The Food

Before coming to Ghana I tried to do some reading on what the food would be like here. I found out that much of the Ghanaian food is eaten using your hands (well, specifically your right hand, as people don’t use their left hand here for anything) and have interesting names like fufu, kenkey and banku. Many of the traditional Ghanaian dishes consist of some sort of dough-like substance of varying consistencies (from pancake batter to firm ash potato) made from maize, or plantain or other crops and served in some sort of soup. From my reading, I also found that most westerners don’t like these traditional Ghanaian dishes. However, being eager to try anything once, I was excited to try these unusual dishes once arriving in Ghana. However, once arriving here, I was disappointed to find out that my host family does not typically serve traditional Ghanaian dishes to westerners, rather opting for more “western” style cuisine. And by “western” I mean rice and pasta. When I first got here I thought to myself, “I like rice, I like pasta, this won’t be so bad” until I had rice and pasta for every meal except breakfast for an entire week. And when I say rice, I don’t mean a side of rice with a serving of meat and vegetable to complete the meal, no I mean a plate of rice with some sort of red sauce for flavour. And the pasta, it’s not so bad when you get it the first time around (except when they add sardines to it… not a big fan of this), it’s more of an issue when they over re-heat the pasta when there is leftovers to the point where any reminants of liquid from the pasta sauce has all but disappeared and the once tender pasta is now more like trying to chew rubber. It’s not so bad for me, seeing that I have only been here 3 weeks, but Emma has now been eating the exact same thing everyday for 11 weeks, which you could imagine, gets a little tiresome after a while. Breakfast isn’t so bad, typically we’re served egg sandwiches (made fro what I gather is 2 eggs and three slices of bread) and tea of coffee (I go for the tea). The only time I’m disappointed with breakfast is when it’s untoasted bread with Blue Bell (a butter-like spread that the advertisements seemed to pride is made from 70% animal fat… yum). If you are keeping track, all that adds up to a lot of carbs. From my calculations, on an average day according to Canada’s Food Guide (which I am now quite familiar with thanks to block II) I’d say I get about:

- 10 servings of grains
- 2 servings of meats and alternatives
- 0.5 servings of fruits and vegetables
- 0 servings of dairy

which is a far cry from the:
- 6 servings of grains
- 2 servings of meats and alternatives
- 6-7 servings of fruits and vegetables
- 2 servings of dairy

that I should be getting. I’ve told Dr. Gyepi-Ate about the food we get here, and she says that we should complain, but the family doesn’t exactly like it when we complain to Emmanuel (one of the Projects Abroad people) about our homestay. Natalie once complained to Emmanuel when we were getting brown water to use for showering and laundry, and the family was very cold towards here for the rest of the week.

Although the food at home is not the greatest compared to other homestays, when traveling I get a taste of the little treasures in Ghanaian food, or Ghanaian junk food more precisely:

1. FanIce – Ice cream in a bag (like most things here). It is quite sweet, and quite delicious. Typically eaten when only half frozen while at the tro station waiting for my hot humid dilapidated tro to fill up. An excellent source (at least in my mind) of calcium.
2. FanYogo – Strawberry flavoured frozen yoghurt (not like frozen yoghurt that you would buy at an ice cream shop, but more like strawberry yoghurt from superstore that has been frozen). Not as sweet as FanIce, but a slightly healthier alternative to get your calcium intake.
3. Fresh Sugar Cane – bought from children carrying it on their heads at the tro station. You don’t eat sugar cane, but rather, chew the wood and suck out the sweet juice (almost like sugar flavoured water)
4. Plantain Chips – slightly salted deep-fried plantains slices similar to regular potato chips that you would get back home (except slightly thicker and they look more banana like)
5. Green Mangos – there are two varieties of mangos here in Ghana. The larger green ones, and the smaller yellow ones (yes, those are the technical names). The green ones are better, as they are less stringy than the yellow ones.
6. Coco – a rather odd fruit. To eat you break open the green shell to find dark purple seeds (larger than pumpkin seeds) covered in a slimy white substance. You then suck the sweet slimy white substance off the seeds and spit the seeds out.
7. Apo (I don’t know if that’s the actual name of the fruit, as words are sometimes difficult to make out through the Ghanaian accent) – another rather odd fruit. Has a sweet white pulp and black seeds. Is very good, although quite messy to eat.
8. Fresh Pineapple – the pineapple back home has nothing on these guys.
9. Bob Water – pure water (water you can drink) comes in 500ml sealed bags. Though it’s pure water, some of it still tastes like dirt, although I always seem pleased with the one that is labeled “Bob”.