Food Glorious Food!
on Tara's Ethiopian Adventure (Ethiopia), 13/Nov/2009 08:59, 34 days ago
Much to my dismay I seem to be putting on (a lot of )weight. It seems especially wrong when there are reports of an impending famine in Ethiopia. You would not believe it if you were only to consider the region I am living in. The land is fertile and there appears to be plenty of food. I haven’t met anyone who appears starving and I have found the people are in fact quite wasteful with their food. I was brought up to finish the food on my plate (often with the thought that there are people starving in Africa so I should make the most of what I have). However, it seems it is the norm here to leave food on the plate at the end of the meal. This is perhaps one of the reasons I have put on weight while those around me stay the same. It is definitely not the only reason though. The Ethiopians are obsessed with meat and so I have eaten much more meat than I would normally eat. On top of that the food is often swimming in grease (like a curry). It is also quite rare to find any vegetables in a meal and so in an effort to stay healthy I seem to end up eating the local food then going home and cooking myself lots of vegetables later! I also feel that it is important to try as many of the local dishes as possible and so do my colleagues. Yesterday my colleagues insisted I try some of the local raw meat, so on top of my normal meal I had a huge hunk of raw steak. Most of the food I find very yummy however, at times I don’t enjoy it. When this happens I have got into a bad habit of treating myself to something nice afterwards to wash it down. I have developed quite an addiction to peanut butter and am ashamed to say I have worked my way through 3 jars in one month!Another issue I have is that I have milk delivered every day from the university farm. It is the only way to get fresh milk but it comes at a price as they will only deliver a minimum of half a litre a day and it does not seem to be possible to negotiate only getting it on alternative days. 500ml of milk seems like an impossible amount to get through- especially as there is no cereal. I have got in the habit of turning half of it into yoghurt and using the rest for my porridge or pancakes (another treat I really must cut back on).My final excuse is that I don’t get nearly as much exercise as I am used to. I’m mostly stuck in an office from 8.30-5.30 each day and when I get out of the office it is dark. The only solution to this would be to get up earlier in the morning to go for a walk or something but as of yet I haven’t managed to get force myself up any earlier (most I think because I’m so tired from the disturbed sleep due to the local church megaphone). I plan to go for a nice long walk tomorrow but I don’t think that will put much of a dent into a month of excess. Perhaps my body still thinks it is in England and is storing up some body fat for a cold winter? Whatever the reason I need to sort it out quickly or I will return from Africa quite unrecognisable!