FOOD MATTERS: Judicious Eating

An Elderly man named Roger warned me never to turn my nose up at spinach leaves that look like someone designed them with a hole-punch. The spinach might not look good, but if insects have been visiting it, then I should also be interested in eating it.

Here is another warning from Mrs. Oyebola Adetula: "Yemisi, I just want to warn you about the use of palm oil. It has been reported that some sons and probably daughters of Belial now add some chemicals to palm oil in order to enrich the red colour. But that this chemical ...very likely is a contributor to the high incidence of renal problems among Nigerians."

Roger's point is that the presence of insects is one of the most authentic organic pass marks that can be given to your food.

Last year, I kept a clipping from The Punch on a wedding party that turned fatal when its guests began to fall ill and die. The wedding was held somewhere in South-West Nigeria, in those parts where people consider Abula and Amala a delicacy.

Warnings abound not only regarding our palm oil, but our Gari, our honey, our yam flour (Elubo), our cayenne pepper, our eggs, our vegetables, our fruit, our bread, our salt; almost every food sold in the Nigerian local market is suspect of what we term adulteration. The rumors abound as well; killer beans! killer apples? How does one separate the hysteria from the reality?

In the case of the wedding party, because most people affected ate the Abula, it helped to narrow the guess on the source of the poison down to the beans used in making the Gbegiri. Abula is a combination of Gbegiri (Bean Stew) and Ewedu (Cooked Jute leaves). There was however nothing scientific about the conclusion.

At the time of the report, there had been no investigation into what really caused those people's deaths. It might have been something else. The report only offered that the beans probably came from the North, which was really saying nothing at all.

I have also heard this geographical accusation being made about "adulterated" palm oil. I asked a woman selling palm oil in Marian market in Calabar if she knew who in the market was putting red dye in palm oil and she answered that it was people from the North. She claimed they were doing it right there in the market. I wondered if she was implying that people really didn't care what happened to people in the "North" or if she were trying to console herself that there was a significant geographical distance between her and the possibility of buying poisonous oil.

There is of course no escaping the facts: Our palm oil is reddened with dyes and diluted with water. Our honey is harvested with fire and darkened and weighed down with caramelized sugar. Our fruits are quick ripened with chemicals even more terrifying in their ambiguity. Our bread is "improved" with bromates.

Has anyone noticed that strong taste of chemicals in chicken and eggs, especially some supermarket bought ones? Who can identify what it is?

The general attitude is that we buy our food quietly, take it home and eat a little of it and if it doesn't kill us, we are grateful and exhale till the next market encounter. We might be so weary of questioning everything that we just don't want to have to do so with our food as well.

NAFDAC has proposed an analytical kit to test if our palm oil is authentic but does anyone really believe that the kit will materialise. Even if it does, will it be a general kit of authenticity for every food? What are the chances someone won't "adulterate" the kit!

In the interim, what is one to do? My first suggestion would be never to trust one's eyes. Most food adulterations are done to fool your untrained urban eyes, not your instincts, or your common sense or even your sense of smell.

But we have all learnt to shut these other gear down perhaps for reasons of convenience and speed of purchase. The ancillary to that is Roger's warning not to automatically gravitate towards the most beautiful food in the market, the whitest salt, the yellowest oranges, the most luminous bananas. Examine everything. Take time to smell everything.

Even when you take your food home, keep smelling it. The woman in the market taught me that the very first premise of good palm oil is its smell. This means one must learn what unadulterated palm oil smells like. It must pass the smell test heated and unheated. Additionally, first grade palm oil left at room temperature should never under any condition solidify into a hard mess. The last premise for judging good palm oil is of course the colour.

Taste is of course another imperfect test.

Trust your instincts. Invest in basic information on food even if they sound like old wives tales: First grade honey doesn't solidify in the refrigerator. It is always willing to curl itself around a spoon. It will on the other hand harden if it has caramelized sugar in it. Some people even claim that some honeys are antiseptic enough to put sugar ants off.

Don't restrict yourself to one "customer" for your needs in the market, shop around, and if you buy something that has been adulterated, don't just throw it out, return it. And don't return it quietly; give the hawker a good firm loud rap on the knuckles while you are at it...even if you don't get your money back.

Never judge the food by the hawker. The women who sell the most organic Jute leaves in Sura market look like they have just emerged out of the bush; they have! They are owners of small plots making a pittance from their hard work, traveling in the back of a truck to bring their wares to a big market.

You might not like the way they look or smell, (and those feelings might be reciprocal!) but seek them out anyway, and pay them well.

By all means shop for your food from distant reliable sources. I don't trust my ability to buy well fermented, perfectly fried Ijebu Gari, so an aunt in Ibadan does it for me. I also have another relative who is willing to follow the process of plantain Elubo from choosing the dried plantains to the grinding, and she never looks away from the process for one moment.

The conclusion is to care, to really think about your food. It might save your life. The people who are involved in adulterating your food are not necessarily devils from the most blistering section of hell; sometimes they are just too poor or too desperate. Most are undoubtedly trying to make a higher margin of profit. Some are just greedy, but as long as one can't just tell which it is; one shouldn't go to the market and bargain the very last margin of profit out of the food vendor. It is arguable, and this is not to justify it, that food adulteration is inevitable in a country like ours where much of the farming is subsistence and food preservation is not a science but an act of desperation.

O by the way, don't completely disregard the rumors on food. Killer apples might be informal language for a case of E coli in apples or the presence of dangerous preservatives on apples.