Butter Up

From mid April to mid May, it was challenging to be a researcher.   With the start of the rains, my opportunities to beg/goad/charm people to talk with me were greatly constrained. Everyone was on their farm prepping the land for planting and then planting the land. The community became a ghost town from 8 AM to 6 PM, a place that outsiders would assume is populated and ruled by children between the ages 2 and 10.

Fortunately for the anthropologist, but unfortunately for crops and for farmers, the last 2 weeks in May went by with no rain.   This has been the pattern for quite a while now in this region: The rains start with a bang, then take a break, and then return—but often without the frequency or duration that they should.  Though the region has always been guaranteed a rainy season and that the rainy season always involved potential uncertainty, a changing climate ensures that the uncertainty now involves certain uncertainty.

I’ve struggled of late to contend with why anthropologists have to spend soooo much time in the field.  I’ve met students from other disciplines doing research in the area and am always a bit jealous when their 6 weeks of fieldwork are over or they get to fly home for a break in-between research periods to recover from the emotional drought that is fieldwork.  What makes day in and day out life in the community where you are doing the research worth it?  Because patterns and not isolated incidents emerge. Patterns in economy and patterns in mental health are what I seek to trace.  And to see how these patterns interact, I have to endure the wet spells and the dry spells, be it in rain or data.

When the rains take a break and people are no longer on their farms, what people decide to do in place of farming is just as important as the farming.  Once households decided to hold off on planting more crops until the rains returned, women began diverting a good chunk of their time and energy to collecting shea nuts, the tree born fruit that leads to that product known as shea butter.

Shea butter is primarily used as a fat for cooking and is, thankfully, the primary and preferred fat used even though more expensive vegetable oils are in the market place. It is added to the litany of local food ingredients that come from the local environment.  In its final form it looks and feels thick and rich, as if a twin of Crisco.   Though it may look like Crisco, it tastes like buttah.  It took me three different meals to realize that shea butter is the awesomely rich ingredient that was fooling my palette into thinking it was eating dairy butter.  Shea butter melted with tiny fragments of scotch bonnet pepper turned a very dry and filling-less corn meal dumpling into a divine meal.  Luckily, licking the bowl with your fingers is culturally expected here.

She butter is also used as a skin care product.  If ever there was a region that was destined to rule in the skin moisturizing industry, West Africa is that region.  In the tropical forests zones, there’s cocoa butter, a byproduct of the cocoa industry that is used in skin care creams and lotions.  In the savanna zones, there’s shea butter, a distinct product of its own that is used in its purest form as a skin care product.  You can moisturize and cook from the same blob of shea butter. Before the importation of industrially manufactured lotions, shea butter was the thing that people in this region to moisturize their skin.  People still do, but the “luxury” of foreign goods often prevails. A shopkeeper in Accra pulled out her best show to try and sell me on a bottle of lotion baring the Family Dollar logo, a US based retailer emphasizing low-cost products that continues to thrive in the US economic slump.  Already familiar with the Family Dollar line of products, I politely declined and bought the cheaper cocoa butter lotion made in neighboring Ivory Coast.

Despite outside ingredients that are a threat to the local usage of shea butter, shea butter remains a very widely used product in the Upper West, so the manufacturing of shea butter is an important activity in women’s economic activity.Shea nuts take a lot of time and labor to process into butter.  First the fruit (which resembles avocado in texture but tastes perfumey) is removed either by eating or by stomping on or by laying out and letting the livestock go to town.  The nut is then exposed and left to dry in the sun before it is roasted.  Once roasted, the nut is then pounded to remove the shell and get to the meat.  The meat is then boiled and the nutty boil mixture is then processed by arm strength mimicking an industrial mixer to instigate the separation of fat from non-fat.  It’s a process that takes days. 

 As anthropologist Brenda Chalfin has well-outlined, most definitively in her ethnography Shea Butter Republic, shea butter is a product that has risen immensely on the global scene. It’s a commodity. There’s an international market demand for it. But unfortunately, the links for getting the producers of the nut and its product remain weak throughout Sahelian West Africa. Though there is the occasional artisanal scale market in a community adopted by an NGO, most communities lack the resources to develop a localized shea butter industry that can produce enough product to entice a fair price from a wholesaler.  Women therefore manufacture the butter on a household level basis and middle men/women make the profit on the way to the wholesaler.  As the initial producer and processor of the product, women throughout savanna West Africa usually get pittance for shea butter that will end up in a luxury cosmetic. 

