Let's Talk Ghanaian Food

After receiving the mother load of a package of Amer8can food goodies from my lovely parental units back in my homeland, I have been inspired to tell the world a little about Ghanaian food.

I live in northern Ghana, which is savannah, but southern Ghana is tropical rain forest. Therefore, the variety of food varies greatly from north to south. But if you are willing to pay (50 or more peswa for a coconut that in the south would cost 5 peswa) you can get anything that is grown in Ghana, at least right now during the rainy season. So in the north our main crops are maize (corn), rice, millet (that's right zoo friends that's what we feed the Budgies), soya beans, bombara beans, red beans, black eyed peas, ground nuts (peanuts), yams, tomatoes, onions, okra, garden eggs (like a small egg plant), alefo (leafy stuff), cabbage, hot peppers,green peppers, and mangoes. Right now I can also get (in the regional capital market and for a price) pineapple, coconut, oranges, bananas, apples, grapes, pears (avocados), green beans, carrots, egg plant, plantains, sweet potatoes, white potatoes, cassava, popcorn, pasta, and probably more. Chicken and guinea fowl eggs are also widely available. Cattle is milked by the Fulani people (a nomadic cattle herding tribe from further north, many of which have seemed to settle in Ghana) but milk and cheese are very rare. Processed foods (boxed or canned) are rare and expensive. Although Ghana is the second largest producer of cocoa, chocolate is hard to find and not very good. Ghanaians don't do candy or desert.

A typical Ghanaian menu looks something like this:

Breakfast – porridge, oats, fried egg sandwich, tea, hot cocoa

Lunch/ Dinner – wakye (beans with oil and ground dried cassava), red red (beans living it up in palm oil served with plantains fried in palm oil), plain rice with a tomato paste stew, jolof rice with meat (jolof is rice cooked in a spicy tomato mixture), rice balls with ground nut soup, tzed with alefo/ground nut or vegetable stew (tzed is traditionally made of millet flour and is a ball of starch), fufu and palm nut or light soup (fufu is a ball of starch made by pounding any combination of boiled yams, cassava, and plantains together, light soup is like tomato soup), banku and okra stew or hot pepe with little fish (banku is a ball of starch made from fermented corn flour), water, mineral (soda)

Basically Ghanaians love balls of starch that you don't have to chew, dipped in things. I don't cook Ghanaian food. Its an all day process and I would rather leave it to the professionals, Ghanaian women. So I basically eat like I would at home in the US only without cheese and more creatively. I also seem to have lost my sweet tooth over the course of the last 4 months. Even soda overwhelms my sweet sensors.

The Peace Corps Volunteers of Ghana have something called "the achievement of the trifecta." Achievement of the trifecta is attempted by many, achieved by few, and mastered by only the most serious. Achievement of the trifecta makes you Ghanaian. To become Ghanaian you must successfully be able to eat two rice balls, two balls of fufu, and two balls of banku. I can rarely eat one ball of any of these.

Talk of food also brings us to intestinal unfortunateness. This is also of course caused by water. Growing up in the United States with our wussy sterilized environment makes us United Statesians as susceptible to intestinal unfortunateness in Ghana as the native peoples of North America were to small pox. Perhaps even more so. What does intestinal unfortunateness entail you may be wondering? Bouts of diarrhea, constipation, explosive diarrhea, vomiting, fever, projectile vomiting, worms, severe stomach cramping, and of course surprise pooping of the pants and surprise vomiting all over. I have yet to get worms.

And with that I will end my lesson for the day.