I’m loving Kenyan cuisine!
I’m loving Kenyan cuisine. I’ve been able to try a whole bunch of new foods since I got to Nairobi. Most of my exposure to Kenyan food comes from the University of Nairobi café that we order our lunch from on school days. Since we’re always pressed for time, we order lunch beforehand and have its brought to class during our lectures so that we don’t have to stop.
My favorite Kenyan food is easily Chapati. It’s a flat bread that lightly fried that you can use to scoop up vegetables, beans, or really whatever else you have. It’s so cheap here and great for snacking on. One of Kenya’s most important staple foods is Ugali, a maize flour paste that tastes like almost nothing. Since maize flour was historically cheap, Ugali has become a very important cultural dish for a lot of people around the country.
Kenyan street food is very interesting. When we walk to the University of Nairobi in the morning, we pass little tons of little cars filled with hardboiled eggs that you can get peeled for you by the men selling them or fried corn cobs on spits with lots of spices. Mandazi, which are like Kenyan donuts are also popular street food. I’ve seen lots of women deep frying the little dough balls in pans along the road to sell. The best food that I’ve tried in Kenya so far though, wasn’t the bread or the veggies though, it was the meat!
A few nights ago, we went to the Carnivore, one of the best restaurants in Nairobi. Unfortunately for the many vegetarian students on the dialogue, this was not the place for them. The servers came to each table with swords that had whole racks of lamb, beef, turkey and chicken skewered on them and would cut pieces of right onto our plates with machetes. They also had some kinds of meat that I had never eaten before. I can now say that I’ve tried ostrich, crocodile, and bull testicle. I wasn’t really able to finish that last one, it didn’t go down well.
Kenyans eat breakfast, lunch and dinner, but since the day starts earlier for most Kenyans than Americans, so does breakfast. However, a lot of people, like those who live in the slums around Nairobi that we’re visiting, can’t afford to eat three meals a day, so lunch is often skipped. A lot of Kenyan food is eaten with your hands, like chapati and ugali, but forks, knives, and spoons are used all the time, especially at restaurants.
Since we’ve been staying at the Kivi Milimani Hotel, we all have a kitchen in our rooms that we use to cook ourselves breakfast and dinner, but we eat lunch at the University. Once we start traveling around the rest of the country next week, we’ll be eating at restaurants and with local people. I hope that I’ll get a chance to try many more kinds of traditional Kenyan food from different areas of the country!
Recently, a drought in Kenya has made maize, the main ingredient for ugali, a lot more expensive. The rise in maize prices, and food prices in general, are a big issue that I’ve been learning about. Especially with the upcoming election, food insecurity in Kenya has become a really important issue. Being on this dialogue has shown me a lot about not only the culture of Kenyan food, but also given me some valuable perspective into the political importance of food security in a developing country like Kenya.
