Food

The average diet of local Zimbabweans is COMPLETELY different from anything I’ve had before. The staple food is sadza: thick maize-meal dough that is usually served hot (but can be eaten cold).  Sadza is typically made with maize meal, but it can also be made from sorghum or millet meal (millet sadza is particularly off-putting since it is gray in color).  The proper way to eat it is to pick up a small amount with your right hand and roll it into a ball.  You then dip this ball into the accompanying meat or vegetables and bite off some.  After your bite, you re-roll the ball and repeat the process until the food is almost gone.  It is customary to leave a small bit of food on your plate to signify that you have been given more than enough to eat (even if you haven't).  Nicole is not fond of sadza in the least, therefore the only member of the current family who eats it is Nyasha. 

Sadza, for Nyasha's dinner

Sadza is usually eaten with some sort of meat dish or stew (all parts of an animal are fair game for food: gristle, tendons, feet, eyes, you name it they eat it). Zimbabweans LOVE their meat. A meal is literally not complete without it, as far as they are concerned. All of the E. Africa workers thought I was crazy when I told them that not only do I often have meals that do not contain meat, but furthermore, where I come from, there is no staple food.

The last part of the staple diet is tchmollyia; a local plant that is very similar to collared greens.  Almost every family keeps a small garden outside their house specifically for growing this plant.  The locals eat the leaves thinly chopped and cooked, usually with tomatoes, almost as often as they eat sadza.

Tchmollyia leaves, up close

A large garden of Tchmollyia at Jambezi Clinic

This meal of sadza, tchymollia, and meat is all eaten with your fingers, two times a day without fail. The only exception from sadza is breakfast, usually consisting of bread and tea. I asked one of the Environment Africa workers how many meals a week are typically not sadza and she answered maybe one (!!). I’m lucky to live with Nicole because we never eat sadza at home. Its really not too horribly bad, similar to an extremely thick cream-of-wheat blob that you pick at with your fingers, but I just cant fathom having it at literally every meal (and for now, I don’t have to contemplate that situation).

The other neat thing about the food in Zimbabwe is that most modern, processed kinds of foods simply don’t exist here. Don’t get me wrong, they still have chips and they drink soda by the gallon, but homogenized peanut butter doesn’t exist. Refined sugar is difficult to find, as is anything but whole cream milk. There are almost no canned soups or ‘just add water’ boxes and what they do have in these categories are outrageously expensive.

As for drinks, the locals drink soda like water, and almost everything comes in old-fashioned glass bottles. Diet soda doesn’t exist at all, with the exception of the occasional coke zero, and a coke in a 330ml glass bottle costs fifty cents, if you bring back an empty bottle to give to the store when you make your purchase. My personal favorite local flavor is Sparletta pine nut soda, but just plain old-fashioned coke seems like the overall popularity winner. Fruit juice is incredibly rare, and prohibitively expensive (and what they do have is all from concentrate). What Zimbabweans call ‘juice’ is flavored syrup that you buy in two liter bottles, and dilute with water.

Another thing that I just cannot get used to about the drinking customs here is that cups are basically communal. Its very normal for someone to bring one plastic bottle of water, and one cup, then you all take turns pouring and drinking from the same cup. With my background, I cant help thinking that this practice spreads TB and cholera like wildfire, but that’s just me.