The Steampunk World
When I travel, I am nothing but a mouth and an ass, in the sense that I feverishly seek strange foods to taste and I am eager to see how each place has solved the problem of hauling the resident asses around. Food and transportation. Out of all of the human needs, an innocent pair to be a tourist of. The more exotic, the better- tramways up mountainsides and food that is buried before it is eaten. There's always something unique in each place, from the hand-made inclined rail in an Alabama ravine near my Grandma's to natto, a fermented bean dish eaten only by Tokyoites- or the intricacies of small-town Italian pasta shapes.
Such political subjects, food and transportation! The U.S. has now banned French fois gras? A symbolic move, easily supported by the animal-rights crowd, affecting 1% of France's fois gras exports. In revenge for some argument about steel- a commody the U.S. needs to fight the very war that France opposed, spawning the latest anti-French sentiments. In the scrapyards of Chicago, the cost of steel has gone from $75 to $90 a ton- making it harder for Working Bikes to acquire old bicycles at $3 each. So strange, how the world works- one guy tries to get another guy back for trying to get his dad after his dad tried to get him, and one year later a few hundred duck-force-feeders are laid off in a small town in France as Mexicans begin to drive right past our truck in a Chicago scrapyard. The Butterfly Effect.
Such a mode of thinking has me pondering what it is that I seek in exotic meat. As a dumpsterarian back home, I rarely ate meat, as it is a risky endeavour on either side of the kitchen. Yet abroad the particular arrangements of protein strings in various mammals yield variations in the way my tongue detects these proteins, and I react with pleasure or disgust but always find the experience worthwhile. The preciousness of meat means that it is not often served at my house here, I excercise my privelege to travel into town to pay an extra 50 cents each day for a hunk of the stuff. It goes a long way in terms of providing energy to build bikes.
Restaurants here in the countryside are conceptually different than the city-style place of dining. A restaurant in America is a place to meet friends, a place to go when you don't want to cook, a place to grab food when you can't go home, and a place to seek out new foods or foods that you cannot get at home. Here in the countryside, a restaurant is most often a house where they cook up a big pot for each meal, and that meal becomes a commodity that is exchanged for money the same way we buy soap rather than making it ourself. The meal is cheap and it is exactly waht you would have had at home. Unless you go to the city, all places of dining serve the same three dishes- banku, fufu, and rice balls, each with the soup or stew of the day. It's tasty! But the way I am conditioned is that a restaurant is a place to go have something you couldn't cook yourself. The only way for me to sate this desire is the place I go, where all the town hunters sell their game and townspeople come over to eat what they cook. If it is something rare then folks will dine there seeking a treat, just like me.
Cooking is done outside, of course, by the porch in the big cauldron on the three rocks over the fire. On the other side of the small courtyard formed by the L of the house is a hut-like trestle covered by a single large philodendron plant, no walls, just four posts and a roof of leaves to keep the rain off. Underneath are two benches and a low square table and a couple of seats and stools. Each night the extended family gathers here for dinner, and some days I join them. Sometimes there will be a few other townsfolk sopping soup out of bowls with fingerfuls of meat or fufu. They have a fully stocked bar, one bottle each of the four liquors of Ghana. Apeteci, dry gin, kasapreko, and alomo bitters. Three gins, varying in flavor and strength, plus bitters called 'my heart' or 'my love' because they are intended to fortify the male libido. All of them make a good apertif. The sun has gone down and the only light is from the coals of the fire and a hissing gas lantern. I buy a shot for 2000 cedis and sit, where my hostess hands me soap and pours water over my hands as I wash them. Then I buy meat, usually at 2000-5000 a chunk, and eat it with my right hand. Today I am trying bush chicken, a bird that looks just like a chicken but it lives in the woods, flies, and isn't quite so stupid. I expect it to taste like chicken but it doesn't, it's a tough meat with the flavor of chicken dark meat amplified and a smokiness accompanied by something... tangy? I find it to clash with the thin hot- pepper-and-onion soup, not my favorite. I drink the soup and then drink a square plastic bag of water the size of an overstuffed artificial cheese slice, biting off the corner to suck out the nsuo. Across from me, an old uncle rolls a joint out of a piece of newspaper and smokes it like a hound dog with a dry bone, like a kid with a skinned knee who has been given a sucker but he'd much rather have love and affection. His only treat in this hard, cruel world.
