Meal Time!

I decided to do a topic near and dear to my heart… Food. In this case leaning towards the way family meals work here in Senegal.

In my village there are no grocery stores or any big stores at all, only a few small corner stores about the size of two parking spaces. These corner stores are called boutique and they stock basically everything you need from cleaning supplies to small amounts of food. The trick is that they only stock a small amount of one brand of everything, which is surprisingly regular throughout the country (for example I thing there are only two different brands of tomato paste you can buy in Senegal). Khossanto, being a fairly large village also has a larger boutique where you can buy bulk items, such as your 100ish pound sack of rice that is the base of most of your meals.

Actually though, right now is harvest time, and since literally everyone in Khossanto farms, there is a lot of corn, rice, millet, and peanuts to go around. What still surprises me is that most of the harvest winds up being sold - apparently it is more cost effective to sell your harvest and buy your food. Don’t be mistaken though; we do get to eat some of the harvest mostly as snacks though.

Women do ALL of the cooking; I’ve even been scolded for trying to help because that is for the women to do. The women and girls in my family are cooking for 15 people each meal, so ultimately someone is always tending the food. However, in this case they do get a break – my host father has two wives, which effectively splits the compound into two families. They wind up taking turns with the meals, whoever makes dinner also makes breakfast and lunch the next day. This system works pretty well for my family, but it’s not necessarily the case for everyone. It is not entirely uncommon for girls to be pulled out of school to help their mom’s with the cooking and household chores.

Moving on to the first meal of the day, breakfast is usually worro, which is either a rice or corn based porridge. The corn version comes least often, thankfully, and needs sugar added to it to become bearable. The rice variety is the most common breakfast that is served and I like to add a little sugar and powdered milk to make it so I can eat enough of it. Milk powder can be expensive though for a lot of villagers so most of the time it is just the sugar, there is always money for sugar. My personal favorite breakfast, that comes the least often of all because it is a little more labor intensive, is monoo. Monoo (pictured below) is still porridge but it contains tapioca like balls made with various types of flower. Monoo tends to start off sweeter than the worro so it doesn’t need as much sugar, but it can also take peanut butter really well. Delicious.

Another breakfast treat that is easier to find in the larger villages and cities but a lot more expensive so only for the more well of or on special occasions is the bean sandwich. Bear with me hear, I remember the first time I heard about them but they are really tasty. Basically you take baked beans, drier than you normally see in the US, and put them on a fresh baguette. Sometimes with mayo, or fried up potatoes… it’s mouth watering to me at this point.

Now for lunches and dinners, generally the same meals are served, with lunched tending to be on the lighter side. Except on holidays lunch is the big deal, as in this picture, which is why that bowl is filled with meat instead of the usual basis of rice or couscous. The big bowl of meat is not an everyday thing; meat in and of itself is a rare treat so this was a pretty special holiday. The big bowl itself though IS an everyday thing.

Most families split up based on gender, sometimes a well respected woman will make it into the bowl with the men, but this is not the case in my family. We typically have 4 bowls. Grandma gets her own since she can barely leave her room, and the oldest son also gets his own since he is basically just waiting on a wife before he moves into his own compound. I eat with my host dad and two younger host brothers. The remaining 9 are women, girls, and one very young boy. They all share the biggest bowl, which does not mean the best bowl. The bowl I eat at, with the patriarch, winds up with the most vegetables and the better bits of meat whenever they show up in the meals

In order to not complicate things I bring my own spoon to the bowl, which guarantees my host father to have his own, and sometimes another spoon shows up that the older of my brothers uses. Everyone else uses only his or her right hand to eat (the left is used when going to the bathroom, keep your left had to yourself). The meals themselves are usually rice or couscous based with some kind of sauce leading to a meal that can easily be balled up in one hand and popped into the mouth. In these cases it is very okay to lick your hands – it’s still kind of hard for me to see the person I’m sharing a bowl with do. This is why I make sure to have my own spoon whenever possible. It allows me to control better when I’m getting my food from, and to avoid the areas where the boy with the runny nose has been eating or where my host dad just coughed into the bowl.

On that note, there are in fact table manners… well, bowl manners. Since there are no tables and the only chairs are really stools, bowls are typically set right on the ground. You eat from the area in the bowl directly in front of you, as everyone around you eats you wind up building rice walls separating your spaces. Those walls so eventually get broken down, but you still have your space to take food from and it is bad form to reach across the bowl for things. To accommodate this and meat or veggies that happen to show up are served in the middle of the bowl, so just reach into the middle and break of a chunk to eat. More often than not someone takes on the role of “Bowl Mom”. The Bowl Mom takes on the responsibility of using her (men can do it too, it’s usually the most respected person at the bowl) one hand to cut up whatever is served in the middle of the bowl and divide it up between everyone at the bowl. It is a polite thing for someone tosses a bit of carrot into it, or uses the back of his or her spoon to push some cabbage into your space. It can be considered disrespectful not to accept it, so you have to be careful when something you don’t want to eat shows up.

There's my summary of meal time in Senegal.  I'm sure there are things I have missed so please ask any questions you have and I will try to answer them whenever I can.