooking for myself – all the non-starch, nutrition-packed, fresh vegetables I wanted. I feel fortunate to have been placed in a town with such availability. Some volunteers’ villages have market day only once or twice a week, and even then, they can often find only onions and tomatoes. At my market, I can buy dry beans, peanut paste, fresh herbs and spices, tomatoes, peppers, mushrooms, cabbage, eggplant, mandarins, occasionally cucumbers and carrots, and a plethora of grassy and leafy greens. Mango, avocado, pineapple, and prune season is over, but now is the time for papayas and passion fruit. Passion fruit, I’ve learned, is aptly named. I’ve never ogled any other fruit with such adoration; its taste is like ambrosia.

If I wanted, I could also buy just about any meat I liked. I was never a big chicken fan in the US, but here, it just tastes better, somehow. You can choose your live chicken at the market, and if you pay extra, the market mommy will kill it for you. There’s also beef, pork, goat, mutton, and sundry bush meats I have yet to try. I hear porcupig (sp.?) is really good. It’s like a porcupine, but a lot smaller and lankier. I haven’t bought raw meat. Seeing it bake in the equatorial heat with scores of flies sunning themselves on the great, red slabs (or matted fur) is a real turn off. But I have enjoyed soya – grilled meat on a stick – and a type of beef jerky that’s made by drying thin sheets of meat in the sun. When I get my teaching and school life more organized, I hope to tackle meat preparation in my own kitchen.

I didn’t eat a lot of meat in the States when I lived on my own because raising animals for food is such a strain on the environment, and we Americans are so far removed from the raw realities of factory farming and animal slaughter. Here, there are no neat, cellophane packages of defatted, deveined cutlets of meat. There are no factory farms. The cattle munch not grain but grass, as ruminant beasts were made to do. And if I’m going to eat meat at all, I feel better that, although I haven’t slain any animals on my own, I’ve at least withstood having to witness their being led to slaughter.

I like being close to my food. It makes me understand the real value and real cost of getting a meal to my plate. And I like how people treat meat here the way New York Times food columnist Mark Bittman has implored Americans to do: as treasure. Meat is costly – to the environment and to people’s pocketbooks. In Cameroon, it’s never the main event in a meal. With your rice and sauce, you usually get just one morsel of meat that’s meant to be savored. I think that is as it should be.