Powerful, herby coffee, sun-dried fish and succulent beef from Ankole cattle are just some of the Ugandan delicacies in a mushrooming movement across Africa to safeguard traditional foods.
Slow Food, a global grassroots organization that promotes “good, clean and fair food,” is spreading its reach across Africa after making its first inroads on the continent a decade ago.
Today, the movement counts 30 African projects as food communities preserve and rediscover native breeds, plant varieties and products, from Moroccan Zerradoun salt, to Ethiopia’s Tigray white honey, Zulu sheep in South Africa and Sierra Leone’s Kenema kola nuts.
Photo: AFP
For Ugandan schoolboy Isaac Muwanguzi, that meant finding a vegetable known as eggobe springing up in his school garden when he returned from holidays.
“In the village it’s very rare,” said the 13-year old, whose country is at the heart of Africa’s slow revolution.
Eggobe, which has a plantain-like taste and softens when steamed, is also said to be handy for treating diabetes and hypertension — and even reportedly for increasing the size of one’s manhood.
It is one of a handful of vegetables a group of students at the primary school in Banda Kyandaaza, a village about 20km outside Kampala, are hoping to put back on Ugandan plates.
Eggobe has been nominated for Slow Food’s Ark of Taste, an online “living catalog of delicious and distinctive foods facing extinction.”
Founded in 1989 and headquartered in Italy, Slow Food started with one Ugandan local chapter in 2008, and has since grown into 13 across the east African country.
In Uganda, it has helped students create 75 gardens in more than 50 schools to taste and test products.
In the school garden in Banda Kyandaaza, students are now growing cassava, cabbage, pumpkin, African eggplant and black nightshade, as well as eggobe.
Recent Ugandan additions to the list include small white mushrooms called Namulonda, as well as the Nakitembe banana, which is traditionally presented by the groom to a bride’s family, but is at risk of disappearing due to the “continuous and indiscriminate hybridization of bananas.”
“We use the gardens to restore the crops that are at risk of disappearing,” said Edie Mukiibi, 28, a Ugandan agronomist who was in February appointed co-vice president of Slow Food International, alongside influential US chef and author Alice Waters.
The country’s capital might now be home to a handful of international fast food chain outlets, but Mukiibi said he was “proud” that Uganda had been “slow” to adopt fast food compared with tradition other countries he had visited.
Mukiibi said many years ago an influx of imported animal breeds began to be mixed with local ones, encouraged by “the NGO world.”
Now, some locals are starting to discard the Ankole cow, saying it takes too long to grow and gives very little milk. Slow Food is working with one of Uganda’s biggest slaughterhouses in Kampala, so producers can sell the animals they raise directly to it.
It is also providing training on improving meat quality.
Meanwhile, in the school garden, students who used to view farming as a punishment are now realizing the value of spending two hours a week out of class, learning everything from how to water crops to managing an agriculture enterprise.
“You farm, you get food,” said Muwanguzi, bending over in a cabbage patch.
“You farm, you get money,” he added.
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