.....but there is no food!

If there were water

And no rock

And also water

And water

A spring

A pool among rock

If there were the sound of water only

….

But there is no water

(T.S. Eliot: Waste Land)

I still remember the day, one of my colleagues told me, she was asked in an interview what type of food she fell in love first in

Somalia

. I tried to digest this question for a long time, to figure out, what I would have said, if I this question had been posed to me.

First, yes, we eat food - almost always. Second, yes, we fall in love. Third, yes, we fall in love with Somalis - sometimes. Fourth, do we fall in love with food? And fifth - do we fall in love with Somali food? I did not find the answer easily. Therefore I tried to encounter the question from different angles: What kind of food do I eat, is this food Somali, do I love it,  what kind of food do Somalis eat, and in which way does the Somali food coincide with the food that I eat and do I love the intersection?

To start with the first question, as a vegetarian I am a little bit limited, so in Borama I mainly ate cornflakes and oats, coming from England and Dubai, with milk from Dubai or Yemen, rice from India, Spaghetti from Italy, boiled with tomatoes from Ethiopia, sometimes with white bread made from wheat probably traded from WFP food aid supplies to Southern Somalia. I calculated that actually every meal I consumed travelled about 50 000 food miles. Then, what do Somalis eat? For breakfast they eat loxo. To explain what it is, some describe it as a Somali injera, but it is not fermented like the Ethiopian injera and therefore not sour, in hotels it is called Somali pancake or crepe, but in the hotels it is also not the same as the home made one. If it is nutritious it is made from sorghum flour, if it is less nutritious, it is made from wheat or maize. Loxo I like very much, but it is almost impossible for foreigners to get hold of it, since preparation takes a long time, is done very early in the morning and therefore is almost exclusively available only within Somali families. Since I was teaching also nutrition, I tried to encourage students to eat a lot of loxo from sorghum and not to be tempted by useless Western food like cornflakes. No need for that, since none of my students had ever seen any cornflake in their life at all. Next question: how do Somalis eat the loxo? Actually the most common way is, to pour very sugary tea on it and cut it into small pieces with a spoon, until it becomes almost a paste. Because there are so high diabetes rates in the country, I told the students not to use so much sugar. There is a rumour, that Somalis get 50 percent of their calorie intake from sugar. I did not believe that, however, after my neighbour told me, for her family of 19 persons she buys monthly 75 kg of sugar, also after I consumed all that tea, about which one of my Somali colleagues joked that it should better be called a syrup, I believe it now. Usually Somalis do not only eat sugar and loxo, they also eat the very tasty Somali rice with raisins, meat from goats and camels, and drink the almost magic "caano geel", the camel milk, which apart from its numerous medical values is said to make you feel happy and free, and which in fact made me feel happy and free. Yes in fact, there is meat in town and sometimes camel milk, imported food and also goat meat and camel meat.

Then, why do Somalis consume so much sugar? Here the food story almost finds its end. The answer is: there is hardly any more meat and milk, especially in the rural areas. There is no food at all. There were three consecutive droughts, people are watching their livestock dying and their water points drying up. Where there were grasses, they are covered by sand dunes now, due to heavy sand storms in the Xagga season, the windy dry season. Where there are still trees, their leaves are old and hard and no more palatable for livestock. Livestock is the food of the nomads, stored as a mobile entity which is fading out more and more with every day without rain. But there is no rain. There is an emergency call by FSAU for the whole country already since June. There are richer people, who can buy some food on the markets, like we expatriates and richer traders, farmers and pastoralists, there are some places in the Northern parts, which have received some rains recently and recovered. The majority of the rural areas has remained dry. . In these areas there is also no food on markets to buy even for wealthier people.

Then, where is the food I could fall in love with?

Comments

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