Food

The F. albida trees that grace the small harbor nearer to town have been blooming since the end our drought in mid-February. It's like deja vu in reverse; the trees faded slowly into their bare state with the rains, and are now fading back into green. Reminds me of the old analog TV's, how you could fiddle with the tint and make the newscasters look like space aliens, or with the color, making them look like the first part of the Wizard of Oz. This transition is far more imperceptible ... I've done a rather poor job of photographing it, but at no regular frequency. When the God's of the Internet (in the guise of Afraim and Mahmood, our IT wiz-kids) bestow us with connectivity again, I'll try to post some of them.

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For those of you who know Zambia (and Southern Africa, and possibly most of sub-Saharan Africa) a bit, you might be familiar with with the porridge that form the backbone of the local diet. Usually made from white dent maize, it can also be concocted from flint maize, sorghum, millet (both finger and bulrush), and cassava (ugh). Yes, the ubiquitous NSHIMA (aka ubwale [ciBemba], nsima [chiNyanja], sima [chiTonga], buhobe [siLozi], and for those fringes along the northeast border, ugali [kiSwahili]). Lovely stuff, really ... it's served as a very thick, malleable porridge which serves the same function as a fork and/or a spoon; you grasp a slightly-larger-than-egg size portion in your right hand, roll it around a bit to mold it into a semi-spherical shape, and then, utilizing your thumb, make a small depression in the lump. You then scoop up whatever relish is served (beans, cabbage, rapine, pumpkin leaves, beef offals, etc.), dip the mass in whatever sauce [soopu] is added, and pop it in your mouth. Repeat until nshima and relish is finished. The only notable departure I've seen from this routine is among the Lunda and some Luvales in Northwestern ... they grasp a larger mass, form a lump, split it in twain, place one lump under the last two digits of their hands, and proceed as described above with only the thumb, index, and middle finger.

How and what type of nshima is served is symptomatic of place and/or wealth (or the presentation / perception thereof). When I grab lunch at a restaurant or within the market in town, the nshima is served in three or four preformed lumps. It is the same setup when I eat with friends in town. Invariably, this nshima is pure white, made from “breakfast” meal; essentially, the skin of the maize kernel is removed (bye-bye vitamins, protein, fiber, etc.), and the remainder (hello, carbohydrates!) is ground into meal. This is considered the “best” nshima, a fact which drives outsiders working on nutritional improvement into conniption fits.

The further you venture out of town, the greater the chances that the lumps become somewhat browner, grittier, and singular. Out in the willies, making breakfast meal means about two to three days of work for the womenfolk, so chances are you will be chowing on “roller” meal, i.e., maize that wasn’t skinned prior to grinding. Furthermore, this nshima (aka “mealie meal”) issues from hammer-mills (grinding mills for maize that utilize a revolving flail to make flour) of varying upkeep; hence some crunchy pieces.

It’s only way outside of town that someone such as yours truly can get millet or sorghum; these are considered “lower-class” foods, another conniption fit for nutritionists-cum-agriculturalists. Though millet and sorghum are considerably more tolerant to the vagaries of rainfall, they don’t share nearly the prominence of maize in Zambian food culture. These crops have almost no economic benefit for the farmer; maize has the support of a para-statal (government-run) market via the Food Reserve Agency [FRA], whereas sorghum and millet have essentially no market beyond the brewing and sale of local beer. Furthermore, “native” crops such as sorghum and millet were historically denigrated in speech and in practice; for example, in my dog-eared Kaonde dictionary that dates from the long ago, there was no entry for sorghum (the crop that Kaondes stereotypically prefer). It is referred to as “kaffir-corn” [my apologies for the epithet]. When reading literature on the history of agriculture during the colonial era in Southern Zambia for my thesis, I found most practices surrounding native agricultural practices involving millet and sorghum were referred to as “primitive”, “backwards”, etc. [FYI - The sing exception to this rule is one ecologist named C. G. Trapnell].

Without going into too much detail, suffice it to say that maize [and its derivative, maize meal] is a mark of status, wealth, and modernity that transcends its ecological appropriateness. (One should read either Nicholas Sitko’s work on the “Social Life of Maize in Zambia” or James McCann’s “Maize and Grace” if one is truly interested in the topic). Serving a visitor anything but the whitest nshima you can manage, though not a high insult, reflects poorly on the host.

Sorry for the tangent, but context is a heavy set of shackles to bear.

Regardless of its origin, a lack of tableware usually results in village nshima being heaped together into a single, huge, steaming mass colloquially referred to as an “nshima mountain”, surrounded by one or two relish dishes. After washing of hands and prayers, guests (me) are looked at expectedly until our right hand is plunged into the mountain, signaling the others’ onslaught upon the redoubtable summit. Within minutes, the mountain devolves into a few pebbles, the flotsam and jetsam of a Zambian meal: small white remnants of nshima, a strand of cabbage, the unblinking eye of a lone piece of kapenta fish.

The difficulty in describing nshima consumption in this country to those without context is the sheer volume consumed daily; it is the lone staple, a social definition, to eat at least two meals of nshima per day, sometimes three, though breakfast is not common. Zambians tend to eat more in the way of carbs than Americans; nshima constitutes at least 70% of each meal. The very nature of food description illustrates the focus on the staple, nshima … nshima is considered “food”, whereas everything else, including other carbs, are described as “relish”. A Zambian who has eaten a week’s worth of rice, sixteen pounds of mashed potatoes, a loaf of bread, and so forth will complain that he / she “hasn’t eaten” as nshima has been lacking.

With all that said, imagine my response when the third or fourth of the canon of questions occurs: “What is the staple food in America?” I used to go into a spiel about how America has many tribes, how we have many foods, we don’t eat the same thing everyday, etc. It engendered blank stares (similar to what I get when describing Zambia to Americans), signifying disbelief, boredom, or incomprehension. Now I simply say “Bread” or “Irish Potatoes” or “Rice”, which gains at least a nod and a smile, as that’s what we are supposed to eat.

Imagine how disconcerting it is when they ask “Is there nshima in America?” Breaking the horrible truth seems to be the most effective deterrent to any future immigration.