Food

Now for those of you who know me, I have never been a big eater. I went into my African experience with the mindset that I was just going to eat whatever was given me and make the best of it. I've had plenty of experience with that (I was force-fed until high school when my parents finally admitted defeat) so I didn't expect it to be a big deal.

Why oh why, then, did I spend the last month and half literally DREAMING about food? The absolute worst dream took place in a kitchen where every single square inch of counter space was covered with cookies and bars, so fresh out of the oven they were all still on cookies sheets. I grabbed a plate and started stacking them by the handfulls. But every time I tried to get to the ones with butterscotch chips, still soft and warm on top of the stove, something or someone would distract me. I stacked every other kind of cookie higher and higher on my plate from all ends of the kitchen, but the ones with the butterscotch chips were always .... just ... out ... of ... reach ...

It's enough to make you wake up in a cold sweat.

And why was a person who has never really been that into food that desperate for a friggin' cookie? I ate starch, and only starch, for about three months.

I must qualify this by saying that I was never underfed or in any way deprived of food. In fact, I actually came home weighing more than when I left (which is actually the most I have ever weighed in my life). I think most people would consider it ironic to go to a continent so often conotated with starvation and come home heftier. But in actuality, my body was trying to hang on to everything that came into it and store it as reserves because it was so kerflummexed about what the heck I was feeding it that it didn't know when or if conditions would improve.

There is not a lot of variety in the East African diet. There is also no flavor. Please realize that I am Midwestern, so for me to say no flavor, I really mean no flavor.

In Maseno, I would walk into the dining hall promptly at seven each morning to find a loaf of unsliced bread sitting at the mzungu table. The first person there would slice 'er up and we would each choke down enough to last us to lunch. Homemade bread is actually my favorite food, but I have yet to have any in the over four months since I've been home, if that gives you an idea of how monotonous this is. We Americans are spoiled (spoiled!) by variety.

With our bread we had the option of some unprocessed peanut butter (like soup at the top of the jar and in chunks hard enough to knock someone out at the bottom), some jam sugary enough to make you go diabetic inside of an hour, or the ever popular Blue Band butter substitute which we affectionately referred to as Grease. That is how it looked (though they did manage to find a somewhat yellowish food coloring to put in it), tasted, and felt on the way down. Someone at some point bougt a bottle of honey in Kisumu that was promptly inhabited by ants, which we kept on the table for entertainment purposes.

Lunch would be rice and beans or rice and super dry Kenyan corn (maize) or a few whole fish, eyes and bones included. If it wasn't rice, it was plain boiled potato. I have always hated potatoes in this form and I swear to never eat them again as long as I live.

I don't eat meat so on the fish days I would pull out the communal bottle of hot sauce purchased in Kisumu for my plain rice or potatoes. For dinner we would at least usually get some type of vegetable similar to collards to put on the rice. It sorted of tasted like ... something.

I would feel an absolute emotional defeat when they brought out the bananas - cooked. Cooked bananas taste exactly like and have the same texture of plain potates. If we wanted fruit we could go buy it ourselves. If we wanted something sweet (besides the diabetic coma-inducing jam) we visited Ruth's shop across the street and bought some mandazi (fried bread like a non-sweet donut).

That being said, there are some things I miss. Ruth's mandazi, which I started purchasing in lieu of bread and grease for breakfast while they were still hot, were the only thing that got me through. It gave me enough fat to finally stop craving other foods for a few hours. Sometimes we had fried cabbage with our rice and I've actually ventured to make that a few times since I've been home (and people, I don't cook).

I miss the sweet little bananas I would buy on the street every day while sitting at my book stand. They were about the same length as an adult finger and wonderful. Toward the end of my stay, the avocados were ripe and we would buy a few and some tomates, bring them back and mash them up with our hot sauce and make some darn good guacamole. Bananas, avocados, papaya - the stuff we get here is just quite frankly inferior.

Despite all those small goodies, my body was literally starving (despite the weight gain) from the almost complete absence of fat in my diet. Since I don't eat meat and dairy there pretty much doesn't exist, I was really starting to feel the effects.

On the way home from the airport, despite the fact that I had been travelling for three days straight without a change of underwear or a shower, my dad brought me straight to El Loro where I had the best cheese quesadilla of my life.