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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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