Today, the way we ate at my village would certainly be considered "different". Most folks then farmed for a living. As a lakeside village, beef was almost absent in our diet: Most folks did not want livestock around for hygiene purposes (the lake). Chicken was eaten maybe once a month. Beef was bought. No one raised cows. Turkey & Goat were eaten once a year. Pigs: NEVER. Nigeria is mostly Muslim and many do not eat "scavengers". They considered them dirty. The rest of the country like myself merely respected our neighbor's religious needs and avoided having pigs around. Hence I grew up never tasting it. (On moving to the west pork was everywhere and unavoidable. More about that later)
During religious celebrations, a lot of these neighbor's shared one third of their goat / beef meat with us. As you can imagine we got a lot so we shared most of it with family and friends. Many Nigerians will tell you that even though they eat meat, they do not consume the average 200lbs per person per year, that most Americans consume. I recently used a fancy tax program to check last year's receipts and figured that my family of 5 consumed about 40lbs! last year. That includes chicken, beef, lamb turkey etc. We also do not eat out. Yep we do not eat much meat in my home now and never really did while i was growing up. Fish is huge in our household. I can say so now because I know no one in my family is reading this. I flake it into everything. Steak/roast dishes are not the norm at home even though we live in the U.S. Traditionally we cut our meat into tiny stew pieces and everyone gets just a little piece or more. Most folks eat this piece at the end of the meal. It is the closer, like a desert and not part of the main dish. Right now skinless chicken drumettes and minced chicken are the staple chicken consumption. Bony meat is more time consuming to eat making one feel like they have had a bigger portion than they acually had.
Yesterday i was volunteering at a sweetgrass basket festival. My co volunteer asked me if i wanted some crab. I told her just one. She said are you sure? It is quite small. Yes i declared. When she got back she bought 4 for herself and 2 for another volunteer. We all ate together. I was the last to finish! I ATE my crab. Every little inch of it. Infact another lady planned to take hers home (because she thought it was too messy to eat in public), but because she watched how i unashameadly devoured mine, she plucked the courage to eat hers:-). I took my time and i enjoyed my crab. This is how we eat and this is why resturant eating in America is torturous for our family: we feel rushed.
Getting back, the wealthier folks while growing up were the ones that ate more meat. The bigger a person was, the wealthier they were. Size was culturally seen as an indicator of success. This explains why when we moved out to the western world initially, we started eating a lot of meat. I guess we finally felt "rich". I say a lot more but on average as a family of 5, with 3 teens, we probably did not eat more than 100lbs a year in total. Even though we were now in England, we just never bothered picking up pork. In fact I distinctly remembered eating the first susage my mom and I picked up at the butcher's. It was a fresh Irish susage, the best out there. When we sauted it, it made us all nautious :-( Until today, i am unable to eat a pork beacause of that. Ofcourse now that i am the cook in my own family, I don't buy it and I don't cook it. I write this because most folks do not think about how much meat they consume. Meat is the most difficult thing for one's body to digest. It takes about 3 days to work it's way through the average human being. That general feeling of not feeling great for 3 days after eating meat was beacuse my body was just not familiar with that "task". Now because I don't eat meat daily I am better able to "listen" to my body and can tell the difference. This is why "detox" diets work so well on Americans. They report feeling great. I never notice a difference. Imagine that same great feeling everyday. This is how I feel and I imagine how everyone I know in my family/village feels ALL the time. So when one goes from that to eating a quater pound of meat one day, followed by a 3 day "meat hangover" one starts to portion your meat intake. By the way, in recent times, a lot of wealthy Nigerian men started falling victim to colon cancer. What is refered to as "the rich man's disease". Now we know why. Research was never done, but we know for sure is that it was never common, only becoming so as Nigeria started having a promnent middle class. Don't quote me, but I feel there has to be something to be said for that.
Poverty may have led me down the road of limited meat intake, but education has kept me there.
In my next post I will discuss Dinner at my village and include recipes to try if you dare :-)...
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