IDDS 2011 - Food

The Ghanaian diet is very different from what I am used to in East Africa. Although both rely heavily on starches alongside vegetables cooked in oil, the food in Ghana wound up being much heavier. Part of it is that cassava and yams are pretty dense, and part of it is that I think we were eating a lot more palm oil in Ghana, while in East Africa, the concentration of soybean oil tends to be somewhat lower.

Now, if it were up to me, we would eat nothing but fruit the whole time we were there, since the mangoes and pineapples and avocadoes and watermelons were absolutely divine (bananas, oranges and papaya were more hit or miss). However, we did have quite an assortment of foods. My favorite meal is red-red, which is cowpeas in tomato sauce (and lots of palm oil) served alongside fried plantains. There weren't a whole lot of pulses (as in peas and beans) on offer, so I was definitely excited when we had red-red. Another favorite was palava, usually served alongside boiled yams. Palava (apparently also called green-green) uses a specific leaf (maybe pumpkin) and its fried with some mashed up agouti seeds (kinda like pumpkin seeds) which always gave the appearance of having scrambled egg in the dish, even though it was in fact vegan-safe.

One of the more difficult meals was groundnut stew, which was served with fufu (mashed cassava) and was just not as good as I remembered it being on previous meals. I generally stayed away from banku, which is similar to ugali that I often eat in East Africa, only this is fermented (there was also something called nsiho which was almost the same as ugali, except it was salted). I also struggled a bit with some of the vegetarian meals, which were mostly tomato sauce with palm oil and a small amount of onions and green peppers. I ate the vegetarian meals quite a bit of the time, though I did make sure to grab fish meals when I could while we were on the Volta river. There was one day where we ordered shrimp, which were rather small and one of the Ghanaians yelled at someone for trying to remove the shell and the legs "If you do that, there won't be anything left!" Oh, and I was also persuaded to try "coat". It's basically cooked leather. And unsurprisingly, it's about as pleasant as you would expect eating leather to be. We also ate lots and lots of rice, much of the time it was prepared as jollof rice, which involves cooking it in oil, spices and tomato sauce. Some days I was thrilled to have jollof rice, while other days I was not so enthusiastic.

We had a lot of prepared meals on campus at the cafeteria. After a couple of days, I was really excited every time that I wasn't eating the cafeteria food. They were very receptive to our requests, but in general, it was just so much oil. There was also a woman who would bring scones or meat/veggie pies for breakfast, and those were always a treat. When we were working in Suame, we would order lunches from a nearby cafe most days, which I preferred to the cafeteria (though I think there were several people who preferred the cafeteria food). In the village, our hosts cooked most of our meals for us (absolutely delicious), and we would make sure to grab some kosi (a delicious cowpea batter deep fried and served with spices) and ballfloat (large spherical pieces of dough, fried up like doughnuts), which always gave us all the energy that we needed for the day. Rose from Tanzania commented that if Tanzanians ate these kinds of foods, maybe they'd be as strong as the Ghanaians. The Ghanaians all laughed at that.

My diet actually consisted of quite a lot of yogurt, which we could buy from the shop in the dorm. It was thin enough to drink and much sweeter than any non-frozen yogurt I've ever had. I also drank an unhealthy amount of soda (as usual), and Coke had a much stronger market presence than Pepsi. The interesting part was that the three flavors of Fanta that they had in Ghana were orange (I assume everywhere they make Fanta includes orange), fruit cocktail which was in fact the exact same color and flavor as the variety they call passion fruit in Tanzania and lemon, which was similar to the citrus flavor (my all-time favorite, which I've only found in some parts of Kenya), but not quite as good. I also periodically bought baked beans, small packets of cookies, ramen noodles or just opted for a peanut butter sandwich.

I cooked only a few times, and usually when other people proposed that we cook for a larger group. One time, I helped make tostones, which come from Guatemala (I think) and are kinda like refried plantains. I also made some masala french fries at 1 AM one time for people who were working that late. I teamed up with Amy a few times and helped make a delightful tomato soup and some pineapple fried rice. And when we had a large barbecue, I was manning the grill for quite a while, and even managed not to burn a few of the ears of corn that I was responsible for.

There were several people who cooked pretty much every night including my suitemate Sanjeev. He complained that most cooking besides his own did not have enough spices (fortunately he brought his own from India) and generally cooked for at least five people. Jessica and Amit (both from California) were really good at accusing me of not eating and then sharing their delicious cooking with me as well. I felt bad that I never really returned the favor.

Introduction
My Project (Part 1)
My Project (Part 2)
Other Work
Delivering Content
My Team
Language
Where We Stayed
Suame Magazine
New Longoro
Maker Faire
Food
Potluck
Ramadan
Transportation
Accra