more thoughts about food

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.