Because women are actively engaged in helping on their husband’s farm as well as planning to start their own farms, while still maintaining their ventures into processing shea nuts, I’ve been asking them if it is helpful to have so many activities running at the same time.  The social science research from this part of the world continuously emphasizes that diversification of livelihoods-- not putting all of the eggs into one basket--is what keeps households afloat.  I’m getting similar responses here. Women don’t indicate that they want to rely solely on their own farms for supporting the household nutritionally or financially.  Also, they don’t want to rely solely on shea nuts.  As one woman put it, all of her activities pay her small money, so it’s best to keep doing all of the small money activities.  If she does her own farming and shea nuts, she is a buffer for the potential failure of the husband’s farm.  If her farm fails, her shea nut business is a buffer against that failure.  In a place where crop insurance doesn’t exist and there’s no social safety net that even pretends to help those who need help, this is risk management—a very important pattern indeed.  

Trash Talk

There’s a scene in Mad Men where Don and Betty are so close to ripping the damn Bandaid off their marriage, but are instead pretending to be happy at a picnic with the kids.  As they leave their brief contented scene, they simply lift their blanket to let the picnic trash float away into the park.  Because by this point in the series it’s impossible to be shocked by the boozing and overt misogyny, I was shocked by this act of blatant littering.  Though my mom assures me that people did not have such regard for littering in the 1960s, and in retrospect I assume this scene is more metaphor than historical marker of American behavior, trash and how we relate to it is weirdly cultural and definitely invokes our social and political systems.  In other words, even trash talk can be anthropological.  

Perhaps the most striking symbol of Ghana's trash problem-a place where two tiny bins are supposed to exist but do not in fact exist. This fake garbage receptacle just so happens to exist in front of Flagstaff House which is the presidential palace. 

In Ghana littering is a norm.  Places to deposit trash in public settings, like garbage cans, are virtually non-existent in the country because a haul away trash system is non-existent save for well to do residential parts of the major cities. Instead, the system of waste management is to toss the trash when and where you need to in anticipation that someone else will sweep it up and burn it.  This works decently well, especially in areas where the only waste management company, called Zoomlion, operates. You still see a lot of trash, but not the amount there would be without any kind of management.  

In my early stages of existence in this country I would diligently hold onto all of my trash until I found a rare trash can to deposit the trash. On public transit I’ve had seat mates rip the trash out of my hands and toss it out the window on my behalf, practically rolling their eyes at my ineptitude as they do so. I simply was not capable of throwing trash helter skelter.  As long as I put the trash where I thought it was my responsibility to deposit it, I had peace of mind even though I knew that the trash I deposited in a bin could very well be emptied in the very helter-skelter way I was trying to avoid. 

This cartoon by the Ghanaian Black Narrator, demonstrates that garbage is a concern on the socio-political landscape. 

As my time here extended,  I’ve found myself able to take on this behavioral norm, especially in moments where something about the country angers or frustrates me.  In such instances, I vengefully throw my trash on the ground.  I turn into a petulant woman seeking solace in a perfectly contextually appropriate act that is only anti-ethical to my own social rearing. 

However, now that I’m not a nomad in the country but a permanent settler in a small community that does not have Zoomlion service, I am again having trash anxiety.  I produce more trash than the average community member because I rely on buying purified drinking water contained in plastic bags and also purchase more packaged food items. Instead of getting into the daily Ghanaian habit of piling my trash outside and burning it, I fell into the daily American habit of compiling my trash inside.  Now every 3 weeks or so I embarrassingly carry my bag outside and try to burn it with the help of very eager kids.  But because it is so much trash (and mostly empty plastic bags that still contain remnants of water) the trash is hard to burn and instead becomes a heap that is 25% burned and that beckons kids to excitedly dig through looking for the bizarre things like sunscreen bottles.  Though I guess I’m creating a trash midden that could potentially challenge some future archaeologists, I feel a lot of guilt for creating and not managing waste that is left visible to my eye and not hauled away to some landfill or recycling plant. 

While I feel shame with my obvious contributions to creating visible trash, disposability is perceived differently here.  Disposability is about being “more hygienic” and being socially mobile.  When I first came to Ghana in 2002 plastic bottles were rare. Now plastic bottles are becoming a norm even though the drinks sold in them are more expensive than the same drink sold in the reusable glass bottle. So as this country becomes hungrier for items that can be used and tossed in the name of social mobility (and in a move reminiscent of Don and Betty Draper’s picnic clean up),  it relies on the lower classes, those Zoomlion workers to wade through, sweep and burn that disposability.  Those lower classes also become informal recycling centers, sifting through trash to find reusable items.  

