Today my cousin Maina sent me a photos of macadamia nuts from a tree I used to climb as a young boy at my ancestral village. Some of them will be dried and stored for my next visit. They will make part of the food while en route back to NC. It is a tradition I have developed over my many trips across the Atlantic ocean.
I avoid airline foods on so many accounts. I have become accustomed to enjoying my ancestral food grown on space that has imprints of my little wobbly childhood foot steps in harmony of so many other family members. It is akin to a perpetual last supper, but significantly better. Here better is both used biologically, culturally and politically.
Eating along this lines is something else I tell you. It is both a sign of resignation as much as it is a symbol of renewal. But I am guilty of talking about eating without first finishing the menu. Back to the ethereal kitchen used for preparing my last meal that I would be consuming during my latest visit to Kenya.
From my ancestral home, I was able acquire indigenous bananas known as Mutahato; yams, sweet potates, gooseberries, avocados and sugar cane. In a seperate bag was a neatly packed glass container with a slices of traditional taro known as Ndùma cia Mwanake( literally means the taro consumed by a young man). These type of taros had been growing in our farm since the days of my childhood. They were not the most loved nor the most tasteful. Only older folks seemed eager to eat them, given their bland taste compared to their more contemporary type of taro that had much more sugar. What I found interesting is that the less sugary taro grew much bigger and was more torrerant to drought The only catch is that you have to cook it for a long time. As a matter of fact, when I first heard of Carol Petrini's Slow Food Movement in Turin, Italy, I first thought of the slow cooking species of Taro.
These ingredients were carefully collected with me and my cousin and then taken to my friend’s kitchen and prepared and prepared in a manner that closely resembled a ritual for a sacrifice of the highest powers. Nothing else I do can come anywhere close in importance in terms of my personhood, food and vibration.
As I prepared the yams, I remembered the stories about the importance that the commodity carried. It was one of the two types of food that were under the authority of men. Farming was an art that was primarily a female engagement. But the animals and the yams were the prevue of men. A man without animals was a man who was on his way to extinction. Yet a man without yams at one point of our history was a man without swag. Yams and a brew from the African Sausage tree, locally known as Muratina, had to be the most romantic foods. They both come in matching colors in the color of ivory. Muratina had a few shades darker than ivory and so did the yams once they were roasted and then finely scracted with a traditional knife known as raù. The knife itself was a symbol of symmetry and duality. It was designed like a sword with two even sides. That is a big difference from the modern type of knife that is one sided. We seemed to have moved from multidimensional plane to unidimensional one. Just like the modern knife that only cuts with one side, our lives is moving towards unitary existence. Maybe these symbolism is real but at least in my own ritual thinking, the relationship is real.
So the two food items play very prominent role in my food planning. I have found out that the period of time I spend in the plane is one of the times I am able to pull away from everything else, including the phone, computer and not to mention, the kitchen. It is a great time to review, reflect and do a bit of theorizing. In some ways, I feel as though I take other flights inside the major flight. I take a mental flight to the past, eat in the present and then take another flight into the future.