Have you ever thought deeply about the food we eat in Nigeria? I think about it every day. It is very limited. You don’t know it until you have had this discussion with your mother, or sister or whoever you share the kitchen with.
It usually begins with something like this, “Ezinne, what are we going to eat this night?”, that would be my mum.
Every single time I’m asked this question, I begin a complex mental analysis of the menu the past few days. Eventually, I come up with nothing and my mum would say, “why don’t you cook beans?”
To that I will probably respond, “mummy we ate it on Sunday morning”.
“How about rice?”
“We ate it yesterday.”
“Ok, boil some yam.”
“Mummy, we can’t eat yam everyday nah, that was what we had for breakfast.”
“Is there still soup in the fridge? Prepare eba, that’s what we will have for dinner.”
“Haba mummy, we eat soup and eba every afternoon, I don’t think anybody would want it for dinner.”
“Then what do we eat?”
The above conversion with my mother almost every night made me realize that our diet is truly limited. We basically run out of food ideas before the end of the week and begin the cycle all over again – bread, rice, cowpea, yam, spaghetti, soup and eba.
If you think about it, our meals in Nigeria primarily come from rice, cowpea, wheat, cassava, maize and maybe yam. I bet just like me, you are tired of eating the same thing over and over again.
What if I told you, you could diversify your diet? Not with foreign food, not junks, not even processed food. I am talking about crop species native to Africa, grown in Africa, eaten whole, highly nutritious, maybe even cheaper.
Have you ever heard of acha, African yam bean, finger millet, guinea millet, breadfruit, balanite, baobab, butterfruit, marula? These are few among thousands of food crops native to Africa but are currently underutilized, neglected, unknown and lost. Experts say several factors led to their being underutilized but one reason that doesn’t sit quite well with me is the fact that some Africans came to associate them as food for the poor as soon as they were introduced to wheat and Asian rice.
Well I believe, these underutilized crops of Africa should no longer remain hidden. Let us embrace them, improve them and work our culinary creativity on them. They could just be our hope for food security, nutrition improvement and rural prosperity in a region that is said to have millions of hungry and undernourished people by the year 2050.
Fun fact: Did you know that African Yam Bean contains 29% crude protein compared to cowpea (black eyed beans) which contains 25%.
agwithEzinne 