Tale of a Recovering Vegetarian

grocery shopping and eating here has been quite different than I am used to. Though I abandoned my pseudo-vegetarianism a couple of months before I came to Kenya, I am still adjusting to being a meat eater. Every evening around 6 or 7 Aimee and I venture down the block to the
“shopping center” in her neighborhood, Jahmuri. First we go to the butcher’s: a small concrete room on the ground floor of an apartment building, with the skinned leg of a cow hanging,
unrefrigerated, from a hook in the window. Our choice is between chicken, beef, goat, or their various organs displayed in the deli case (refrigerated?). We always choose beef—either 1/4kg of steak(which they conveniently cut up into cubes) or 1/2kg of minced meat—because it is cheaper than chicken and who wants to cook goat?

The “produce aisle” is the small wooden booth around the corner on the side of the dirt street. There we buy tomatoes, tiny red onions and green peppers, garlic, cilantro,chili peppers, carrots, potatoes, and sukuma (kale/chard-like veggie). We combine these with our meat choice to produce some variation of stew or meat dish with veggies. For our starch, we- and
by we, I really mean Aimee- make rice, chapatti (tortilla-like flatbread), or ugali (a thick corn-flour mush eaten with your hands).Milk for chai comes in a plastic sack, the eggs are kept at room temperature, and shopping is hardly done for more than a meal at a
time.

My days of packaged tofu and fresh veggie salads are gone for now, but this provincial style of eating is somehow more satisfying. I know the cattle, though extremely skinny, are not being kept in huge feedlots, pumped full of antibiotics and hormones. The produce is grown domestically and the veggies look and taste like they were naturally grown, not manufactured like their super-sized-diluted counterparts in the U.S.