Cows blood vs. Corn Flakes

Seemingly every semester my housemate, Katie, delivers the bad news: she has to save money to travel and therefore cannot buy food anymore. Regardless, this does not stop the flow through our cement block African house of watermelon and grapes, chicken and ground beef, olive oil and jam, corn flakes and granola, nor her requests for shrimp and brown rice. We still have Parmesan cheese and milk, we still make naan bread and tortillas, and when I have a can of evaporated milk from the States, I will stir up an Alfredo sauce. I freeze sausage to save for pizza when I have a chance to go to the city again to buy cheese, which will be combined with a yeast crust and very thinly sliced tomatoes. I will trek fifty miles with bread from the capital, since it’s whole wheat or really soft or particularly fresh. Katie will become so enamored with the bread as to do the same, although it faces the significant risk of getting smashed on the long bus ride home. We gave up margarine a long time for real butter and dip our carrots into creamy Caesar dressing from South Africa. I have developed a particular affinity for ketchup, which I eat with potatoes fried until they are crispy.

Since we are foreigners in a land that is not our own, we do what other foreigners in strange places do: Food is one possible means by which to preserve a satisfying part of your own culture. This why the Indians in California bring spices packed into their suitcases, why the Chinese flock to specialty stores for fish-flavored rice crackers. When no one is like you nor understands exactly what you are, you can still be yourself when you face your dinner plate.

Mozambicans do not drink cow’s blood, one of the horrors I was spared from facing when coming to Africa. Overall, food is not horribly painful, only a little. I am still uncertain if they eat cow’s brain, which I know is removed from the cow’s head, perhaps to be thrown out, perhaps to be cooked separately. The cow’s head is by all means, eaten. I have both tried it and helped prepare it. A cow’s head lying the market place is in fact a very common site. One day I discovered cow testicles draped over a severed cow’s neck, which I imagined implies that testicles are eaten as well. Mozambicans suck the ligaments off chicken’s feet in wedding soup and sometimes they clean the yellow muck from inside the chicken’s intestines and make soup out of them, too. All butchers sell hooves and livers and other organs I cannot identify, sitting in little open-air, fly-covered piles. Fish heads are consumed, little white fish eyeballs and all, but usually the tiny fish is cut in half and shared between two people so I request the tail. Meat is almost never served in terms of steak and fish fillets and boneless chicken breast.

Vegetarians can opt for white corn meal porridge, or rice, which is the cheap, sticky, fat-grained kind, or a variety of green curries made with ordinary leaves. Leaf consumption in the United States is usually limited to flavorful herbs, cabbage, and crisp lettuces, but in Mozambique, anything that is not poisonous or too tough or extremely bitter will be pounded up, mixed with salt and coconut milk, and eaten. Some if it is still fairly bitter. They call these dishes “yangana” and “matapa” and “couve,” and “aboubora” but they all more or less taste the same with only some variance between mildly sweet and painfully bitter. The typical diet is rounded out with white bread, watery bean dishes, and tea with brown sugar.

I have, for many years, eaten nearly everything that can be chewed and swallowed. I marvel at the oddity of adults who refuse to eat harmless things like tomatoes and myself keep a very short list of things I will chose to pass up, like Brussel sprouts and beets. In this way, Africa suits me well, and with the assistance of only a mild dose of hunger, I can almost always clean my plate, no matter what it contains. I do, however, draw a distinct line between consumable (nearly everything) and enjoyable (desserts with nuanced sweetness, meat marinated into spicy savoriness, warm, dry rice…)

In my generally very ascetic life, food is my primary source of fleshly pleasure, and I can fantasize about life where restaurants of every type line the streets and brownies are a mere instant grocery store mix away!