I have no problem depleting the local rat population, for I know that it will long outlive my species. But that lizard-monkey has me thinking, about bush meat and how a crowded world is driven to eat what it can find, depleting the jungle. This is a problem of overpopulation and not of carno-tourism. But when I ask about a beast and the hunter says, "I never see those anymore" I know why, it's because they've been shot and ate. Perhaps my urge to dine on exotic meat has diminished since my lifelong quest to taste human was fulfilled in a bloodsoaked and quite unappetizing night with a jujuman that shall not be recounted here. Meanwhile, I think the patented Third World In Your Face Slaughter will cause me to be even more disinclined to eat meat upon my return. Even so, as I am more likely to buy chitlins than chuck, I am a scavenger consumer within the meat industry's meatosphere. Yet flesh will always be a special treat for me, a gift reverently taken from the creature that provided it.
---
I wake up in the morning to a knock on the door, breakfast is ready. It's just coffee or tea and a jar of honey with a plate of bread, but it has been prepared for me. I liv e in relative luxury while the jungle presses in on every side. I import bicycles and try to shake awake a slumbering giant rail monopoly. I turn on the television and BBC World is showing some symphony performance... with the classical music as I sip tea, I don't just feel like a steam-age explorer, I feel like I'm in a movie of some pith-helmeted gadabout.
Too bad it's not a Bollywood movie, available in full half-day length every Saturday on one of the two TV channels. If only life were like that. A love scene that turns into a long song-and-dance, a swordfight, the music swells, and then it's time to sing and dance again. Sometimes it would go song-> love scene -> caughtcha->sword fight -> song. Much better than in American movie land, where everything's always kersploding and the women are young but the men are old..
---
I love Ghanaian commercials. They don't have that Orwellian buy-or-die evilness that American ads possess. The innocence about them can be charming. Plus the products are based on African life. Like the pretty spokesmodel who says, "Wormex cured my worms... fast!" Or the gin commercial that shows a bunch of guys getting shitfaced and stumbling around- truth in advertising! In America it is taboo- possibly even illegal- to suggest that your alcoholic drink might get somebody drunk. There's a great musical commercial- the Three Days of Malaria- set to the tune of the Twelve Days of Christmas: "On the first day of malaria, take the purple pill..."
Some commercials aren't that funny, but captivate me simply because the subject matter is so far removed from my worldview. Like machete ads- yet every kid is a pro with one, tots wielding blades as big as themselves. In America we'd be aghast at the thought of giving a machete to a small child! Another strange PSA urges parents not to sell their children into slavery. What kind of parent... never mind, I won't go there. So much behavior here that I am tempted to condemn is driven purely by desperation.
---
One of my students, Asante, comes from cocoa farmers and so he brought me two cocoa pods to try. I'd seen them on the trunks of the trees, and all over the money, but I'd never eaten fresh cocoa.
The outer hull is much like a squash. Cutting it in half, you will find the seeds, looking for all the world like an oversized maggot or some sort of spider-egg cocoon. Or a half-ear of corn with huge white kernels. There is a superstructure of white filament holding the seeds in place, just like in a pomegranate. You don't eat the hull, the seeds, or the filament. Instead, you can pick out the seeds and suck off the goo around them- it has the consistency of grapeflesh. The taste is not at all like chocolate. It's much closer to cocoa butter. If you bite the seeds you can get that bitter taste that semisweet chocolate has. Once the seeds are dried on rattan platforms, some people chew them and spit them out. Farmers don't make anything from cocoa, they just mill the seeds and sell it in bags for export. Apparently there are people trying to develop in-country processing, but as it is this is a cash crop, and a relatively profitable one compared to plantains and yams.
Every Ghanaian knows the story of Teteh Quashie, the Ghanaian hero who brought the cocoa tree to Ghana. Legend has it that he traveled to the Spanish colony of Fernandepo, where they had the trees. They let him try some but wouldn't let him take any home to grow. So he swallowed the seeds and smuggled them out inside him, and returned home to grow cocoa trees whereever he pooped, like some excretory Johnny Appleseed.
---
An update on my quest to figure out what apese is- it's related to the porcupine. That explains why it lives in trees. They say it is smaller and less dangerous than the porcupine. It has a long tail with a tassel at the end like a kangaroo rat. Whatever it was, it was the tastiest meat I have ever eaten! I sure hope it's not endangered. I want to eat more!
So far I have eaten fish head stew, goat head stew, goat hoof stew, goat chitlin stew, rat stew, porcupine stew, bush chicken stew, cane rat stew, dog stew, dog kebab, and snail stew. Yet there remain many local stews which I have not tried. To a Ghanaian, their diet is not homogenous! There are many different types of stew. It can be based on rice, corn, yam, plantain, plaintain-and-yam, cassava, dried cassava, and many other subtle variations that appear to all be stew to the outsider. But sometimes I yearn for a piece of lettuce, or a crunchy onion. My addiction to strange tastes has served me well here, but my addiction to texture has not.