This can be on the benign level of a kid picking up a plastic Coke bottle to give to their mom who will wash it and use it to sell homemade beverages. But it can also take on a more disturbing (and potentially malignancy inducing) form.  In Accra there is an area known as Agbogbloshie  that collects the world’s e-waste at the Ghanaian government’s approval. Here, Ghanaians eager for some kind of livelihood, dig through antiquated and not so antiquated Western technology coming from Western countries to pick off valuable metal scraps that can be re-sold.  Needless to say, this is an atrociously toxic condition under which to  make a living. 

Here gas is being funneled into old plastic drink bottles.  Most "gas stations" in the Upper West are simply bottles of fuel on a table by the roadside. 

While Ghana struggles to manage trash coming from daily consumer goods, and deals with the e-waste of other countries, it excels at managing and reusing larger consumer durables that are given a chance at re-birth before being sent to a dump.  In Kumasi there is a place called Suame Magazine where old, supposedly dead cars are re-born as new vehicles. Electronic goods are treated similarly. Before my departure to Ghana I had a hell of a time trying to find a place in St. Louis that would repair a broken netbook screen for less than the cost of the netbook.  In Ghana, getting your laptop, or any other electronic good fixed is not only possible, but usually easy and affordable.  So just as I hope that someday soon there is a more formal and consistent form of recycling all of the disposable plastics that are increasingly used in this country, I hope that one day, the US will return to a system in which our stuff can be fixed and not just tossed out for the world's poor people to pilfer through because a new one is cheaper anyway.  And on a personal side, I'm going to buck up and start boiling my drinking water so that I can avoid buying the plastic bags and partake in the first rule of waste management: reducing. Hopefully this will also reduce my trash anxiety. 

A library of old laptops used for their parts

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.  

Childhood and the Politics of Representation

Interacting with kids between the ages of 2 and 16 is probably my only daily guarantee during fieldwork.   Kids make me laugh.  I make them laugh.  I’m getting to know them and they’re getting to know me.   I don’t want to deny the relevance of children to my fieldwork experience, nor negate what I learn about their lives here.  However, neither do I want to contribute to a narrative of an outsider talking about the needy, but happy and resilient African child.  It's complicated to be an outsider in Ghana or any other country where the collective “developed” world’s imagination thinks of inhabitants as poor, in-need, or un-developed.  How I position myself as an anthropologist who is witness to life (including childhood) in Ghana in 2014 is challenging.

There is an entire Tumblr devoted to mocking women who, in their adventures traveling or volunteering abroad, take and publicly post pictures of themselves with children. This site draws attention to how a conglomeration of such publicly posted images, without any kind of context, reinforces a classic narrative of the good-willed white person bringing joy and good deed to the non-white person who needs their joy and good-deed. As Rafia Zakaria wrote about voluntourism in an online debate:

“The photo ops, the hugs with the kids and the meals with the native are part of the package; the helpers can see and touch those they are saving and take evidence of their new mobility home with them.”

The Onion is less harsh but no less biting in nailing why such a trend is problematic:

So I while I will be taking pictures of myself with children who, by the end of 12 months spent getting to know them, will be nothing other than friends, I will likely not publicly post such pictures.  But I will talk about what I observe about childhood here because it’s really not different from childhood anywhere. 

I watch kids get lost in their own fictional and fantastical worlds of play, where all that is needed is a large tree branch to serve as some motorized vehicle and some vocal cords to make engine sounds. I watch kids make their own toys. I watch this and relay this with the very careful and important acknowledgement that such scenes are not to be filed under the “They are so poor but so happy” category.  They’re simply creative like kids tend to be when left to their own devices. 

playing with natural resources-making a clay TV

don't worry-she also made a remote control

at work on a car made from recycled goods

car in progress

car in its final stages--the wheels are old flip flops

I also watch kids learn the roles of adulthood.  I’ve seen a 15 year old kill and clean a duck.  I’ve seen a 13 year old cook enough rice for 15 people in the rain. I’ve seen 7 year olds build bricks. I’ve seen 3 year olds carry tiny bowls of water on their heads as they follow their mothers from the borehole with their much larger basins.  I watch these scenes and relay these scenes with the very careful and important acknowledgement that such scenes are not to portray childhood as a drudgerous and laborious life phase in Ghana. Children bear large responsibilities here, but they still go to school, still get time for play and are still loved by their mothers and fathers.

