The Sport of Cooking

 Last week I found myself watching coverage of the winter Olympics, a conglomeration of sports geographically and financially inaccessible to the Ghanaians I was watching with. I’ve always thought that the Olympics would be more compelling if the competitions engaged the strength and capacity for endurance that a lot of the world’s population employs in their day to day life.  Right now I’m quite fascinated with the sport of cooking.

In Ghana, cooking is a workout. Heart rates accelerate, muscle is built and sweat is induced.  I fancy myself  someone who is decently athletic and who can handle herself in the kitchen.  I am not a contender in the Ghanaian cooking Olympics.  The meals that are prepared (and perhaps preferred) within the home are starchy porridges paired with soups. Making either is not easy. Food is enjoyed in smooth textures and complex flavors that necessitate laborious, tedious, and fastidious cooking.

Grinding

Though blenders are increasingly used in kitchens around Ghana, the traditional mode of blending ingredients for soup involves using a small ceramic mortar and a wooden pestle.  The technique of wrist movement and arm pressure to efficiently and quickly grind things like peppers, garlic, tomatoes, and onions is one that is seemingly intuitive.  And yet every time I give the grinding a go, I feel like a moron.  I feel like that 5 year old me who struggled to figure out the rhythm to pumping ones legs to gain momentum on the swings.   I vigorously move my wrist in a pattern I think is mimicking the technique I so diligently observe while simultaneously reminding myself to apply muscle pressure. When I decide that my arms are too tired to continue, I decide that I’m finished.  I present my results and am faced with kind, yet placating comments about my effort.  My cooking supervisors will point out the tiny membranes of pepper or tomato skin that I have failed to incorporate into the pulse.  And they will then take over and get the job done.

Ghanaian hand takes over Jessica's epic failure at grinding peppers

Ghanaian hand takes over Jessica's second epic failure at grinding peppers and tomatoes

Pounding

Fufu (or kapala as it is known in the languages of the Upper West) is perhaps the dish that is most reliant on the pounding process. (More profound words and thoughts on the importance of fufu in Ghanaian diet found here)

Pounding of kapala takes place in large wooden mortars and long wooden pounding sticks. Pieces of boiled yam are placed in the mortar and in the beginning stage, the pounder/s gently slam the stick down onto the yam to mash it.   Once the whole pieces of yam are no longer visible, the pounder/s begin using absolute full force to slam the pounding weapons down onto the mashed yam.  This is done repeatedly, sometimes with grunting reminiscent of tennis players, until chemistry takes over.  The idea is to slam the yam until it forms a gelatinous texture.  At this point one person continues to pound and another person uses the seconds between poundings to collect and knead the yam dough while adding small amounts of water.  It’s like watching synchronized swimming.......but only if synchronized swimming was terrifying to watch for fear of hand maiming.  I do not even attempt this process for fear of hand maiming or being a hand maimer.

This is a relatively small kapala mortar-a size for a small family 

Finished kapala served in the grinding bowl so as to absorb all of the delicious remnants of garlic and pepper--can't eat out of blender can ya?

Stirring

Other staple foods such as banku or tuo zafi (made from maize flours sometimes mixed with cassava or millet flours) require extensive stirring.  These porridges are thick and made in large quantities.  They are stirred in a particular pattern until the consistency is smooth.  Stirring such vats of flour and water is like being on a rowing machine that sits over a hot fire.  I stir for about 30 seconds and then hand over the paddle like spoon to those with biceps and triceps I covet.

Harnessing the cooking pot with your toes is surely worthy of a medal in and of itself

 

Teenagers are often responsible for cooking the tuo zafi, making my lack of endurance feel even more pathetic

Stirring banku for selling at a streetside food joint

My participation in these cooking sessions, while largely observational, is a nice reminder that eating well requires commitments of time and labor that not everyone is able to provide for themselves or their families. As a grad student, I've had my fair share of boiled peanut and Miller High Life dinners* because I lack the time, energy or brain cells to prepare myself something a little more substantial in the wholesome meal realm.  Though food accessibility issues have been widely integrated into discussions on diet and health, I think there's still a lot of room to talk more about how the preparation of good food can take good time or good money.  Not everyone can afford time saving gadgets or time saving ventures such as pre-washed, pre-chopped vegetables.  Cooking from whole foods can sometimes take whole chunks of time.  And there's value to that in how our food tastes, how our children learn to cook, and how we pass on unique culinary traditions.  

*I seriously miss these dinners

There is a Season

To honor Pete Seeger’s recent passing, I title this blog after his pretty swell retrofitting of the Book of Ecclesiastes into a pretty sweet song. He was an anthropologist of song.

If you’ve ever commented to a teacher that they made a good career choice because they get the summers off, I bet you were very poorly received--especially if such a comment was made to my father.  Farming is another profession prone to critiques of time spent lollygagging.  This is not so true. 

The dry season is opportune for putting new fencing up around gardens that people keep around their homes.  Fences are essential for keeping out roaming goats, sheep, pigs, and anthropologists prone to tactile methods of observation. 

Anthropology is well adapted to documenting how economic and social activities change throughout the year.  We’re long term researchers and  enmeshed in the communities we’re researching.  One of the principle methods of anthropology is observation.  When I’m not asking people questions, I’m constantly scanning my surroundings and looking for things, actions, and behaviors that will tell me something about life in the rural Upper West during the dry season.  The things that I see are just as important as the things that I ask about--sometimes more so.  If I ask people what they do during the dry season they will sometimes respond that they do nothing because they are not farming.  This is not so true. I've observed a lot of this "nothingness" that is happening. 

