Chakula

“Food” (cha is one of many ways to say “of” and kula is the infinitive form of the verb “to eat”)

My experiences with Tanzanian food so far have been made somewhat public in past posts. I am, by the way, completely over and adjusted now from that little episode and I do appreciate everyone’s advice though I really didn’t need everyone to play nurse. The food here and the whole eating experience though has been relatively easy to get used to and form expectations. Almost everywhere in or around Dar es Salaam that we go has the same menu exactly with only a few unique exceptions for each restaurant or establishment. Therefore, I feel like I can adequately sum up how must of us have interpreted our dining experience thus far.

The first thing to know about Tanzanian cuisine is that the main course will almost always be exclusively carbohydrates. The three main staples that I’ve seen are white rice, chips (French fries actually, but they were a British colony so they call them that), and ugali which is essentially just steamed cornmeal or something that you ball up and eat with whatever else is on your plate (sauces, meats, vegetables, etc.) There is also tambi which is pretty much spaghetti noodles, but it hasn’t been as widely available as the big three above. When I say that the main course is carbohydrates, I am referencing something I learned yesterday morning in our Kiswahili class. Although any of those three things would be horribly bland and inadequate by themselves, they are the most important and the staples in the diet here. When ordering a dish, you say “rice” or “chips” first and then whatever meat or other thing you are getting with it, hardly ever the other way around. I’ll let you interpret that and figure the significance of it on your own.

The restaurant experience here is also something that we are still getting used to, but pretty much have figured. We still aren’t sure if it’s customary to tip or not… pretty sure it isn’t but we always kind of leave a little extra instead of just getting change. One thing that we have figured out though is that you either need to think fast or come up with several different meal choices at once because they have never actually had everything that is on their menu. This can obviously be very discouraging as sometimes you see something that sounds really good and you get your heart set on it only to find out they don’t actually have it or not on that day. However, you may never even get to see what they have because they might not even have a menu to bring you or you have to ask them directly if you want to see it. Last night we went out and they really only had I think four things that they were serving. We haven’t really figured this out yet either, but I’m pretty sure they won’t bring you your check until ask them to.

Dar es Salaam is a coastal city where fishing is a common occupation and seafood has been available at a lot of the places we go. I’ve ordered calamari and octopus so far which have both tasted fine and actually pretty similar. Also, I’ve eaten king fish which is a relatively large fish and they cut it and cook it kind of in steaks rather than just filets. I haven’t really gotten any other fish yet (I will though sometime) and here’s why. When you order a fried fish or something, you generally just get a gutted fish that they fried. It still has the eyes and the tail, which were fried too, but you get to do the fun part and stab into and tear the meat off, leaving a fish head, skeleton, and tail. I wasn’t much of a fish fan at home anyway and there have pretty much always been better options when we go out, but hey, when in Rome…

There are also some clear outside influences on food here though they seem to have their own Tanzanian twist – as in something gets lost in translation. I ordered a cheeseburger at a restaurant last week and it was pretty good, though it had cucumber slices on it. I don’t know if this was supposed to be like pickles but it actually wasn’t that bad so I didn’t mind. Chapatti is a pretty standard food here and many places will have samosas and pilaf, all of which I think are Indian or Middle Eastern in origin. Like I wrote earlier though, almost everywhere will have “chips” which surprised me. I like to joke when we go out by just asking everyone what they’re going to get with their fries because they are seriously everywhere.

One thing to note here is that a foreign experience for us here has that the food here is actually made here and not somewhere else. This shouldn’t be a foreign experience, but it’s making us realize even better now just how many foods at home are processed or how you never really see foods in their raw form, only as a finished product. I learned this summer about how capitalism involves a production process and this is huge in the U.S. with foods. You don’t buy a chicken and cut it yourself but rather just buy parts of it in a bag and frozen. I don’t even know if I’ve seen a freezer here, but I definitely have seen people flattening the dough to make chapatti or cracking the eggs to make chips mayai. One reason might be that it could be cheaper to just hire someone to do the work than actually buy a freezer and prepackaged products.

Our cafeteria meals here are subsidized to some extent by the government here so we are a bit spoiled because we find prices will often be double at restaurants. However, double the amount we pay still definitely is not much. For example, I paid 800 shillings today at breakfast ($1 USD always equals at least 1,300 Tanzanian Shillings) and this got me two decent tortilla-sized chapattis, two bananas (smaller than the ones at home, but still respectable) and also some fresh cut pineapple. For lunch I paid 1000 shillings for a plate covered by rice with some beans, tasty cabbage prepared and probably boiled in some spices, and two beef cubes with sauce. It’s getting a little easier to understand how people could survive on less than a dollar a day though you also have to realize that that would have a very simple, not diverse diet that has little nutritional value and also your income probably would not be stable so there is not security that you will even have a dollar to eat with every day.

Lastly, the soda coolers are always stocked full of coke, pepsi, fanta, sprite, mirinda, you name it. These all come in glass bottles which they return and reuse which is a much better and sustainable way of getting drinks than in the U.S. with our disposable plastic bottles that don’t even recycle well at all. I haven’t seen any fountain drinks and only a few cans of beer (they reuse the glass beer bottles too) and pop. What’s also strange is that I have yet to find a place where they sell beer, pop, water or any liquid really in a package with more than one. If you want to buy beers at the store, you have to buy each one individually which is kind of weird, but I guess it makes sense because it’s not like we have a way to cool them here.

All in all, I was very excited when I first arrived to get a lot of food for a small price, then that wore off when I stopped digesting that food, now I’m kind of back there again as we explore more and more places to eat. We still haven’t gotten to the point where we just accept and get used to the fact that we will be eating the same or similar foods everyday, multiple times a day. A pretty popular thing to do, or at least what I find myself doing several times a day, is talking about foods that would be really good. We’re definitely missing ice cream and other sweets but also things like milk or just diversity in our diet sounds really good right now. I’m sure this will come to pass and we’re very realistic about the fact that we aren’t going to have that for quite some time, but it’s still just nice to remember and be thankful for all of the delicious, nutritious, and satisfying foods we have back home.