What's for Dinner?

A note about the photos. I cannot get them embedded into the body of the text, so I'll describe them here. The top one is the 16 ft+ boa constrictor that we ate in Lowuma. Next is the community vat for processing palm oil. Center is some people that we met along the trail, walking to the market with their bush meat. Next is a closeup of the smoked monkeys - you can see a paw sticking out. The bottom one is some people we met on their farm close to the trail, showing the rice that they are harvesting.

I have had people ask me what I ate when I was up country. I ate what was available! The villagers live a subsistence lifestyle. They eat what they can produce by farming, hunting, or trapping. They grow rice, cassava, eddoes, types of eggplant, peppers, onions, pineapples, oranges, bananas, plantains, potatoes, jackfruit, mangos, peanuts, and maybe something else that I've forgotten. They usually eat one meal a day, and they must have rice. If they don't have rice, they say they haven't eaten.

They use palm oil, processing it from the palm nuts that grow wild. There is red palm oil, which comes from the fruit of the palm, and there is brown oil, which they process from the palm kernel. I helped them with the processing. What a chore. The palm kernel oil is delicious, so it's worth the work. I'm posting a photo of a big vat where they process the palm oil. This is in the village of Gbeleyankei, and all of the people use it. It would hold about 400 gallons! They live a communal lifestyle, so they share in the work and the product. They take care of each other.

Dinner usually consists of rice and soup. The soup usually has meat from the forest, such as monkey (yuck), porcupine (yum), anteater (yum), snake (yum), chicken (can be yummy), deer (can be yummy), catfish (yum), or other things that may not sound as good! They don't believe in wasting any part of the animal, so the deer stew even had part of the hide in it. Once, they cooked chicken which had un-laid eggs in it. Otherwise, they wouldn't eat eggs, believing that you are taking away somebody's child. I always picked things out of my food - like fish heads and bones - and left them on my plate. Somebody then took my plate and ate the rest. They don't waste anything. I was there during the dry season, when food is more plentiful. I understand that in the rainy season, they don't eat so well.

When the hunters bring something home, they share it with others in the village. One man shot a boa constrictor snake while I was there. That was delicious! It was 16 ft 4 inches long, so there was a lot of meat on it. They shared with the whole village. Since they don't have refrigeration, they smoke everything to preserve it. While on our village trek, we met people along the road that were taking dried monkeys to market. There is a photo of that posted above. They put the whole dead monkey on a rack above the wood fire. They have about a 2 day walk to go to market, where they sell the "bush meat". They will then buy things like salt and sugar. They also buy caustic, which they use to make soap. And of course, they buy shotgun shells for hunting. Fishing is done with hand-made nets.

So, what's for dinner tonight? I'm having chicken breast - boneless and skinless. I'm spoiled.