Do you enjoy starch?
Ugandans do.
Well, that’s hasty—they eat a lot of starch, I can’t judge
whether they enjoy it.
We had a terrific Ugandan dinner Monday night. The main food is called Matoke, and it is
starchy. Actually it is made from a
local banana much like the plantains you see in Connecticut (which naturally
come from Puerto Rico and Jamaica)
There were some nice stew things with beans and some starchy
vegetables. Then there were several
other root/tuber starchy things. Despite
the starch theme, I do need to add that they were cut into different
shapes.
To be honest, it was all right up my alley. If you have ever had Watkinson’s bean bouillabaisse,
the Ugandan vegetarian dish was very close to that.
You’ve probably heard people at school talking about local
food and sustainable seasonal eating—strawberries in June, apples in October,
Kale in February. In Uganda, almost all
food is local food every day. It’s the
equator, and almost always mild and warm. There is something wonderful that is
fresh, in season and good. Pineapples,
mangoes, passionfruit, bananas. The
other kind of bananas. Papayas,. A different
sort of banana.
In New England, we tried that roughly between 5,000 BC to
about 1950. Blueberries and corn in
July, tomatoes in August: the salad days of summer. Ah, but Connecticut is not on the
equator. So the other 10 months of the
year included leathery smoky dried meat and slowly rotting pumpkins. Later on, after Europeans came, these were
the chowder days, where unfortunate clams mingled with whatever was left
over. I regard these several thousands
of years, comprising all of human history up to the Second World War as a grand
experiment in local eating. A new
experiment, now underway, added elements like cans and refrigerators, banana
boats, and sushi-grade tuna flown in from the Pacific. If I have to participate
in this new experiment, then so be it.
Seriously, though,
I am told that one can eat as the Ugandans do in Connecticut—that we can be
sustainable and local. That’s good news,
because given how unsustainable our current diets are, inevitably we will have
to one day.
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