You are what you eat
By
What follows is about some off centre eating habits that may not be to everybody’s liking. Readers who do not have the stomach for that sort of thing are advised to move on to the fashion page, where the staple is likely to be more to their taste.
Having got that out of the way, we start off with the story about the man who, while on a flight from M’goomba to London, was approached by a smiling stewardess who handed him a menu and asked what he would like to eat for lunch.
The man spent a long time studying the menu, then handed it back with a shake of his head saying: "There’s nothing here that I fancy, but perhaps if you could let me have a look at the passenger manifest?"
Not surprisingly, he did not get his wish, and the worst that happened to his fellow passengers was that they had to put up with the noise of his grumbling stomach all the way to London.
It would be easy to guess on what grounds an airline company that prided itself on its eagerness to "take good care of you" would find itself unable to serve up a fare paying passenger as the main course for someone else’s lunch. One of the grounds would certainly be that the law did not permit it.
What would be more difficult to guess is why the gentleman from M’goomba would want to select his lunch from the passenger manifest. It couldn’t be merely to satisfy his hunger _ or, as the TV commercial quaintly puts it, to "hold his belleh." The more likely theory is that the man, being one of those types who couldn’t say boo to a goose, had consulted a local witchdoctor about his diffidence, and had probably been told to eat a broiled homo sapiens on the flight to London, with a guarantee that it would make him twice the man he was.
Thinking about it, I decided to compile a list of reasons why people are attracted or repelled by certain types of food.
Stockfish (that piece of cod which passeth all understanding) is not for me. I came to this conclusion when, as a boy, I watched a woman drop a couple of six inch nails into the pot containing some stockfish she was cooking for the family dinner. The reason for the nails, I was told, was to soften the fish, but knowing how tough dried stockfish was, I quite believed that the nails would be well done before the fish was.
In later life my dislike for stockfish was reinforced when it was rumoured that the reason why stockfish had their heads sliced off before being shipped from the exporting country was to conceal the fact that they (the stockfish) had the heads of human beings. To prove it, postcard size photographs began to circulate, showing what was claimed to be a live stockfish with its head intact, right down to its blond Nordic hair. The effect on the cod trade (then worth about £8 million annually to Norway in the early 1960s) was so potentially damaging that the Norwegian government went to great lengths to reassure consumers of stockfish. Not all of them were reassured.
Grilled locusts is not the sort of dish one is offered everyday, even in the most off-beat bukateria.
That is probably because, right from biblical times they have been regarded more as a plague than as a gourmet’s delight. And since they make their appearance only once in every few years, steady supply cannot be guaranteed.
I saw my first swarm of locusts as a five year old living in a small town in the old Oyo province. They came in such a dense mass that their appearance darkened the sky in daytime The voracious creatures stayed around for only three days, but that was long enough for them to strip farmland and the surrounding vegetation almost bare.
The locals mounted a spirited counterattack, which consisted of flailing at the vermin with sticks, brooms and anything else that came to hand. Women and children fanned out and busied themselves with stuffing enclosed kerosene tins with locusts. (If you don’t know what a kerosene tin looked like, ask an older person).
All the locust gatherers had the same idea, which was to sell their haul at the local market. But in a situation in which every single household had no less than four kerosene tins full of locusts, everyone was a potential seller, and there were no buyers. As an entrepreneurial effort it was a bust.
Incidentally, I can here confirm that locusts are far from being a delicacy _ especially when they have been dead for two or three days.
Anyone who has never tasted elephant meat has got a lot coming to him, to use an expression. I once heard about a village that was terrorised by a rogue elephant until it was hunted down and killed by an intrepid hunter. But it turned out that killing the elephant was easier than disposing of its carcass. Eating it, which was the obvious solution, presented some problems: There was so much of the meat, and so few villagers.
While the villagers were contemplating the monotony of a daily diet of smoked elephant, salted elephant, roasted elephant and boiled elephant, they made the happy discovery that an elephant had in its huge carcass an amazing variety of meats. These included some that looked and tasted like pork, and some that looked and tasted like chicken, fish, mutton, beef, etc. That took care of the monotony of eating nothing but elephant meat for weeks. The man who told me this story didn’t do so on oath, so it is up to the reader to decide to believe it or not.
The rhinoceros is now found mostly in the game parks of East Africa. In bulk and thickness of hide it may be said to remind one of an elephant. Strangely though, no claims have been made that its body is made up of a variety of meats. What a rhino has instead is a horn that is much in demand for the makings of what is said to be a powerful aphrodisiac. I have not the faintest idea of how it is used whether it is gnawed like a bone, or ground into powder and then sprinkled in egusi soup, or mixed with an ointment and then rubbed on. The puzzle is why anyone would go to all that trouble when he can achieve much more by simply swallowing a Viagra pill.
Prejudice sometimes plays an important part in the way people choose what to eat. I once listened to an argument about the relative qualities of imported corned beef. Perhaps I should first explain that all the corned beef that one is likely to find on the shelves of Nigerian supermarkets is imported mainly from England, France, Brazil and Argentina. The runaway favourite with many Nigerian consumers is the one imported from Argentina.
Why? Because, according to one of the ladies who was engaged in the above mentioned argument, Argentinean leather goods are better than those of England, France and Brazil, so Argentinean corned beef must also be better than the corned beef imported from those other countries. I got the impression that if Argentinean corned beef were to disappear from the shelves tomorrow morning, this lady would rather eat a beautifully made Argentinean handbag than a Brazilian corned beef. That would put her at par with Nigerians who eat shoe leather. The only difference is that Nigerians call what they eat pomo. (Cow Skin)
A couple of weeks ago I had a long distance telephone conversation with a doctor friend whom I had not heard from in many years. He knew that I was in my twilight years, so when he asked me "How are you?" I knew that it wasn’t just a casual enquiry. This was confirmed when he went on to ask me about my cholesterol level. Like many doctors he believed that the worst enemy of an ageing man was a cholesterol level that was not reined in..
Since I considered it my duty to allay his anxiety I told him that my cholesterol level was just fine. I then took my knowledge of medicine to its outer limit by adding that I had not eaten red meat in years.
"I’m glad that you know about avoiding red meat," he said, sounding vastly relieved.
We chatted for a few more minutes, and then he rang off, without realising that everything I knew about red meat was gleaned from a newspaper report I read some years ago about the appearance, in some markets in Kaduna, of some strange meat that was described as being "too red." It was speculated in that report that it must have been camel meat. Butchers strenuously denied it, but for a while it was difficult to sell any meat that had the slightest tinge of red about it. Some years later another newspaper carried a report that two or three camels had been seen in the vicinity of the Lagos State abattoir at Oko-Oba. But what could have dealt a serious blow to the meat business was averted when the butchers’ association put out the word that the camels spotted at Oko-oba were only on a sight-seeing visit.
Finally, what do you do when you discover that the pepper soup you have just eaten with such relish was prepared with dog meat? This happened in Surulere several years ago, and was duly reported on the NTA programme "NEWSLINE."
Apparently, the owner of the roadside pepper soup joint had been steadily depleting the canine population without his customers having the faintest inkling of what they had been eating. When they heard about it on television they proceeded to the pepper soup joint and completely wrecked it. A passer's by, apprised of what the hullabaloo was about, said: "The one wey dey inside dem belleh nko?" It sounded like a good question.
December 2001