Where did YOUR dinner come from?

(Disclaimer: at the risk of perhaps being terribly predictable to those who have talked to me at any length in recent months, I’m writing about food again.

Mali is making me see food in a whole new way. Okay, I’ll admit it: In America I wasn’t exactly the Whole Foods–shopping, farmers-market-seeking, vegetable garden growing type. In fact, one might accurately dub my diet “starving college student.” Let’s just say I wasn’t opposed to the occasional 99 cent double cheeseburger from the McDonalds Drive thru, and Maruchan Ramen noodles (10 cents a pack if you buy them in bulk!) were my best dinner friend for late study nights. Busy, stressed and uninspired to cook, I rarely put much thought of effort into food. It was merely what got me through the day.

But I’ve been thinking about food a lot more here–where it comes from, how it comes to be on my plate, and what that means in the broader sense of social justice. Villagers in Marena, and especially women, can literally spend almost all their waking hours in some way dealing with food–finding/collecting/harvesting it, pounding it, cooking it, stirring it, cleaning up after it. Where my idea of culinary effort in college was watching the oven to make sure my Jack’s frozen pizza didn’t burn, here I watch my host moms and sisters sit around smoky cauldrons all day and still never be finished cooking.

Take a relatively easy example: a chicken. In America, after forking over about $5 I can get a complete, 6 wing meal including fries and bread, all smothered in delicious tangy BBQ sauce (my mouth is watering as I write this) from that great Chicago institution, Harold’s Chicken. And eat the entire thing in a few minutes, all without thinking, I wonder how they selected their chickens? Exactly how many miles did these chickens travel to end up at the 211th St Harold’s? And how DO they make the mild sauce (okay, THAT I really do want to know).

In contrast, consider the following: a village feast day in which your host family has decided it would indeed to very nice to eat a chicken (an uncommon event, but a pleasant one to be sure). A 20 minute fiasco ensues in which 6 of your little host brothers try, in vain, to corner the least scrawny of the 10 or so scrawny chickens that always running around the compound (well, 9, considering one is considered the “crazy chicken” because he walks around in circles and bumps into things, and nobody wants to eat that one). Finally, they manage to anchor one by the claws and carry it proudly, squaking and clawing, to the men. The chicken’s head must then be broken, and then the body handed to the women to pluck the feathers. When the de-feathering is complete, you realize how depressingly little meat such a laborious process is going to yield. You’ll be lucky if each person in the family gets a few bites of chicken.

Then comes the boiling of the chicken, maybe done with some pounded hot pepper to give it that extra zest (ranch or BBQ sauce isn’t exactly a big seller here) and the adding of rice or, if it’s for a guest, more expensive pasta. The family eats the animal to a degree you didn’t realize was possible, delightedly chewing at the rubbery joints and sucking the flavor out of the bones that you, you ashamedly realize, would have long ago discarded.

I’ll tell you, nothing changes your perspective like watching a real live slaughter from seeing the live animal right in front of you to the moment its liver (or perhaps less desirable parts) shows up on your plate. Chicken, goat, sheep, porcupine–I’ve seen and eaten plenty of things I never would have expected. And I’ve discovered what it means to really appreciate food in a way that you just can’t browsing the frozen food aisle or in line at the drive thru. To eat is to survive, but to survive is a much more complicated business here than those of us fortunate enough to live in a land of plenty can imagine.

I can’t say that I don’t still have dreams of deep dish pizza (OH THE CHEESE), but I’ve begun to see food more in the way that Malians do, as sustenance, as the very stuff of life, and as something that cannot be taken for granted. And every time Mamu hands me a bowl of hand-rolled fish balls (which I could barely stomach at first, like meatballs but so full of tiny bones that you have to constantly spit throughout the meal) I am a little more grateful for the precious protein that her and my other host mom work so hard to provide to their families, and by extension of their hospitality, to me.

A simple trip to the grocery store will never be the same.