Stomachs on legs are proud to present

A couple of years back I had a week in Ethiopia.

After the anglophone part of deep East Africa, Ethiopia felt a bit like Europe.

One of the reasons is that their lovely Italian style macchiato... not to mention Ethiopia's superb coffee.

I know there are plenty of bad things about colonization, but like French style café's and baguettes in Laos, the Europeans have left some yummy trails.

But the huge greasy spaghetti that came with a pile of fries was less European... was more African, for their love of carbo and fries.


After a couple of tries of European style dishes and having learned that they are huge carbo-grease bombs, I started to stick with Ethiopian food.

I was trying to de-meat my diet while in Ethiopia, having felt I had so much meat in East Africa.

Fish goulash was one of the few choices on regular days.

But on vegetarian days - the Ethiopian orthodox church sets two days a week as vegetarian days - the restaurants have nice vegetarian specials.


I had this in Lalibela. Several bean stews and salad.

I was in Lalibela for the Ethiopian Christmas. I sat down with a French photographer staying at the same lodge, who ordered himself some meat stew dish, but kept stealing my bean stew... I thought French men were nicer.


I had this deluxe one in Addis Ababa. I wish the vegetarian special was available seven days a week!

Wowwww.
The plot thickens like Gong Bao sauce with Kingsfords 'expressly for food' cornstarch!

There have been a few interesting Gut Feelings discussions of late on personal eating choices vs societal implications.

As Maytel pointed out, there are so many different sets of circumstances under which, say, a Walmart may open, it's very difficult to say definitively if it will be a good or bad thing.

England is still fizzing with rage over Jamie Oliver's school dinner campaign, and omnivores get ever more obsessed with the origins of their food, calculating how much energy they expend per footstep to reach their seed store to buy a tomato plant. Meanwhile, as we noted in April, a study in the USA showed that vouchers that permit low-income women to shop at a local farmers’ market increased fruit and vegetable consumption in poor families.
it feels like the developed world is caught in a massive tangle of environmental and social/governmental concerns versus free will concerning what one puts in one's mouth.

Here is a fascinating article about how Los Angeles has imposed a one year ban on new fast food franchises in Southern LA.

Are we at a dietary tipping point? People's dietary choices being controlled by well-to-do city planners!! The coining of the term 'food desert'!!
Are healthy choices a type of imperialism, or is fast food a type of social ill that should be legislated against? It seems clear that in certain senses & situations people are not capable of making choices that are good for themselves.
But is this food-equivalent of Giuliani's draconian nightlife laws going to make LA people healthier and happier?
And is it a big deal if a few pupusa vendors are sacrificed along the way?

"Jonathan Gold, the LA Weekly food critic who won a Pulitzer Prize last year, said he understands the spirit of the freeze, which is an urban planning measure meant to keep the neighborhood, South Los Angeles, from being swallowed up by drive-though fast food restaurants. (A separate measure by the city provides economic incentives for new grocery stores and restaurants with table service.)

Fast food chains, he said, are like jellyfish in the ocean: with too many in one area, nothing else can thrive.

But he worries that the law could keep out places of more culinary interest. South Los Angeles has the best barbecue in the city, he said, and it has a growing number of cooks from Mexico and Central America making lamb barbacoa and pupusas. “Anytime you try to ban something, there’s a lot of bycatch,” he said.

The moratorium’s definition of a fast food business is any stand-alone restaurant that dispenses food, to stay or to go, and that has “a limited menu, items prepared in advance or prepared or heated quickly, no table orders, and food served in disposable wrapping or containers.” It is up to the city’s director of planning to decide which places fit that definition.

The councilwoman behind the moratorium, Jan Perry, says its intent is not to crush food choices, but to encourage variety and give residents more nutritious options. Making healthy decisions about food is difficult when people have small incomes, the grocery store is five miles away and a $1 cheeseburger is right around the corner, she and supporters of the ban say.

The moratorium doesn’t mean that people who live within the affected 32-square-mile zone will be cut off from the pleasures of an inexpensive cheeseburger and hot fries. More than 45 percent of the 900 restaurants there — the highest concentration in the city — are fast food chains.

The idea is to bring new eating options to the city’s food deserts, the term now in vogue to describe poor neighborhoods whose residents have few places to buy fresh groceries.

“People do not understand what happens in a disenfranchised community,” said Councilwoman Perry, who represents neighborhoods in the area. “The fact remains, there are not a lot of food choices in South L.A.”

Since there is not much land left to develop in the area, the moratorium will allow city planners time to determine what kinds of businesses would be best in an area where rates of obesity and diseases related to it are disproportionately high.

