Foo Foo No More
Originally posted on 9/2/2010
My first full day at home was marked by a lot of hard work and a lot of good food. My sweet wife is an excellent cook. In fact, I can provide physical evidence to substantiate that claim! Since I have returned, she has been expressing her love for me by making the meals that she knows I love: Roast last night, steak on the grill tonight.
This is in contrast to the food they serve in Burundi. Oh don't get me wrong, I was definitely taken care of by the church. The fine ladies of the church cooked…well…like church women everywhere cook. They took their service seriously and provided the fare in abundance. That being said, the mainstay of the diet was something that was difficult for me to eat. In fact, (it's confession time), I didn't eat it. While that pastors chowed down, I sat and drank a coke.
Foo Foo is traditionally made with cassava (aka yucca and/or manioc). It has a soft, dough-like consistency. To eat it, you pull off a piece, roll it into a ball with your fingers and use it as a sponge (or piece of bread) to mop up the juices from the other food being served. You eat it this way because it has almost no flavor of its own. I think I could stomach it a little better if they added even a little salt.
Being home has a multitude of wonderful blessings: traffic laws, safe drinking water, people speaking English, for example. But one that shouldn't be forgotten is no more foo foo.
Okay, I just read that last sentence and I sound like an ungrateful wretch. But hey, everybody doesn't like something, right? So before you begin to cast stones, eat some foo foo.