"Food"

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By nearly any imaginable standard, I'm an adventurous eater. Aside from pine nuts and tripe, I will happily eat most anything on God's Green Earth. So when friends had moaned about the selection of food available in East Africa, I ignored them. Now I'm not so sure. I won't dismiss the Ugandan cuisine entirely, but it is a challenge. There are two major reasons for the difficulty I have with the food: (1) there is usually no salt or spice on anything, and (2) boiling is the predominant, maybe in some places completely dominant form of cooking.

See the above plate - which was actually a decent meal at Medinah's Restaurant here in Arua - starting clockwise from the upper-right: you've got pasted meat (a piece of, hopefully, roasted meat, in this case beef knuckle? Or is it spine? in a pool of crushed g. nuts, pronounced "GEE-NUTS" short from ground nuts, or as we call them in America, peanuts, lots and lots of oil, some broth and some other mystery material), sweet potatoes (boiled), matoke (that is, mashed plaintains wrapped and boiled in a banana leaf), beans, rice in g. nuts which I've generously poured over them, and a sort of bitter sauteed greens. A fine, cold bottle of Stoney sits out of view. Stoney is a ginger ale with a punch to it. There are couple of items missing from this plate if it was going to be representative of my experience so far. There would also be posho (boiled cornmeal or some variation of grain) and cassava root (boiled, I suppose). There should also be a clearer, larger piece of unidentifiable meat (maybe beef or goat).

There are some non-dinner items that I should mention, and will probably include somewhere else: tea with an unbelievable amount of sugar, all sorts of sweet sodas, deep fried dough varietals (like samosas, fried bread, chapatis, etc.) and blessed fresh fruit (I cannot complain about the bounty of Ugandan fruit - it is incredible) - passion fruit, guava, pineapple, jackfruit, sweet bananas, and on and on.

The result of this diet for Ugandans, probably like some 19th century Irish who survived on a diet of unsalted, unsweetened oatmeal and potatoes, is a sensitive palate and an insane loyalty to bland food. I've heard people argue about the quality of matoke, which is basically like listening to people argue about the quality of boiled potatoes. 

There is an Ethiopian restaurant here in Arua - conveniently called, "Ethiopian Restaurant" and without any sort of address of signage, much like some very chic, exclusive New York club. The tart sourdough flavor of injera and the spices of the veggie and meat stews is a very welcome contrast. But I've criticized the food on my plate enough, probably offending some Ugandan reader. It's not that bad. It just, as an American, requires some effort.