It is kind of hard to avoid, really, when that’s what most of my questions have been about. Food. What do people eat to sustain themselves. They tell me: That wild bush has leaves that can be used to spice tô (millet porridge). And they pick the leaves and start nibbling on them, offering me a piece too.
I’ve been invited to share many meals, and most of the things that they have cultivated aren’t that bad. The tô is definitely edible, even though I wouldn’t call it delicious, the spinach-like aubergine leaf sauce is decent and the maize couscous and jollof rice is even good. But the other things, mostly the wild. So bitter! Sour, sometimes even putrid. I thought I wasn’t picky with food, but here I’ve had to learn that there are many things that I just can’t eat. Not because I find them disgusting, but because they don’t taste like food at all. Like eating grass. My mouth rejects them.
Like the kegla berries of the keglega tree. They can be used to make soap, but can also be eaten. My guides always stop to pick the ripe orange ones and nibble on them like they were wonderful little treats. For me, the tinge of sweetness can’t hide the overwhelming bitterness and my nose instinctively wrinkles. They always laugh at me, my villager guides.
Or the guila fruit, that grows at the base of white water lilies. I must admit, it looks quite tempting, but eating it, it only tastes like starch and muddy water.
The bagandré bush is used as an indicator for the state of a fallow, and its fruits are dried and grinded into a nutritious powder for the animals to eat during the dry season. But the young leaves are also used spice tô. I don’t understand why. They are really bitter. The taste is quite similar to spruce needle shoots, you know, the small bright green tufts at the end of the spruce branches in late spring. To be honest, I quite like eating them, the baby spruce needles I mean, but only a nibble here and there. I wouldn’t spice an entire meal with it. That’s way too much bitterness for my pallet.
And the gumbo, which actually is a cultivated crop, but that I would like to include in the category “weird foods that I’ve tried”. The taste is actually quite nice, something not quite unlike cucumber, but after the first bite the whole thing turns into slime in your mouth. Like, the consistency we’ve been programmed through movies about supernatural things to associate with anything yucky and disgusting.
I think the conclusion here is that I would not survive out in the wild. My taste buds are way too domesticated.
There was one delicious wild thing that they introduced me to, though. The yellow or orange berry of the mugunuga bush.
Mostly, they’re made up of a big seed, but around it there’s a thin layer of berry. Sweet, without a hint of bitterness. They had many of the bushes in Zanzi and Nakombogo, and I ripped up tiny holes in my shirt trying to get hold of the berries on the thorny branches. The taste was quite unique, but if I have to describe it, I’d say it was a mix of cloudberry and apricot. It was amazing.
Katja Malmborg 