“What we’re beginning to see is almost the monopolization of our dietary intake by a handful of corporations,” said David Zinczenko, editor in chief of Men’s Health magazine and the author of several diet books, including “Eat This, Not That! for Kids!” (Rodale, 2008).

“Add to that the financial reality of feeding ourselves today, where a single grapefruit from a corner fruit stand costs two or more times as much as a few Chicken McNuggets,” he said, “and I think you can begin to put together a case for governmental intervention.”

But not everyone agrees, including Joe R. Hicks, a radio talk show host who was the executive director of Los Angeles’s Human Relations Commission under Mayor Richard Riordan a decade ago. The two now work for a think tank that focuses on race relations.

“The crime in all of this is that people are sitting around meddling into the very minutiae of what people are putting in their mouths,” he said.

He argues that the ban assumes the 500,000 people who live in South Los Angeles are intellectually incapable of deciding what to eat.

“There is not a single public health crisis in the history of mankind that has been solved by handing out brochures,” said Harold Goldstein, executive director of the California Center for Public Health Advocacy.

In South Los Angeles, the burgers continue to fry.

“There is a sentiment here that it is a little anti-American, but people forget government tells businesses where to go all the time,” said Eddie North-Hager, a blogger who runs a community bulletin board focused on his neighborhood, Leimert Park, which is about 90 percent black and within the ban area.

He says there are 10 McDonald’s restaurants within three miles of his home. “It seems like a lot,” he said, “and that’s just McDonald’s.”

I thought I had more of hand-to-mouth food photos, since I have been to the land of maize meal and have been in the land of sticky rice afterwards.

I found surprisingly few.

I think I also have my hands on food not on camera when hand-to-mouth commensality occurs. Here are some I managed to dig out.

The maize meal is called nshima in Malawi, ugali in Kenya and Tanzania and several more different names throughout South-East Africa. In homes, it sometimes comes served in the covered pot that keep them warm.

It's actually quite hot when they are freshly made... but the locals seem to have more tolerance to the heat from the maize meal.

The manner is to rinse your fingers first, then roll the nshima into a ball with your fingers. Some seem to be using a part of the palm. It takes some training... nshima feels a lot looser than sticky rice. It's similar to the consistency of, say, mashed potatoes after all the liquids are added.

The Kenyan and Tanzanian equivalent, ugali, has thicker consistency and is sometimes made hard enough to be cut into small pieces, so I was told.

The picture above might be condowole, similar texture to nshima made with white maize flour, but instead made with cassava flour.

Some people told me that if you keep eating condowole, you get constipated... I guess there is almost no fiber left in the starchy cassava flour.

Nshima and condowole are eaten with the relish.

The poor man's relish is pumpkin leaves cooked with just salt, while a bit better-off folks add tomatoes and onions.

Often, beans are the only protein source to accompany the meal.

Then comes usipa (small dried fish), also cooked with tomatoes and onions.

While in the city of Lilongwe, expats have them with chicken or beef. Or sometimes with chambo, freshwater fish from the Lake Malawi.

These prime protein sources are occasionally eaten in the countryside as well, but more rarely, and in many places limited on festivities.

There is so much attachment people seemed to have with this staple food. When I asked the project driver what his favorite food was... he thought about it for more than a few seconds, then said, nshima!

... and yes, fruits are also the classic hand-to-mouth food.

These small girls are not drying fish, but rather, walked around to sell these fish, while snacking on local mangoes.

When I stayed in the countryside at a local development officer's house, every once in a while we'd run out of water, which they brought from the nearby well about 500 meters away. After dark, there is no way you would walk to the well, so when the water is finished, it's finished.

So, after the meal is eaten in the evening, I sometimes went to bed feeling leftover nshima on my fingertips... which seemed to stick even after rinsing with a wee bit of water and rubbing off with tissues I brought. And I would try not to use those fingertips to take off my contact lens.

Voila: my husband. (I still get a kick out of how arcane that word sounds). He hates this photo.

#2: Gamely eating fried fish with soon-to-be in-laws at the Fisherman's Table Restaurant, Wellington, NZ



Nice location, but this restaurant is decidedly not good.

If you have that bourgeois, obsessive-compulsive habit of photographing food, no doubt you've also accidentally collected quite a few shots of people caught in the act of stuffing their faces. Hence: the Hand to Mouth series. Gut Feelings members, I heartily invite you to add your own.

And in the interests of bringing myself down a peg or two, I present:


#1: Chewing ribs in Porirua, Wellington, New Zealand.