Food

I’m writing about the food of The Gambia due to popular demand (hi mum).  The main crop of The Gambia is peanuts. This is a bad thing because peanuts are worth, er, peanuts. Hence the country being very, very poor.  Apparently during the colonial era the British, in their wisdom, decided each African colony should be turned over to a different crop. Gambia was turned over to peanuts and remains so, meaning that there is almost no subsistence farming and everything is imported (including 80% of the rice, which is the mainstay of their diet).  It’s a bad situation and it means that food is relatively expensive – most of our income goes on food, and vegetables are expensive.  Most Gambians seem to survive on a diet of bread, palm oil and sugar, accounting for the disproportionately high diabetes rate.

However, we are rich westerners so we don't concern ourselves with such things.  Our biggest problem is where our next beer is coming from.   Julbrew, the only available brand, is tasty, cold, fizzy, and costs just 40p a bottle in your nearest non-Muslim shop. Unfortunately, here, your nearest non-Muslim shop is likely to be some way away.

Many things in Gambia remain a complete mystery to me and here is just one example – every road you go down has at least 2 or 3 goats, and yet I’ve never seen goat meat on a menu or in a shop, or goat’s milk, or cheese. What are they doing with the goats?

There seem to be five Gambian dishes, of which four (domada, yassa, afra and benachin) are delicious, and the fifth, (ebbeh), is fish stew so vile that Beelzebub himself would refuse it.  However, what Gambians mainly eat are tapalapas, which are french-bread –style sandwiches filled with omelet, beans or liver.  Gambians tend to have one of these around midday, call it breakfast, and as far as I can tell don’t eat for the rest of the day except sugary drink s and peanuts. Pete, on the other hand, has breakfast with me, then Gambian ‘breakfast’ tapalapa with his colleagues at 12, and then lunch at 1.