Eating Colonialism

So clearly there are a couple of things I always complain about like relaxed and fake hair, food, TV, music videos, etc. and I will always blame them on capitalism, racism, patriarchy and colonialism. It’s time to complain about food again. The eating patterns here were thoroughly colonized by the French. I have already complained a lot about the bread, butter, cheese, Nescafe, chocolate spread and powdered milk for breakfast. It is just too French for me (although it is low-budget French). I would prefer an American breakfast, eggs, bacon, toast, pancakes, waffles, cereal, fruit, etc. or some platanos sancocha’os o mangu con queso frito o salami. Although, I knew that rice was also introduced by French I was happy eating it until one day I stopped to observe the grains before putting them in my mouth. I realized that they were much shorter than the rice we eat in the US. I figured that rice wasn’t the same everywhere until I remembered something Oke mentioned a long time ago. They eat broken rice here. Broken rice is basically the waste produced from preparing and packaging white rice for market. Some brief online research (and you know you can always believe what you seen online) revealed that in the US broken rice was mostly used for brewing beer and is now used for pet food. We’re eating dog food. It’s all imported from Thailand and other Southeast Asian countries and it’s advertised as 100% quality broken rice. Why do they eat it then? Because it’s cheap. According to the website it’s low in nutrients and fiber, but high in “energy” content, i.e. it’s empty carbs meant to fill the tummy as quickly as possible.

What I have to do more research on, is why they don’t eat more Senegalese couscous which is already the most feeling substance I have already put in my mouth. Made from ground millet, a little bit of Senegalese couscous (it’s brown rather than yellow like Moroccan couscous which they also eat here) with some stewed fish or beef is guaranteed to put you to bed and make you forget any thought of hunger for several days. Millet is the traditional grain that was the main staple (they would have it with real milk for breakfast, I have no idea how they got through their days eating this stuff more than once daily) before the French introduced them to rice and bread. The imported rice is cheaper than the native produced millet although I get the feeling that there is also a social status aspect to it in that people associate millet with villagers and rice as more urban and therefore prefer rice.

But the French really did a good job overall here. Their influence is all over the cuisine. For example, people here love everything here super-sweet even though sugar is also something they didn’t know before the French. I can go on, they love mustard, mayonnaise, and gruyere. Could anything be more stereotypically French than mayonnaise, mustard and gruyere? Could the French colonial policy to “educate” and assimilate West Africans in order to create “black Frenchmen” have worked any better?