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In our sequence of letters from African journalists, Ghanaian Elizabeth Ohene considers the phone of Uganda’s President Yoweri Museveni for individuals to take in the humble cassava as the price tag of wheat soars about the earth.
There are two principal root greens in West Africa – cassava and yam.
Cassava is accessible all year round, it is low-cost and is acknowledged, or to place it correctly, was regarded as food items for the bad.
The other well-known 1 is yam, which Nigerian author Chinua Achebe famously described as “the king of crops”.
The yam harvest is awaited eagerly. In fact, exclusive rites are executed just before the new yam can be eaten, and we set on our greatest garments to celebrate the vegetable.
Cassava is, at very best, day-to-day foods and made use of to be the frequent fare of the inadequate and servants.
I observe that President Yoweri Museveni of Uganda is urging his persons to transform to a food plan of cassava as an antidote to the rocketing rate of wheat for the duration of the latest around the world price tag of living disaster.
“If there is no bread, consume muwogo [cassava],” he explained.
Mr Museveni’s opinions have prompted controversy, with critics stating he has no real strategy to offer with the charge of living crisis.
Around listed here in Ghana, we had a finance minister who, way again in the 1960s, tried using to justify a proposed enhance in taxes by saying the bad wouldn’t be affected mainly because they ate gari – a well-liked granular flour built from processed cassava.
At the time, gari was known largely as food for the weak and the minister designed the stage that if you included h2o to half a cup of gari, it would swell to give more than enough food items for a few people. It was low cost and filling.
The minister was also generating the level, devoid of stating it aloud, that very poor men and women failed to eat bread or rice, or other these kinds of extravagant imported meals. This was mostly accurate at the time.
Several years later on, we experienced a minister of point out who tackled soaring food price ranges by stating people could usually try to eat kokonte, which he cited as a low cost alternate to rice and other imported foods.
Kokonte is made from cassava flour and, like all factors cassava, was recognized as food items eaten by the bad.
President Museveni designed the stage that he ate cassava. In other words and phrases, no one need to be ashamed of taking in, or noticed to be eating, cassava due to the fact it was now presidential foodstuff.
These days, the drought-resistant crop is also touted as owning health and fitness added benefits – cassava root is gluten-free of charge, large in vitamin C and abundant in copper.
I never know if cassava remains branded as food items for the weak in Uganda, but in Ghana, we have arrive a extensive way.
Acquire gari. It lose its picture as foodstuff for servants and the inadequate when it grew to become the indispensable companion of all boarding school pupils.
They go to college with a bag of gari in their “chop box”. The a variety of meals they make with gari in dormitories are called soakings.
It truly is a brief and uncomplicated course of action, involves no cooking or microwave oven for heating – you set some gari in a cup, insert water, sugar and milk, mix it and that is it. You have the most delightful and filling snack.
The savoury substitute is much more common and includes using about a cup of dry gari, sprinkling a bit of drinking water on it to soften it, including a tablespoonful of our famous peppery sauce, shito, incorporating a tin of sardines, mixing it all up – and hey presto, you have one more delectable food. I you should not know why but this one appears to be ideal eaten in a team.
But gari actually turned the ultimate haute-cuisine product when Ghana’s famous caterer, Barbara Baeta, devised a recipe for “gari foto” – gari combined with gravy and seafood, which she served at a state banquet in 1970 hosted by Primary Minister Kofi Abrefa Busia.
Quickly gari experienced turn into foods that was served at gatherings for the large and migh
ty and it was fashionable.
In some strategies, the many foods built from cassava have been reworked into food items that people today boast about taking in.
It really is not in contrast to the emergence in the 1960s of what African Individuals known as soul foodstuff, when they embraced what they ate as slaves and turned it into stylish and desirable foodstuff.
I consider there is scope for some adventurous Ghanaian caterers to go to Uganda and create cafe chains that would provide only cassava-by-product foods.
And I hope that by the time the madness in Ukraine is above, cassava will turn out to be the food of alternative throughout Africa and we shall go away wheat to people who improve it.
There could not be a Chinua Achebe all over to wax lyrical about cassava, we could possibly not celebrate cassava festivals but no-just one would at any time refer to it again as food for the inadequate, and President Museveni will never have to make speeches to stimulate his people to eat cassava.
Extra Letters from Africa:
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