A Ham Talks Protein

With my whacky appetite of late, I’ve been allowing my body’s cravings for chicken to win over my mind’s reluctance to eat chicken.  I’m not a meat eater in my home context.  For the past 5 years I’ve lived in Georgia, a state that often reminds me why I don’t eat chicken in Georgia or any other US State. Semis stuffed with crates upon crates of chickens are a constant presence on GA highways, signaling the fact that chickens come from factories, not farms.  Where I live in Ghana, I’m surrounded by chickens that know nothing other than the open range and a diet of grains and termites.

Dried cow dung used to attract termites to feed to chickens

However.  Most of the chicken that is consumed in Ghana does not come from local farmers. Most of the chicken that is consumed in Ghana is consumed in urban areas and has been imported from abroad and frozen for eons.  I know this because I’m aware of Ghanaian food politics. But because I live amongst roaming chickens and the factory farms that produce mass produced, juiced up chickens don’t exist here (and therefore don’t serve as visible signs of an industrial food system), it’s a lot easier to ignore the source of the chicken I’m eating.  I could go and buy a chicken from any farmer in my community, but I haven’t because I know I will then be likely to witness the slaughter of the chicken, a sight I’m still not comfortable with even though I’m only 2 generations removed from a livelihood of raising and killing chickens.  Instead I’ve been buying chicken at one of the numerous cold stores in a nearby urban center. Cold stores sell frozen fish, chicken, sausages and so forth.  This is the meat that is coming from abroad and the very meat that I protest against by NOT eating back home. Two weeks ago while I was waiting to buy some of this frozen chicken, I finally got the visible sign that is putting me back in the no chicken camp.  Underneath the counter was a box collecting scraps of the butchering process.  On the box was the emblem: “Georgia Grown.”  This, I can only assume, indicates that some of the very chicken I abstain from eating in Georgia is in fact the chicken I’m eating in Ghana.  And that makes no sense, but is the very essence of how weird and global and the food system is today.

Meat from the bush 

Advertisement for grasscutter, a very popular bush meat, in Accra, a metropolitan city that also enjoys Pepsi

People in the community where I live rarely eat large, distinguishable pieces of meat even though they rear livestock.  Goats, sheep and cattle are rarely used for household consumption because they are more valuable as assets that can yield cash or be used as in-kind in transactions. Bush meat (meat that is hunted from the wild) remains quite popular throughout Ghana, but is considered more of a luxury than a daily protein source.  Fish is more widely consumed as it is easily smoked to enhance shelf life and it is comparably much cheaper than meat.  Pieces of smoked fish add great flavor to soups and are often complimenting tiny dried herring that are ground and added to soup in a powdered form. 

Dried herring ready for pounding

With the arrival of the rains and the increased availability of green things for cows to forage upon comes the increased availability of milk.  With the increased availability of milk comes the increased availability of a locally made fried cheese called wagashe.  Yes.  Fried cheese.  Nothing is better. 

Fresh milk with maize porridge

The most interesting protein sources, however, are those that are plant derived. I’ve already written about the importance of cowpeas. Bambara beans, an indigenous crop that produces a legume similar to the peanut, are also a valued source of protein.  Bambara beans can be boiled or roasted, much like peanuts.  Bambara beans are also ground into flour that is combined with maize flour to produce a steamed dumpling that is awesomely similar to a tamale.  

Bambara beans

Peanuts (groundnuts as they are known here) are roasted and used as a snack food, but perhaps gain most of their culinary esteem in the pulverized paste form.  Groundnut soup, made from groundnut paste, is a popular soup right now as people are processing last year’s groundnut crop for sale and re-cultivation.  When combined with biri, a wild green vegetable that is currently thriving with the rains, a pretty divine soup is created. 

To what would shock pumpkin loving Americans, pumpkins here are valued not for their flesh but for their seeds and leaves. Seeds from gourds are ground and strong protein value to soups and stews.  

Pumpkin seeds at market ready for grinding

The yellow, fleshy looking part of this dish is ground gourd seed

Another seed based protein source that is very popular here, and throughout Sahelian West Africa, is dawa-dawa.  Dawa-dawa is a fermented product made from the seeds of the Africa locust bean tree.  The pods of this tree contain yellow, pillowy fruits that fall into the Dr. Seuss camp in my ongoing quest to categorize all trees in the Ghanaian savanna as either Dr. Seussian or Tim Burtonian.  

Pods from the African locust bean tree

Removing the fruit from the pod

The Seussian yellow fruit

The fruit is either eaten off of the seeds or washed off with water.  The seeds are roasted and pounded to remove a hard outer shell.  Finally, the seeds are pounded into a paste.  The paste is rolled into balls that are used in just about every soup that is cooked in this region.  Dawa-dawa gives a very distinct smell when it is added to hot oil.  If I had enough money to be well schooled in fine cheeses, I would be able to say which fine cheese dawa-dawa smells like.  But I’m not well schooled in fine cheeses.  I just know it smells like a pungent cheese and that is a sign of its culinary prowess.  It adds a distinguishable and nice flavor to soups in addition to its 40% crude protein content.

Dawa dawa in its final form, ready for being plopped into soup

As the world's growing economies become hungrier for meat, and as an not very environmentally friendly industrialized meat system continues to provide the majority of the world's meat, now is the time to celebrate the protein sources that do not ride so high on the food chain.  So here’s to dawa-dawa.   May it contribute to fixing a craving that I don’t want chicken from Georgia to solve anymore.