Such political subjects, food and transportation! The U.S. has now banned French fois gras? A symbolic move, easily supported by the animal-rights crowd, affecting 1% of France's fois gras exports. In revenge for some argument about steel- a commody the U.S. needs to fight the very war that France opposed, spawning the latest anti-French sentiments. In the scrapyards of Chicago, the cost of steel has gone from $75 to $90 a ton- making it harder for Working Bikes to acquire old bicycles at $3 each. So strange, how the world works- one guy tries to get another guy back for trying to get his dad after his dad tried to get him, and one year later a few hundred duck-force-feeders are laid off in a small town in France as Mexicans begin to drive right past our truck in a Chicago scrapyard. The Butterfly Effect.
Such a mode of thinking has me pondering what it is that I seek in exotic meat. As a dumpsterarian back home, I rarely ate meat, as it is a risky endeavour on either side of the kitchen. Yet abroad the particular arrangements of protein strings in various mammals yield variations in the way my tongue detects these proteins, and I react with pleasure or disgust but always find the experience worthwhile. The preciousness of meat means that it is not often served at my house here, I excercise my privelege to travel into town to pay an extra 50 cents each day for a hunk of the stuff. It goes a long way in terms of providing energy to build bikes.
Restaurants here in the countryside are conceptually different than the city-style place of dining. A restaurant in America is a place to meet friends, a place to go when you don't want to cook, a place to grab food when you can't go home, and a place to seek out new foods or foods that you cannot get at home. Here in the countryside, a restaurant is most often a house where they cook up a big pot for each meal, and that meal becomes a commodity that is exchanged for money the same way we buy soap rather than making it ourself. The meal is cheap and it is exactly waht you would have had at home. Unless you go to the city, all places of dining serve the same three dishes- banku, fufu, and rice balls, each with the soup or stew of the day. It's tasty! But the way I am conditioned is that a restaurant is a place to go have something you couldn't cook yourself. The only way for me to sate this desire is the place I go, where all the town hunters sell their game and townspeople come over to eat what they cook. If it is something rare then folks will dine there seeking a treat, just like me.
Cooking is done outside, of course, by the porch in the big cauldron on the three rocks over the fire. On the other side of the small courtyard formed by the L of the house is a hut-like trestle covered by a single large philodendron plant, no walls, just four posts and a roof of leaves to keep the rain off. Underneath are two benches and a low square table and a couple of seats and stools. Each night the extended family gathers here for dinner, and some days I join them. Sometimes there will be a few other townsfolk sopping soup out of bowls with fingerfuls of meat or fufu. They have a fully stocked bar, one bottle each of the four liquors of Ghana. Apeteci, dry gin, kasapreko, and alomo bitters. Three gins, varying in flavor and strength, plus bitters called 'my heart' or 'my love' because they are intended to fortify the male libido. All of them make a good apertif. The sun has gone down and the only light is from the coals of the fire and a hissing gas lantern. I buy a shot for 2000 cedis and sit, where my hostess hands me soap and pours water over my hands as I wash them. Then I buy meat, usually at 2000-5000 a chunk, and eat it with my right hand. Today I am trying bush chicken, a bird that looks just like a chicken but it lives in the woods, flies, and isn't quite so stupid. I expect it to taste like chicken but it doesn't, it's a tough meat with the flavor of chicken dark meat amplified and a smokiness accompanied by something... tangy? I find it to clash with the thin hot- pepper-and-onion soup, not my favorite. I drink the soup and then drink a square plastic bag of water the size of an overstuffed artificial cheese slice, biting off the corner to suck out the nsuo. Across from me, an old uncle rolls a joint out of a piece of newspaper and smokes it like a hound dog with a dry bone, like a kid with a skinned knee who has been given a sucker but he'd much rather have love and affection. His only treat in this hard, cruel world.
I have no problem depleting the local rat population, for I know that it will long outlive my species. But that lizard-monkey has me thinking, about bush meat and how a crowded world is driven to eat what it can find, depleting the jungle. This is a problem of overpopulation and not of carno-tourism. But when I ask about a beast and the hunter says, "I never see those anymore" I know why, it's because they've been shot and ate. Perhaps my urge to dine on exotic meat has diminished since my lifelong quest to taste human was fulfilled in a bloodsoaked and quite unappetizing night with a jujuman that shall not be recounted here. Meanwhile, I think the patented Third World In Your Face Slaughter will cause me to be even more disinclined to eat meat upon my return. Even so, as I am more likely to buy chitlins than chuck, I am a scavenger consumer within the meat industry's meatosphere. Yet flesh will always be a special treat for me, a gift reverently taken from the creature that provided it.
