Food

I've decided that it's too hard to sit down and try and write a post about everything I do in a day, so at least for a while, I'm going to choose one topic and talk about it for a while.  Today, I've chosen food.

Already, I am deeply in need of American food.  They told us not to hide in our rooms and eat by ourselves because that would offend our families, but I’m secreted away in my chambre eating Zapos (admittedly Australian, not American) because I simply must.  My uncle bought me a  Coke and a hamburger this weekend, and although it was in slightly bizarre circumstances, I almost wept with joy and gratitude.

The problem I’m having with the food is not the one that I thought I would have.  Turns out, the food isn’t that spicy here and I’m not having to battle my way through intense flavors.  The problem is the lack of variety in what we eat here together with the physical manner in which we eat it.

Every meal is accompanied by a baguette.  Breakfast is a baguette, sliced in half and spread with jam, Nutella, Laughing Cow-type cheese, or butter.  This is what zee French would call a tartine.  Every now and then Kiki will produce some clandestine cornflakes and Coco Krispies from his bedroom, but that’s only if no one has gone out to buy baguettes.  We wash down our tartines with cups of hot milk, which is made not by heating fresh milk, but by heating water and adding powdered milk.  The Senegalese don’t really do fresh milk at all.  Even at WARC, if you get a coffee from the kitchen ladies, you get a sachet of milk powder to add to it instead of cream.

Lunch and dinner are similar affairs at home.  Sometimes we’ll eat lunch at the table in the living room, each with our own plate and silverware. Usually, though, we sit on little stools and white plastic deck chairs around a small, low table (read: one of those huge spools that telephone wire and electricity cable come on), with one huge plate for all of us.  “Us” is me, however many of my siblings are around (usually no fewer than 3 and often all 5), the maid, and any other young people that might be around (often Moussouba’s boyfriend, Habibou, or a neighbor).  Mama never eats with us, although her friend Hélène, who lives in the house with us and wears the same clothes everyday, often does.  Everyone gets a large spoon and is responsible for cleaning their wedge-shaped portion of the plate.  Before I came here, I was taught how to eat with just my bare right hand, in case my family was really traditional.  From talking to the other girls, most families eat with spoons, but not all.  Even in my own family, if there are not enough clean spoons, the maid will eat with her hand, something she’s clearly comfortable with and practiced at, and sometimes even the kids will set the spoon down towards the end and finish the rest of their wedge with their fingers.

It’s hard for me to tell how much I actually eat at any given meal.  I can’t visualize what my wedge would look like on a dinner plate, so I don’t know if I’m eating more or less than what I’m used to.  I do know that I eat less than everyone else.  I am never capable of eating my whole wedge, whereas everyone else picks his or hers clean without fail.  I think this might be partly due to the fact that the people on either side of me usually give me an awfully large wedge.  Maybe I just don’t have a decent understanding of proper wedge proportions yet, but there are always banks of rice separating the dent I’m making from the wedges on either side of me.  No one else ends up with rice buffers like that.  I think they’re trying to make sure I eat enough, but I’m always/usually too full to eat my buffers.  When I put my spoon down and lean back from the table, one of my siblings usually says, in a shocked voice, “Tu n’as pas fini? (You’re not done, are you?)”  To which I reply, “Oui, oui, j’ai bien mangé (Yes, I’ve eaten enough).”  Sometimes they try to make me eat more, but by now they don’t really push it any more.  And I really am always full.  I eat to the point where the thought of taking another bite totally grosses me out, but I am always the last one finished and I always eat the least.  Everyone else takes HUGE bites and finishes in about 8 minutes.

The food itself is always a starchy base (rice, couscous, millet, French fries, potatoes, spaghetti, etc) with a little pile of meat, chicken, fish in the middle.  Usually there are vegetables too, usually cooked.  Onions are the most frequent, but carrots, peppers, cabbage, yams, eggplant, and cassava often appear as well.  In those cases, there will be one large chunk of each vegetable and each person will get a bite or two of each one.  Same thing with the protein.  7 people will share one fish, meaning each person will get enough to constitute maybe 1 American fish stick.  Either everyone will pinch of their bites with their own spoon or one of the more senior members of the dining party will pinch pieces off and distribute them to everyone’s wedge.  Sometimes there is a sauce that the meat/veggies were cooked in that’s poured over the whole plate, and sometimes the spices are mixed in with the rice.  Fish is hands down the most frequent source of protein.  Chicken comes in third, after viande, or “meat”.  When I asked what kind of meat is was, Fatima said mouton, or sheep.  And it’s definitely sheep and not lamb.  Actually, it’s not definitely sheep.  I’ve heard that mouton might be a broad term that includes goat as well as sheep.  I haven’t really tried that hard to find out if this is true, mostly because I don’t much care what mouton or viande are; I’m usually just delighted that it’s not fish again.  Apart from eating it all the time, they eat their fish whole here, which means a lot of careful chewing and spitting out of little bones.

