food food food.

I've been thinking a lot about food lately. For a few different reasons. A desire to be healthier. Children telling me they are hungry. Watching films that highlight fine cooking (which can be painful when you're cooking on basically two hot plates and access to fresh vegetables isn't always easy to come by). And over the holiday I spent the last week and a half in Mubiza, my former village, where I enjoyed the food my Namibian family so graciously cooked for me. And I came to realize that apart from the cooking oil and sugar, I knew exactly where all of my food was coming from, which is pretty great compared to my food consumption in the U.S., and even here in my current village of Ongombombonde.

An average meal for me in Mubiza consisted of the staple maize meal (cooked into buhobe, a thick porridge you can mold into a little ball in your hand to pick up other parts of the meal), vegetables which can include tomatoes, onions, and some type of green (my favorite being sinshungwa which is a slightly bitter leafy green), and sometimes fish. The maize is grown in the region, and during the right season it's grown in my family's own field, and locally pounded. The tomatoes and onions are bought at the market and grown by the vendor's families. The leafy greens tend to be harvested straight from my family's back yard. And the fish are from the Zambezi river. Even when we eat buhobe with milk and sugar I know exactly where the milk comes from. I can see that cow every day. That's two ingredients that I can't trace to their origins without a little bit more work: oil and sugar.

Compare that to what I was eating in the U.S....well, I'd have to put a lot of effort into finding out where everything came from. And Ongombombonde. It's dryer in this part of the country, and I am further from a place that can offer me fresh vegetables. So, many times, I have to resort to canned goods. Even now, looking at my fridge and cabinets, I'm not exaclty sure what the food went through to arrive in my kitchen.

I'm not really sure where I'm going with this. Only to say that Namibia has made me think a lot more about the resources I consume on a daily basis: food, water, electricity, etc. It feels good to not be so wasteful. And it makes me worried about returning to the States and old habits.