---
I wake up in the morning to a knock on the door, breakfast is ready. It's just coffee or tea and a jar of honey with a plate of bread, but it has been prepared for me. I liv e in relative luxury while the jungle presses in on every side. I import bicycles and try to shake awake a slumbering giant rail monopoly. I turn on the television and BBC World is showing some symphony performance... with the classical music as I sip tea, I don't just feel like a steam-age explorer, I feel like I'm in a movie of some pith-helmeted gadabout.
Too bad it's not a Bollywood movie, available in full half-day length every Saturday on one of the two TV channels. If only life were like that. A love scene that turns into a long song-and-dance, a swordfight, the music swells, and then it's time to sing and dance again. Sometimes it would go song-> love scene -> caughtcha->sword fight -> song. Much better than in American movie land, where everything's always kersploding and the women are young but the men are old..
---
I love Ghanaian commercials. They don't have that Orwellian buy-or-die evilness that American ads possess. The innocence about them can be charming. Plus the products are based on African life. Like the pretty spokesmodel who says, "Wormex cured my worms... fast!" Or the gin commercial that shows a bunch of guys getting shitfaced and stumbling around- truth in advertising! In America it is taboo- possibly even illegal- to suggest that your alcoholic drink might get somebody drunk. There's a great musical commercial- the Three Days of Malaria- set to the tune of the Twelve Days of Christmas: "On the first day of malaria, take the purple pill..."
Some commercials aren't that funny, but captivate me simply because the subject matter is so far removed from my worldview. Like machete ads- yet every kid is a pro with one, tots wielding blades as big as themselves. In America we'd be aghast at the thought of giving a machete to a small child! Another strange PSA urges parents not to sell their children into slavery. What kind of parent... never mind, I won't go there. So much behavior here that I am tempted to condemn is driven purely by desperation.
---
One of my students, Asante, comes from cocoa farmers and so he brought me two cocoa pods to try. I'd seen them on the trunks of the trees, and all over the money, but I'd never eaten fresh cocoa.
The outer hull is much like a squash. Cutting it in half, you will find the seeds, looking for all the world like an oversized maggot or some sort of spider-egg cocoon. Or a half-ear of corn with huge white kernels. There is a superstructure of white filament holding the seeds in place, just like in a pomegranate. You don't eat the hull, the seeds, or the filament. Instead, you can pick out the seeds and suck off the goo around them- it has the consistency of grapeflesh. The taste is not at all like chocolate. It's much closer to cocoa butter. If you bite the seeds you can get that bitter taste that semisweet chocolate has. Once the seeds are dried on rattan platforms, some people chew them and spit them out. Farmers don't make anything from cocoa, they just mill the seeds and sell it in bags for export. Apparently there are people trying to develop in-country processing, but as it is this is a cash crop, and a relatively profitable one compared to plantains and yams.
Every Ghanaian knows the story of Teteh Quashie, the Ghanaian hero who brought the cocoa tree to Ghana. Legend has it that he traveled to the Spanish colony of Fernandepo, where they had the trees. They let him try some but wouldn't let him take any home to grow. So he swallowed the seeds and smuggled them out inside him, and returned home to grow cocoa trees whereever he pooped, like some excretory Johnny Appleseed.
---
An update on my quest to figure out what apese is- it's related to the porcupine. That explains why it lives in trees. They say it is smaller and less dangerous than the porcupine. It has a long tail with a tassel at the end like a kangaroo rat. Whatever it was, it was the tastiest meat I have ever eaten! I sure hope it's not endangered. I want to eat more!
So far I have eaten fish head stew, goat head stew, goat hoof stew, goat chitlin stew, rat stew, porcupine stew, bush chicken stew, cane rat stew, dog stew, dog kebab, and snail stew. Yet there remain many local stews which I have not tried. To a Ghanaian, their diet is not homogenous! There are many different types of stew. It can be based on rice, corn, yam, plantain, plaintain-and-yam, cassava, dried cassava, and many other subtle variations that appear to all be stew to the outsider. But sometimes I yearn for a piece of lettuce, or a crunchy onion. My addiction to strange tastes has served me well here, but my addiction to texture has not.
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