Food For Thought

One of the things I was most uncertain about when coming to Ghana this semester was the food.  What would it taste like?  How spicy would it be?  Would I like it at all?  My friends and family would agree that I am not the most adventurous person when it comes to eating new things.  At least, that’s what I used to be like.  Now, here I am, three weeks away from leaving and deep in data analysis centered almost completely around food; food I wasn’t even sure I’d like.  We’re lucky to be able to have good, authentically Ghanaian meals every night of the week, instead of having them be a once-in-a-while treat.  When Charity turned to me one night earlier this week and asked what my favorite meal was, I was stumped.  In the rice category, there’s the always-reliable steamed rice with egg stew (tomato-based stew with vegetables and egg in it), or the increasingly spicy jollof rice with chicken that is nearly impossible to finish because it is so filling and often leaves me thinking a fire has started in my mouth.  Boiled yams were frequently present for the first few months here-heaping egg stew on top of the dry, starchy root pieces makes for a very heavy but satisfying meal.  The one meal we are actually allowed to “help” cook is fried yams, as we take turns sitting by the pot of oil outside and stir the yams.  Besides yams, plantains have also showed up in our dinners more often in recent weeks-we can tell that they have come into season more than they were initially.  Basic boiled plantains offer a sweeter alternative to yams as a partner to egg stew, and fried plantains for kele wele or red-red are delicious!  Kele wele is plantains with groundnuts (peanuts) and red-red is plantains with beans.  We also took red-red with gari yesterday, which is powdered cassava.  Cassava is very similar to yams, and tastes very much like a potato.  Gari can be mixed with a variety of foods-many of the kindergarten students participating in my study eat it mixed with sugar and water.  Then there’s kenke, banku, and fufu.  I can only imagine how much kenke Charity sells at her food stand at the hospital, because every night she sits with her daughter Vale and a variety of other women around huge bowls of kenke dough, wrapping individual portions in corn husks.  This is another task we are invited to participate in from time to time, but the sheer volume of work to be done every night still stretches over many hours, and even our clumsy help does contribute to finishing.  Kenke is fermented corn dough, and is probably the food item that has been the hardest for me to become acclimated to-the rough, gritty texture and sour taste may have something to do with that-but even kenke is growing on me.  Banku is another one that didn’t appeal to me the first time around, but now is one of my favorite meals.  Banku is corn and cassava dough mixed together into a smooth consistency and eaten with okra stew.  Okra stew is very slimy, and you eat this whole combination with your hands, grabbing off a piece of the banku and scooping the soup up with it into your mouth before the whole thing falls back into the bowl.  It’s also not chewed, just swallowed whole.  Lastly, there’s fufu, which is plantain and cassava pounded together to form a sticky doughy ball that is eaten like banku, but usually with a spicy tomato soup, not okra stew.  We have taken our turns pounding fufu, but it is really difficult and requires a lot of muscle!  I’m much better at eating it-it is so delicious!  I wish we could have it more often, but fufu is usually only eaten for lunch, not dinner, because it is so heavy.  I find this to be incredibly ironic, since all of the foods we eat are very heavy, but for some reason a distinction is made about fufu and red-red (because it has beans in it); they shouldn’t be taken for dinner. 

The fact that these foods are part of my everyday life here in Dodowa lends a valuable context to my research.  Since I’m familiar with and regularly eat many of the same foods that the study subjects discuss, I can understand what people are saying on a much deeper level.  Whether I observed students coming into their classroom with lunches of rice and beans, or heard from a mother how she knows she needs to provide more fruits and vegetables instead of solely yams and banku, I could relate what they said to what I knew about the food too.  When school cooks and food sellers described their 3 AM wake-up to start preparing all of the food they serve, I know I could picture all of the work that goes into it accurately after seeing Charity and Vale labor with kenke, banku, and fufu every night.  I’m lucky enough to be able to buy apples and oranges from local street sellers, but as nearly every parent cited in their interview, the 1 cedi (50 cent) cost of an apple or 20 peswa (10 cent) cost of an orange is too expensive to be able to regularly provide, especially when there are 3 or more children in the family.  The stories that can be told through qualitative research are a large part of why I have loved doing this kind of research so much, and being able to put these stories into context with even more background knowledge and mental images and experiences of my own is something I value greatly.