What anything that is food means to Kenyans

By PETER WANYONYI

The science people have a reason why eating a lot feels so good. Apparently, humans evolved during very rough times. The drive to survive thus equipped us with the instinct to eat a lot every time we are able to, as a preparation for leaner times ahead.

It also helped that male humans evolved in competitive times, in which beating other males to the food meant having more women to mate with.

This instinct has not gone away despite the repeated assaults of civilization — your average male Kenyan politician, who looks like he is affixed onto a tortoise with the shell protruding outwards, still attracts the best-looking women around.

The science mob has gone further; apparently, eating a lot causes the release of pleasure chemicals in the brain. That’s right — you literally get a high when you pile on the excess calories, especially those fatty, salty, sugary foods that are such a death sentence in advance.

Dodgy

This perhaps explains Kenya’s decidedly dodgy relationship with food. To understand what food means to Kenyans, one needs to gate-crash a party — that is what we call eat-fests in Kenya — where there is free food.

Some politicians discovered this a couple of weeks ago when they arranged a party of sorts in Othaya. The ostensible objective was to show people there, how to breed fish. Wananchi ignored the breeding nonsense and scrambled for the free fried fish on offer.

In Kenya, filling the stomach — and feeling full — are more important than pesky things such as taste and nutrition. This is what explains the rather unusual dietary habits one finds in some homes, where a fat mound of ugali can sometimes, be washed down with a bowl of uji.

Being full, after all, is more satisfying — literally — than sitting there with a gnawing, grumbling stomach.

The typical meal at a gate-crashed party will thus be designed to fill voters’ stomachs. There will be vast mounds of starch, usually rice or ugali — chapati is for dignitaries.

There will be what are supposedly vegetables, but they will not look anything like vegetables. Because they will be so overcooked that their colour will be a sickly brown if it is sukuma wiki.

But even this disgusting fare is better than what we do if the vegetables on offer are cabbages. Because we then cook the life out of the poor leaves, with the result resembling boiled whitish paper.

Meat

No Kenyan meal is complete without some meat in it. But at a party like that, the meat is theoretical.

There will be the odd piece here and there, cooked so much that it has the consistency of rotting mangoes when chewed. Makes swallowing easier, you know.

For a people used to alternate seasons of starvation and plenty, this is our lot, then. We are brought up in homes where food is sacred, go to schools where food is served in grudgingly tiny potions, and join high schools where the diet seems like an attempt to starve students into submission.

By the time we are adults living on our own, the relationship we have with food has gone from a happy one to culinary torture. Just cook it, whatever it is, and we will wolf it down.