These are universal aspects of childhood with contextual variations. Childhood is about learning in play and learning in work. Childhood, whether composed of homemade tin cars or an i-pad, is still childhood.  And yes, I think we should all work to ensure that all children are equipped with environments that lead to enlightening, nurturing and healthy childhoods.  But we don’t need to patronize vulnerable children to accomplish that. 

Sicknesses of the Heart and Mind

 A NYT piece on the Affordable Care Act indicates that people who have gained health care coverage are experiencing improved mental health because they no longer worry about how to access health care. One interviewee, who now has consistent care to manage diabetes stated that, “The heavy thing that was pressing on me is gone.”  I focus my research energies on the heavy things that press on people here in the Upper West Ghana. It turns out I’m not immune from my own heavy things either as I continue to cope with being a stranger becoming no less strange in a strange land.  

Medical anthropologists approach health in a holistic way. I study how emotional strife originates, navigates into the mind, and settles in the body. I investigate how illness, as medical anthropologists Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Margaret Lock (1987) assert, is a form of communication by which nature, culture and society speak simultaneously. Such an approach looks for how proximate biological symptoms have ultimate factors of causality that are social. 

Here in the Upper West region of Ghana, where farming is becoming an increasingly challenging livelihood, and access to other viable income earning opportunities are constrained, emotional strife is not difficult to uncover. No matter where you are in the world, managing a household on marginal incomes is stressful.  It involves daily decisions about how to meet immediate needs like food and health care while not neglecting future needs.  A common scenario in this region is the struggle to farm to feed children while also ensuring that their increasingly expensive school fees are paid.  The higher the educational attainment, the more likely they are to obtain a salaried job and the more likely they are to be able to take care of ageing parents constrained to farming.

People operating under these circumstances talk about “thinking too much”, a local idiom that describes a brain overwhelmed with the need to solve various economic problems. People who identify as doing too much thinking talk about how the activities of the brain result in poor sleep, body pains and dizziness.  Some people identify these symptoms as congregating in an illness locally known as worry sickness.   Thinking too much can also, and quite deleteriously, travel to the heart.  When worry settles in the heart, a more debilitating illness, which translates as heart sickness, can result.  This illness of the heart somewhat resembles hypertension and somewhat resembles severe anxiety disorders. Regardless of its clinical categorization, it greatly limits the amount of work that people can perform, thus reducing their income and feeding back into a cycle of thinking too much.

Not surprisingly, prevention of the onset of worry sickness and heart sickness is companionship.  Both men and women identify socialization as the primary way to put too much thinking at bay. Both men and women actively seek out their peers to discuss their worries and ways to mitigate them. 

It’s also not surprising that the most well-adjusted sounding anthropologists are those who have moved to their field site with a significant other or a family unit. 

Fieldwork is not hard because I don’t have indoor plumbing. Fieldwork is mother trucking hard because it is always emotionally overwhelming.  Without someone who is also simultaneously experiencing and understanding that emotional hurricane, it’s hard to keep these heavy things from pressing too hard on me.

I think I just took 5 days of Ciprofloxacin to cure homesickness.  When I get homesick, my heart feels like it’s sinking into my lower abdomen and I embody the “heavy heart” idiom common in the US.  And I’m beginning to suspect that this weighty melancholy instigates other physical symptoms.  Since starting fieldwork I’ve had phases where I become intensely nauseous. It’s a sickness that is not comparable to the “well I shouldn’t have eaten that” illnesses I have previously experienced here.  I think these phases of nausea have psychological rather than organic origins.  I think these phases are a way that my body is rebelling against my social circumstances.  The waves of nausea may be my body’s way of saying “Why the hell are you even here???”

If only emotional ailments could be treated with something like Gripe Water

Cipro won’t cure my heart sickness. So to keep my social protest stomach at bay, I’m trying to play with as many roaming puppies and babies as possible without looking too loony. I keep working my way through the WTF canon and am cultivating quite a fictional friendship with Marc Maron.  I’m also packing in as many evenings with my adoptive family as possible.  Even though we can’t share laughs over references to Arrested Development, we can drink beer together and share laughs over the universal funniness of flatulence. Sinking comfortably into the backdrop of a busy, loud and welcoming house (farty or not) is a pretty good social medicine for keeping those heavy things from always pressing too hard on me. 

Somebody Still Loves You Barack Obama

When my nationality is inquired about,  usually within seconds of my response, "Obama!!" is gleefully shouted.  For a country that loves to hate its own politicians, it is pretty infatuated with my own president.  This love emerges without consideration of who Barack Obama is as president. 