The national dish of Senegal is thiéboudienne.  That’s the spelling I found in my Lonely Planet guide.  It’s obviously a French-ified spelling of the Wolof, which is pronounced tche-boo-djenn, and which just means “rice and fish.”  We eat classic thiéboudienne at least 2 times a week and other variations on rice and fish probably 6 more times.  Whenever you meet a new Senegalese person and they realize that you’re not from around here, they will inevitable ask you two questions: 1) Did you vote for Barack Obama? and 2) Do you like thiéboudienne?  The answer to both of these questions is always Bien sûr!

The only thing that I’ve eaten here that I’ve really never had before in any incarnation is millet.  The first night we had it, I sat down to what looked like a plate of slightly congealed hamburger meat.  It was lumpy, grey-ish brown, and totally unappetizing looking.  I don’t really know what millet looks like in the first place, so I don’t know what had been done to it to make it look like that.  Once we all sat down, Moussouba poured a warm, sweetened milk sauce over the top of it.  Everyone sort of mixed the sauce in with the millet, which made a kind of porridge.  I don’t think there was any form of protein in it at all.  That’s probably been my least favorite meal so far.  We had millet couscous a few nights later, which was better than the porridge, but I don’t think millet is going to make the list of my favorite things about Senegal.

Breakfast happens whenever you wake up.  Lunch in our house is usually between 2 and 3, though I think most people in Dakar eat it earlier than that.  Businesses often close from about 12 till 2:30 so people can go home for lunch.  Dinner is usually between 9 and 10, which has consequences for Senegalese nightlife.  No one goes out until after dinner, and no one is ever in a rush to get anywhere, so nightclubs and bars don’t usually heat up until about midnight or 1 AM, and a rockin’ time in Dakar doesn’t end until the imam’s start calling their faithful around 5 or 6 in the morning (so I hear.  I still haven’t gone out much yet).

So that’s dining in Dakar.  It’s not that bad, but I am craving respite from the never-ending rice and feeling like I need to keep eating until I’m bursting.  In particular, I want beef, Raisin Bran, peanut butter, ice cream, and chocolate.  I’ve been plotting how to get some of each of those.  Our program director, André, took us out to lunch on Thursday before he headed back to the states and I had a skewer of beef and roasted vegetables that was heavenly.  I’ve been making a note of the European supermarkets on my way to and from school, and the chances that I will buy peanut butter before the week is over are very high.  I don’t know if I’ll be able to get Raisin Bran, but I might be able to get something similar or equally not a baguette for breakfast.  The supermarkets are expensive, but at this point, it will be worth it.  I know I can get ice cream at the interestingly-named “Creamy Inn” down the street from WARC, and chocolate cookies and things are widely available from fruit stands on the side of the road or the little closet-sized boutiques tucked between the houses.  Those are the kinds of places where there are no set prices and you have to haggle in order to not be taken advantage of.  I haven’t really done that yet, mostly because I don’t know what a good price is and I don’t want to insult anyone by offering too little.  Also, I’m shy.  That’s my goal for the week, to get a feel for how this works.  I think the lure of chocolate will be a strong enough incentive.

And to those you who are eating pizza and DC soft serve this week, please make note of the fact that you are currently in heaven.

Added later:

Haha, okay, I think I just watched a Senegalese cooking show.  It was all in Wolof, so I don’t know for sure what was going on, but it wasn’t a soap opera, a music video, or the news, which is what’s usually on.  It looked like it was filmed on some guy’s camcorder and just showed video of a woman cooking with mbalax (Senegalese pop music) playing over it.  Every now and then the music would cut out and it would break to a segment where the woman cooking would stand and talk to another, much more glamorous woman, who I assume is the host of the show.  Then it would go right back to boiling pots of rice and mbalax.  It was awesome.