Mmmmmmm!

I seriously don't know how I got this far into the blog without posting more about food. I've certainly been meaning to do it... but, well, perhaps I've been too busy eating. To be sure, each new place brings even more new yummy things to my attention, so perhaps I've just been hesitant to write as the story unfolds. In any case, this huge part of my travelling life goes unexplored no longer.

So, food. I love food. I love food even more when missing some of the other creature comforts (having more than 3 shirts, functioning toilets, or temperatures under 35). To a budget traveller food is a lifeline served up in shacks by the roadside.

And shacks they are. A standout feature of the West African eating scene is the vast gap in price between street food and restaurant fare. The same dish might cost you 50 cents on the street and 4 dollars in a restaurant. Suffice it to say, on a shoestring, I rarely end up at places with menus.

Which I don't mind. West African cuisine (and it is possible to speak in broad strokes about the region here) lends itself to streetside service. All around the region, the basic recipe for most meals is sauce + starch = yummy. The starches tend to vary from country to country, with lots of rice in Senegal and Guinea, for example, and much more fufu (a glop of goo made of pounded flour from various grains) along the Gulf of Guinea. You also get To, smaller glops of maize-based pate, and from time to time, couscous. Like most white people here, my preference runs to rice - but unlike many other foreigners, I haven't developed any particular loathing of fufu and its relatives, either.

In any case, you take this starch and over it pour a sauce, often with meat bits or fish bits in it. Sauces are made of many things; my personal favourite is Peanut/Groundnut/Sauce Arachide, especially its Senegalese variant that comes thick, brown, and peanut-y. No points to Ghana for making groundnut soup that just tastes like pepe (the basic hot spice used here). Other sauces are based on green stuff - either cassava leaves, okra, or (my favourite) spinach. Generally there are chunks of something meat-ish in the sauce as well. By far the most common, even far from the sea, is fish. Often it's random little river fishies; they are the cheapest protein here by some measure. Next most common is goat, which pops up in stew or as brochettes by the streetside. Chicken and beef are rare and pricey; pork barely registers (though in more Christian areas, you do find it from time to time)

There are, of course, tons of regional specialties. Senegal goes in for Thibou Djienne, a super yummy fish and veggie mix with the rice steamed in the sauce... mmm! Ghana gets huge points for Red Red, a delicious bean stew served over plantains. I'm in Benin now, where mashed yams emerge as a starch; utter yum.

I'm a vegetarian at home. Not a strict one - ideology being just as silly in your diet as anywhere else - but I rarely eat meat. In many ways though, my diet at home prepared me pretty well for west Africa. "Rice and stuff" is a pretty big staple for any vegetarian, so when I chow down here, I kind of feel at home.

But it's not the big meals that make West Africa great, so much as the little things. You're never far from food in a town, where a continual parade of street vendors go by with buckets of deliciousness on their heads, or grill them by the roadside. Indeed, with rice and sauce generally more of a breakfast and lunch thing here, the roadside barbeque is my usual dinner stop. Tonight, as often, it was a pile of fresh-grilled goat liberally doused in spice and chopped onions, with some fried plantain and a mango for desrt. MMMMMMM. But the snacks go beyond the joys of meat on a stick.

Yam chips, oh yes. Peanuts in every form. Deep fried doughnuts. Roast plantain. Sweets. Dried fishes. Sandwiches of all kinds. Ice cream bars. Fresh yogurt. It goes on and on and on. Togo and Benin even have plenty of roadside salad shacks for that veggie craving.

Just as good as the snacks are the drinks. Often tied up in little plastic bags you find fresh ginger beer (clears the sinuses!) , juice from the baobab tree, iced tea and lemonade (big up to Togo for this one), sweet yogurt drinks, and the love of my liquid life, bissap - sweet hibiscus flower tea, iced down. Many of these are sold frozen from coolers, and letting them melt in your hand is a lifesaver on a scorching day. The best part? Essentially all these things come in good portions for 10 to 50 cents

A whole separate point has to be made about deep fried plantains, which may be the most perfect snack ever created. Roasted plantains get dry; deep-fried they are soft and sweet with just the right amount of salty crunch. You usually get them hot, and with a cold beer they're truly mind-blowingly delicious.

Beer is almost a whole other topic. Each country has at least one unique brew. Most of them are sort of middling lagers that do the job on a hot day, but there are a number of standouts. You can get a mean bottle of stout in Ghana, and the Togolese Pilsner is exceptionally good. They're also usually rather cheap: the standard price for a 630 ml bottle (points to Liberia for 720 ml monsters at the same price) is about a dollar. This goes up in more Muslim places, but not by that much.

And then there's fruit. It's seasonal of course, but my life is full of many kinds of delicious mango, sweet soft papaya, meaninglessly cheap and delicious bananas, occaisional watermelons, oranges and mandarins, tiny sweet pineapples and so forth. I'm a fruit fiend, and it's rare to find a day where I don't down at least 4 or 5 bananas and a couple of mangoes.

My consumption of all of these things is made much easier by my freakish iron stomach. I've been in Africa almost 7 months now. I eat unwashed fruit, drink tap and well water, eat streetside salads and stuff that's been sitting in the sun all day. Not a peep. The only thing that's gotten my tummy really gurgling is a few hubristic attempts at downing whole watermelons in 2 sittings. I don't know much about the vagaries of immunology, and I don't care. I'd be perfectly willing to be sick from time to time as the price of being utterly carefree about food. The lack of sickness is just a bonus. That being said, in general the risks of food, and especially street food, are greatly overstated. I'd be much more worried about restaurants that get 5 customers a day rather than vendors who get 50 - the vendor food is far more likely to be fresh. I know plenty of digestively normal foreigners who would widely endorse this view.

The final thing that matters, oddly enough, in any discussion of West African food is language. Put simply, food in Francophone countries is generally much better. So is the experience of eating it. In Francophone West Africa there are little cafes everywhere where you can have a snack or a coffee and watch the street go by. In Anglophone countries, no dice. They are further burdened by horrid bread. Where in Francophone countries you find tasty crusty baguettes everywhere, in English ones you are stuck with the British bequest of spongey, tasteless loaves that resemble nothing if not wonderbread. Blechh. Any traveler eats a lot of bread, especially when you go away from towns and pack food, so this is a real problem. In any Francophone place you can step out of your hotel and easily find someone whipping up tasty omelettes on bread with a bit of mayo and some cafe au lait or tea (nescafe, usually - let's not be too optimistic here). In Anglophone places (Gambia excepted) you are SOL, as you are with finding a streetside cafeteria in which to be served.

Well, as I knew would happen, I can't write another word without getting a snack!
Peace
Josh