It's kind of refreshing to be away from the disillusioned disappointment of Obama's supporters and vitriolic hatred of his haters. Here Obama is more of an ethereal figure--a man who doesn't have to stand for what he does,  but is admired simply for his eloquent movement  into a realm of power and prestige.  

Here he joins the ranks of rappers with admirable haircuts. 

And his message of hope and change is not used to amplify grand policies such as national health care, but rather it is all that is needed (alongside a toothbrush) to encourage healthy teeth and gums. 

Here, he even has his own cheer leading squad. 

 And boys deck out in the "Obama Tuxedo"

Where a jersey is best accompanied by embroidered jeans

So, regardless that back in the USA where Obama is greying crazily fast and looking dour and mournful as he tries to salvage the pre-presidential legacy that gave him the opportunity to gain a presidential legacy, here he is a man that is likeable enough that he sells cheap, yet comforting biscuits called Obama Biscuits.   It's a lot easier to digest this Obama. 

Searching for Saalong

At the risk of sounding like a line Meryl Streep probably delivered in Out of Africa, “Thank God the rains are coming.” I am thankful for the rains because the temperature drops and the dust is contained.  The world looks and smells refreshed and I can sleep without sweating and thereby come a little bit closer to looking and smelling refreshed.  The rains are also bringing out critters.  The other night I woke up to the sound of 2 furry spiders galloping across my room.  In the ongoing tournament for MVFP (most valuable fieldwork possessions), in the current bracket, furry spiders initiate the triumph of mosquito net over Kindle.

There’s obviously a lot of relevance to the start of the rains to my research on food and farming as well. Though farming is still about a month or two away, the rains are bringing new green growth in the wild.  Tiny shoots are springing up out of the still very dry earth.  Some of these tiny new green things are edible.   Last Saturday I was invited to accompany some teenage girl on one of their recent foraging expeditions for such a green edible called saalong.  

I’m hyper self conscious when it comes to foraging for things because as a child I failed in every single morel mushroom outing I ever had.  During the springtime morel season, I’d board the school bus and my bus driver would boastfully hold up the giant bread bag of morels he had gathered in the morning.  Those dumb mushrooms evaded me in every angry march through the woods. 

I got a little flustered, therefore, to see that saalong is not even close to looking substantial in girth.  It’s teeny and grows as close to the ground as it possibly can.  If I couldn’t find a mushroom how was I going to find this tiny plant, a tiny plant that I suspect might actually be classified as an herb? Well it took about 5 tries, but I did eventually and correctly identify saalong.  Much to the amusement of my young female friends, I threw my arms up in the air in celebration, feeling vindicated for every little elfin mushroom that has ever escaped me.  I never determined any kind of pattern for where saalong might be found and noticed that the girls were very careful to pluck only the leafy growth so as to leave the roots intact. We paraded around the bush for about 3 hours.  By the end of the expedition I’d say that each girl had about 1 cup of saalong to take back home, an amount substantial enough to do what it is valued for—making soup slippery.

Saalong that I found

How close to the ground you have to be to pick saalong

About 90 minutes in to collecting saalong, this was the amount procured.  I got great delight that one of my companions was collecting her saalong in an old bread bag-it was this that made me remember all of my bitter and happy morel mushroom memories.

Saalong is helping to drive home the point that food security is not just about having food, but having food that is prepared in a way that is most appreciated and enjoyed.  Commonly used products from the savanna forest (including leaves, seeds, and fruits) contribute to how food tastes and, perhaps even more importantly, how it feels.  Yes, how it feels.  There is a very strong preference for foods that are “slippery.”  Slippery is the less caustic way to describe the sliminess I often ascribe to okra. Though I’ve yet to dig deeper into the matter, I’m guessing that a slippery texture is important for soups because slippery soup covers the staple porridge quite well.  Slippery soup really isn’t my cup of tea, but it is the cup of tea for people here.  If they didn’t value this aspect of their food culture, no one would spend 3 hours searching for it under the glare of the savanna sun.

Even though I’ve never been able to supply my own morel needs, I’ve eaten my fair share of them and appreciate their fleeting buttery presence. Perhaps one of my earliest food memories is sitting in a tavern eating deep fried morels and knowing that because they came from the woods and not from the grocery store, they were afforded a degree of admiration for the time (and obviously talent) they took to find. So even though saalong and it's slipperiness isn’t my cup of tea, I understand why it’s important and not to be neglected in talking about food security in the Upper West and why it and other foraged for foods need to get on the radar of the designers and planners of food and nutrition interventions. 

Attempting to capture the slipperiness of the saalong as it is used in soup.