How to think about butter in Wa

Wa is not a place where you find butter. To put this in terms that people from mid-MO will understand, pretend you live in Hermann and want to make some Indian dish that calls for tamarind paste.  This is not an ingredient you would ever expect to find in Hermann.  You'd expect to have to go to St. Louis to find it. Hermann is to tamarind paste as Wa is to butter (or so I thought). 

The butter posing against the bag it was put in

The pineapple upside down cake I made with the butter.
It is gloriously topped with Fan Ice (a local ice cream that magically
unites the flavors of two of my favorite guilty pleasures--Cool Whip
and vanilla icing that has a very long shelf life)

I am never one to be deterred, especially if I am being fueled by the desire to make and eat cake.  In my very first full day in Wa I found myself in the company of a volunteer from Japan who has been here for 18 months.  Like you do when you first meet someone, I initiated conversation by asking her if she knew of a place that sold butter.  She said yes, I freaked out, and got on my bike to go find the African European supermarket.  At the African European supermarket I found a cooler full of butter.  The butter was misshapen from repeated cycles of melting and re-solidifying.    But by golly.  BUTTER.  The next day I used that butter to make a cake. 

My fellow anthropologist-in-arms here in Ghana and I have conversed a lot about how to interpret our absolute commitment to making sure that we are able to prepare and eat the foods we are fond of.  I spent a week at her fieldsite and she has what can best be described as a food alter.  Here lie sacred spices and non-perishables as well as the high priestess of all cooking implements in Ghana-the can opener.  Because of Accra’s high density of ex-pats (Lebanese, Chinese, Indian, British, Italian and so on), it’s relatively easy to find a wide range of spices and other ingredients that are not necessarily “Ghanaian.”  I accumulated spices and brought them with me to Wa.  I’m still waiting to get permanently settled into the community where I’ll be living and cooking, but for now I do have a very large tote bag full of spices and dry beans waiting for their positions on my own food alter.  

It’s not that we don’t like Ghanaian food and refuse to eat it.  Ghanaian foods compose the majority of our diet and we find it incredibly satisfying. I could eat waakeye (rice and black-eyed pea dish) everyday whether here or in the US.  My cravings for kontomire stew (a tomato and pepper based stew with the leaves of the cocoyam, ground melon seeds and smoked fish) rival my cravings for lasagna.  But Ghanaian food is not the food that nourishes our spirits. At the end of a day of being an outsider whose existence as a single, 33 year old student is an absolutely ridiculous status, I sometimes want comfort food. Just as much as I want the food, I want to go through the familiar and cathartic rhythms of preparing that comfort food.   Food, I think most people would agree, is more than nutrition.  We eat to satisfy a biological need, but we do so through our cultural context and for reasons that extend beyond our biology.  This is a mantra of my research, one that I’m going to smear all over this blog, and one that I find ok to apply to myself.  I will learn how to cook local foods, but I’m also not about to give up my favorite food day of the year that showcases my favorite food of all time.  I’m already plotting how to unite the widely available Ghanaian white bread with my bag-o-spices to create a magnificent stuffing.  

Kontomire Stew

Waakeye smothered in spicy tomato stew