Merrily I chomp along

I have gotten to try a variety of new foods here. I am so blessed to have had these opportunities as the general food situation in Botswana is “not enough”. The majority of families don’t have enough food. Many children at the daycare don’t have a meal when they go home at 2 or before they come in the morning.

The mother of one of the kids at the daycare volunteers and helps at the daycare each day. When we were making flowers with the kids, she mentioned that Rose was the name of her late sister. I asked what the cause of her sister’s death was, she casually answered “malnutrition”.

Some people do have some food in Botswana and many of those that do have beef. Oh the beef. Beef is a major product in Botswana and cattle can be spotted everywhere, most frequently in or slowly sauntering across the road. Some company donates meat to the daycare, so the children eat it. The family I am staying with also eats a ton of beef. Tshidi asked what I eat most of at home, “chicken or beef or?” I admitted that I don’t cook much meat for myself. She started at me blankly and after a moment responded “oh, so you eat a lot of chicken?”

The family I live with cooks nearly every night and I think that their food is fairly representative of the food that the middle class eats. Food that I have had outside their home has also indicated that their habits are representative. Tshidi’s family typically eats a meat, a starch, and a vegetable. In the meals that I have had with them so far the meat has been one of chicken, goat, or any part of a cow. The veggie was mashed butternut squash (this is hugely popular) or rape. The starch has been pappa (maize I think), sorghum, or rice. Pappa reminds me of grits, if they were much drier and so clumpy that they would stand on their own. Sorghum is like brown pappa that tastes a bit more like whole wheat. Unless they are eating rice, they eat with their hands and use the pappa or sorghum to clump up the veggies and meat. It also seems to be popular to have a chicken and potato like stew/curry with rice.

It was really nice to finally try sorghum, even if I don’t take a package home. Pappa is nice only in its ability to pick up the flavor of whatever you are eating it with. I was surprised by how dissimilar goat is to lamb; it is more chewy, stringy, and smoky rather than smooth in flavor.

The most adventurous thing that I have tried was ox tail. Batswana cut up the entire animal and cook up every single piece. Even at restaurants you get all kinds of funky bones in your meal and as you gnaw away at them you begin to wonder if there is any meat on them. The ox tail was pretty nasty. I tried to politely finish the piece they gave me, but my bone wasn’t nearly as clean as theirs was. There is NO elegant way to gnaw away at the ox tail. I’m not even sure what we were eating as it didn’t seem to have a lot of meat. It was really difficult to note any experience beyond the gooey brown gelatinous case the bone was in. That part was probably supposed to be tasty...

Other adventurous trials included fruit chutney flavored potato chips. How could one resist? And how would one guess that they taste so good! I couldn’t imagine what they could taste like. I did one of my favorite travel activities – I went to the grocery store. It’s shameful to enjoy a grocery store so much, but it’s like a treasure hunt to find all the foods that are different to what I have in the States. The particular run I went on the other day was for junk food. The haul included:
Maize potato chips
Spicey Mexican flavored and fruit chutney flavored potato chips
Some other maize snack
A beautiful chocolate and rice flake blob
A fruit juice and milk drink (very lovely)
A very viscous, yet clumpy, drink made from maize (maize milk?)

I also made a trip to the liquor store. Botswana manufactures next to nothing, but they have like 6 varieties of beer. They also have bottled gin and tonics. There were quite a few hard liquors from South Africa that I have never seen before (including mint flavored), but I didn’t think I could hold those.

To complete the autopsy of my consumption thus far, we must cover chocolate. The chocolate is terrible. The cocoa content is not mentioned on a package of any chocolate bar here. Perhaps this is because they don’t have any cocoa in them and they would better be referred to as “chocolate flavored candy” than proper chocolate. The bars taste like they are made with more sugar and different kind of fat or milk solid than Dove or Belgian chocolate. Needless to say, this issue results in a bit of chocolate withdrawal. The most lovely chocolate that I have been able to find is the mass of cornflakes and chocolate, which is similar to the birds nests that we used to make for Easter or the spiders at Halloween.

The cakes and sweets here have done nothing to compensate for poor chocolate. The sweets are closer to sweet breads than cakes. Perhaps this is an effect of Botswana being so dry and far from a natural sugar source? Maybe sweets have just not been developed as part of their cuisine the way beef has.

Luckily, and as expected, the food is much better than the tour books indicated. The local food is tasty. The pseudo British ex-pat food or anything you can find at one of the lodges is 3 times as expensive and pretty nasty. I do miss chocolate though.