Just as teachers spend their "dry seasons" working on things like curriculum, professional development, and lesson plans, the dry season for farmers is about hustling. 

If you are the head of a large family that likes to eat a lot of fufu, it's necessary to have new mortars that can withstand the pounding.   The dry season is the season for making new mortars as is shown here. 

The dry season is, perhaps, mostly about building.  People are refurbishing existing house structures and building new ones. 

Such building is always time and labor intensive.  If people are using local materials to build mud brick, the first step in the process is to make the bricks. This involves digging deep holes, hauling water, mixing mud, hauling the mud to a brick making station, and then giving the bricks an opportunity to bake in the sun. 

The next step involves assembling.

For households transitioning from mud brick to cement brick, the process is not only time and labor intensive, but also quite expensive.  One bag of cement costs approximately $10.  This bag of cement will form 30 cement blocks.  30 cement blocks can build about 1/3 of a one wall for a small room.  Money for building cement block homes comes from different  strategies. Some farmers are selling their recent groundnut harvest (aka peanuts, the only viable commercial crop for farmers here) even though groundnut prices are currently quite low.  Others are doing day labor in Wa, a large town about 10 kilometers away and one that is booming in size because of the growth of a university.   They spend the day  shovelling sand into a dump truck to be used in the construction industry.  They earn about $4-7 for their day labor. They then spend some of that money on buying  cement for their own homes as well as save some for the cost of inputs for farming. These cement block homes are often works in progress for years. Think about this the next time some media outlet demerits some African's home as a "shack." 

For 3 years a farmer has been selling his groundnut harvest to put up this house.  

The dry season is also about gathering stuff from the bush (countryside).  Men have more time to go hunting and fishing during the dry season. Women have more time to spend gathering firewood, burning charcoal and gathering wild foods. All such activities are vital to procuring income and enhancing food security.  These are the things that I need to know about so that I can understand the bigger picture of household management--how people make decisions about how to earn and spend money throughout the year, not just during the farming season. Farming is never the only story for farming families. 

A dam where fishing occurs with weighted throw nets as well as set up catch nets. 

Demonstration of a bird trap

The stems of the vogaa flower (collected from a tree).  The flowers are used in the preparation of soup. Like so many of the soup ingredients here (especially okra), the ingredient is said to be nice because it makes the soup slippery. Slippery soup works well for the staple starchy porridges that are consumed here.  The slippery soups coat the porridges very well, ensuring that you get the flavor of the soup with every bite of starch. 

Who is the Anthropologist?

Two summers ago during a prelim research trip I found myself donning the tourist hat at a hippo sanctuary located about 15 miles from my field site.  My fellow tourists-in-arms were a German family.  As we were getting ready to load the canoes that would provide our river safari, there was a moment that the anthropologist in me loved so much.  As we stood on the river bank waiting, some women disembarked from a canoe with the wares they were taking to sell at a local market.  Upon solid ground and close proximity, we became the objects of intense observation.  Or rather the Germans became the objects of intense observation. For the Germans were decked out in ridiculous river safari ensembles.  They were in head to toe synthetic fabric and looked as foreign as they possibly could. I can only imagine how those women were internally postulating about why the Germans were wearing the clothes that they were.  And a game I’ve named Who is the Anthropologist? was born.  

Because I’m so eager to see and learn here, it’s easy to forget that Ghanaians are just as curious about me.  One of the hazards of living in the community where you do research is that it’s incredibly difficult to refuse visitors to your house when you’ve spent all day inviting yourself into their homes to ask them questions about their lives and observe their activities.  So I find myself hosting a daily entourage of children who walk into my room to see all the bizarre possessions I’ve brought with me and what I do with them.  Thus far, my decrepid Dell laptop is the item that draws the most excitement.  Kids who haven’t even been in my house will see me around town and shout out “laptop!” and mimic typing and make computer noises.  Nevermind that my next door neighbor has a TV and DVD player. 

And here in the land of way too many plastic bags, my box of aluminum foil is also quite intriguing.   

My behaviors, too, are inciting local theory building.  In visiting with the local assemblyman last night I learned that many people are concerned that I don’t have intestines.  This concern emerges from the fact that I don’t consume the standard amount of local foods, the amount locally perceived to be substantial and sufficient to filling the belly.  Fufu (yam that has had the holy hell pounded out of it to become highly starchy and gelatinous) is served in portions the size of an American football.  I find it physically impossible to consume that.  When I only eat half of the football it seems that people are assuming that my body can’t process food properly.   I wonder what they think I’m doing in the latrine everyday.  They see my daily walk there.  

And then there’s the interpretation of how foreigners look.  Whenever I’m with another white woman it’s not unusual to be asked if that woman is my twin.  It matters not that hair colors are different or facial features incongruous. I brought a Memory game with me to play with kids.  Interestingly, they are able to match items that they’ve probably never encountered (like a rotary telephone or a dog house) but are unable to correctly match the white people (and it’s only white people in the game) represented. 

The absolute best, however, is how Ghanaians perceive the sound of foreigners. There is a tendency for Ghanaians to initiate conversation with a foreigner by talking in a high pitched, Mickey Mouse voice.  Though highly annoying, I use such opportunities to entertain myself.  I respond to such cartoonish conversation initiations with my best Leonard Cohen meets Tom Waits impersonation. 

It’s always nice to be reminded that I, too, am under the cultural interpretation microscope.