Food Insecurity

In the lead-up to arriving in Burkina Faso, I remember many people asking me all about Burkina Faso and what life would be like there. After ascertaining where Burkina Faso was located, people frequently asked what food would be like. I always replied with a verbatim recitation of the description I had read in the welcome packet from the Peace Corps: “A Burkinabé specialty is tô, a paste made from millet flour that is served with delicious leaf sauces.” It was the type of situation where you think you have a vague semblance of an experience by having memorized peripheral details about it, but in actuality your eyes are not opened until undergoing the experience, and then your eyes can never be closed again.

Now, by way of background, when Dave and I were living in the US we rarely cooked for ourselves. For me, lunch in the financial district was a veritable cornucopia of options and rotated between a variety of lunch spots, such as the fancy salad bar, Chilean sandwich shop, sit-down sushi restaurant, Indian food stand, Korean buffet, Italian pasta place. Dinner was equally a rotary motion, a United Nations of take-out options, if you will: Lebanese, Korean, Thai, Italian (pasta and pizza being important distinctive factions), Japanese (sushi and shabu shabu also splintering off), Indian, Mexican, Chinese, Cambodian, Malaysian, Spanish tapas, Barbeque, New American, Burmese, Vietnamese , etc. (Allston, Massachusetts is pretty diverse in its food offerings.)

During the 10 week training in Ouahigouya we had breakfast and dinner prepared for us by our host families, and we were able to eat at a restaurant of our choosing for lunch. Now, some people love to cook for themselves and would have been devastated by this setup. Obviously, Dave and I were pretty used to having people prepare food for us and were pretty stoked about not having to worry about cooking for ourselves. Yet, something I failed to consider was that the fourth dimension of my culinary penchants (after convenience, cleanliness and cost) was predicated on choice. Burkinabé do not crave variety in food offerings, and their taste buds are very specific in their likes and dislikes. As I soon discovered, they generally only like to eat a starch (tô, rice, pasta) with sauce (tomato, peanut, and of course “delicious” leaf varieties). Finding a restaurant outside of this well-ingrained norm can be challenging and expensive… and essentially non-existent if you are attempting to do so in any location aside from a major city.

So now that Dave and I are at our permanent site with our own gas range and cantine stuffed with care package food (thank you all!) it has been a delight to cook for ourselves. Somehow, the opportunity to diversify food options outweighs the offensiveness of preparing food and doing dishes. As I previously mentioned, our living situation is a bit exceptional, as we have lots of fresh fruits and vegetables available on a daily basis in our city. However, our options are nevertheless a bit constrained because of seasonality- the produce in season right now are onions, tomatoes, zucchini, parsley, sweet potatoes, cucumbers, lettuce, cabbage and green peppers for vegetables and oranges, watermelons and bananas for fruits. Occasionally we have seen okra, potatoes, carrots, avocados and mangos, but not on a regular basis. I realize now how miraculous American supermarkets are, as you can get pretty much any vegetable or fruit whenever you want and you’re never constrained by silly things like “seasonality.” If someone wants strawberries in the dead of winter, gosh darn it, Whole Foods will go all the way to Costa Rica to get them for you with such facility that only the exorbitant price will indicate the lengths they’ve gone to.

The produce here is a bit of a blessing and a curse. Because there are no industrial-sized farms here in Burkina, all of the vegetables and fruits are for the most part locally produced and consequently wonderfully fresh and crisp. Overpriced organic food in the US doesn’t come close to the taste. However, because fertilizer is expensive, I hate to admit this, but sometimes raw sewage is used in its place. Therefore, we have to bleach all of the produce for 15 minutes and then rinse with treated water to make them safe for consumption (and mentally palatable). Bleaching is a small price to pay for the, well, small price we pay - CFA 50, or 10¢, will buy 4 heads of lettuce, for example. 20¢ will augur 3 lbs of sweet potatoes. Onions are a bit more expensive, normally priced around $1 for 4 large purple onions, though I would usually use only ½ of an onion in any one meal I prepare for two people. The breakfast baguette Dave and I share costs 25¢. The $8 / day salary that we each receive goes a long way in the food department.

Despite that, cooking for ourselves has not been easy. I would liken the process to those word games where you have to spell as many words as you can from a limited combination of letters. The limited times when I was forced to cook in the US, despite the bountiful treasure trove of food at my disposal, I would invariably make the same thing: orechette with broccoli rabe. As you might imagine, I was a bit ill-prepared to cook here but somehow we are managing to get by. Believe it or not, the difficulty of cooking is greatly exacerbated when you have no refrigerator, microwave, or oven. Dave has been very gracious about my concoctions but at least we don’t go to bed hungry. In the meantime, if anyone wants to send us any burritos via DHL, we would be most grateful…