Kenyan Food Rocks

After over two months in Kenya, eating primarily Kenyan food for every meal, we’ve made a few observations.

1) Kenyans do not tire of foods.

If you ask 20 Americans what their favorite food is, you’ll likely get many different answers. Burgers, pizza, spaghetti, pad thai, etc. In our first few weeks here, we tried this question on several Kenyans, with surprising results.

Me: “If you could have any food in the world for dinner, what would it be?”
Person from Luo tribe: “Ugali” (very bland, polenta-like paste made from cornmeal).
Person from Kikuyu tribe: “Githeri” (stewed mixture of beans and corn).

Mzee, the man we live with, is Kikuyu, and he claims that he could (and used to) eat githeri for every meal and he never gets tired of it.

After thinking about it briefly, the reason for this is obvious: If you grew up in a village and climate where beans and corn grew well (like Kikuyu country), githeri was always on the menu. Here there is no thai takeout next to the cantina next to the pizza joint, so the diverse palettes that are so common in the US just don’t happen here. People become accustomed to their few specific foods are exposed to little else, so that’s what they like.

2) You have to be careful when eating food in Kenya.

There’s the obvious concern about food-bourne illness such as hepatitis A, typhoid, and old-fashioned food poisoning, and then there are other, less typical concerns. At our house, we generally eat at a higher standard than most Kenyans. No dirt floors, no wood-burning stove. However, the scourge of food eaters everywhere knows no socioeconomic boundaries; it doesn’t care that we’re wazungu. Rocks. They permeate the cuisine here in such a way that if you let your guard down for a second, they’ll replace that tender bite of rice with a tooth-shattering crunch. The issue seems to be with the processing of the food before it’s sold in the markets. In there US, I’m sure that there is a strict ounces of rock per ton of grain requirement, but here, as long as there’s more grain than rock, it’s kosher. Here, all rice, lentils, beans, etc. is picked through very carefully before cooking, but inevitably, the highly evolved rocks, with their chameleon-like colors and patterns, slip through security. If you’re fortunate, the rock is more of a dirt clump, and you just get the sudden flavor burst of earth in your mouth. A came up with a strategy for taking on the rocks; “you’ve just got to power through them and keep chewing”. Though brave, this approach may be on the myopic side.

3) The concept of starch v. protein v. vegetable doesn’t really exist here

In general, the traditional Kenyan diet is pretty balanced. Lots of veggies, some beans, some rice or ugali, and maybe a smattering of chicken. However, we’ve been served some meals that are bizarrely weighted. One night, Lucy cooked for us chapati (flatbread), ugali (polenta), rice, and stewed vegetables. This seemed perfectly reasonable to mzee, who topped his rice with ugali and went about his dinner. Now that I think about it, maybe this isn’t that foreign. The Double Down sandwich from KFC just came to mind as an American equivalent:



Coming soon: Dinner and Street Food