JuneJuly

In the Upper West, June and July are often referred to as one month: JuneJuly.  The JuneJuly compression evokes the lean season—the period before harvest when farming households endure incredibly tight food budgets.  Farmers have invested all of their money in their crops that are still in the fields.  Stored food from last year’s harvest is finished.  Money for buying food is pretty darn hard to come by, but people manage to different degrees.

Maize reserved for planting in July

This year JuneJuly is extending into JuneJulyAugust. The first harvest period has been derailed by drought that killed a lot of the maize that was planted at the start of the rains.  People have replanted this staple, but there are still 2 more months to go before it will (hopefully) be harvested. To add insult to injury, with no new local maize integrating into the food system to compete with maize from other regions of Ghana, those who sell foodstuffs can set high prices.  Last year at this time, with fresh, local maize in the markets, a bowl of maize (enough to feed a family of approximately 5 people approximately 2 meals) cost approximately 2 Ghanaian Cedis, which is approximately $1 when the Ghanaian Cedi is not deflated (as it currently is). Right now a bowl of maize is hitting 3.50 Ghanaian Cedis a bowl.  With the sudden and recent cessation of a government subsidy on fuel, fuel costs have recently soared and with the rise in fuel comes an additional blow to food costs. This is not a trivial series of events for most families in Ghana, where food costs make up a high percentage of the household budget. However, coping with JuneJuly, just like food insecurity anywhere in the world, is not a homogenous experience. 

Being food insecure in one of my research communities means skipping meals because money is so tight that even maize porridge and a proper soup is not always guaranteed. It means having to beg for some pieces of fresh maize from family members so you can eat for the first time in 24 hours.  It means carefully doling out roasted bambara beans to your children and not offering any to the visiting anthropologist, a rarity in a culture that always invites strangers to partake in their food. Here people laugh when I question whether they’ve lost weight in the past month because this is seen as a given for JuneJuly.  This question results in people sharing “funny” stories about pants falling off.

Being food insecure in my other research community is not about skipping meals because of lack of food, but fatigue with having to eat the same foods over and over again because they are the most affordable foods.   It means selling your rice harvest to buy more maize for the household because even though everyone is sick of the maize porridge, the porridge that can be made from one bag of maize lasts a lot longer than the equivalent bag of rice. Maize is cheap.  Rice is not.  In this community people laugh when I ask them if in the past month they’ve ever had to forgo eating a whole day. This is an unfathomable scenario here. But people also express enough malaise with a routine, non-changing diet that their appetites diminish and they skip meals not out of necessity but choice. They express disappointment for not being able to satisfy their cravings for foods that satisfy certain taste and health preferences. 

Fresh tomatoes and peppers are often cited a ingredients desired for soups but sacrificed because of cost

These are different types of hunger that exist within a 5 kilometer radius.  Both deserve compassion and comprehension of causation. Hunger is a complex function of the human experience. Hunger doesn’t just exist in the stomach, but also in the mind, where our cultural notions of food and what it means to eat and be satisfied are met depending upon our different types of hunger.  After a day of mental overload at the conference I recently attended in Scotland I announced to a companion that I was famished and wanted something hearty to eat.  She laughed at this announcement but in her laughter I knew she knew what I meant. That was the night I finally gave vegetarian haggis a go.  It was hearty.  It was satisfying.  It was exactly what my mind and body wanted to eat.  Food doesn’t just have to be present, it has to be appealing and considered satisfying by the eater.