This might be my last recipe I will be creating for the year. It was inspired by my first student who paid for my class in cryptocurrency back in February 2021. That essentially made her the first entrant and practitioner of my thesis of Just Food as an antidote to Death Worship. The concept of Just Food and Unjust Food( also referred to Colonized Food) are the polar opposites in my classification of the food system along the binary of Life Worship and Death Worship as the main foundation of of my thesis relating to the broader topic of Food Justice. All that is a story of another day. Since then, a handful of other practitioners have followed suit and completed the whole course with amazing results. I have learned just as much as I have shared as I have experimented on taking indigenous concepts about food and fashioning them in a modern global food system.
My approach towards foods may sound highly exaggerated and so I wonder why they should pay for something that is so basic that anyone can figure out almost intuitively. That is not a problem that is unique in my experience but the experience of most new concepts. Knowing that has kept me focused on what my passion and interest is regardless of whether anyone ever pay for it. It was a great breakthrough to gain traction outside of academia and other institutions. Lindsey Thomas started a new phase in my work.
Now that the consequences of food injustices are becoming more obvious as poor diet causes havoc in the health of more and more people across the globe, my ideas seem to gain acceptance more and more. The biggest news in Kenya about a renowned preacher who spent KSH.460 million shillings on cancer treatment in the U.S over one year must have turned the most heads. My thesis is that humans have been set up by having their food culture colonized in front of their eyes. That colonization has taken the form of food illiteracy that has literally erased the advanced food culture over our evolutionary history that is itself the foundation of our advancement as a species. But for the sake of profits a few powerful idiots are on the verge of destroying all the advances of the man species. Extinction of many species has been the cost we have had to pay, but now humans are facing the same extinction as a reality.
You do math and tell me how sustainable it is for anyone to spend KSH 460 million shillings for medical treatment. While it is true that some of the illnesses might be related to other things, the truth of the matter is that we know all too well what the side effects of the chemicals we use in our food are.
So I shared here my best vinaigrette I made for the year. Since I am focused on decolonizing our food, I am closing the year with the decolonization of the word vinaigrette. A French word for a salad dressing, typically made with vinegar, oil and spice. In line with my futuristic thinking of ever pushing the boundaries, I decided to formulate a name that would be most appropriate for salad dressing in my language. I arrived at the name Njuthi. I borrowed the word for sauce, mùchuthi and the first letters from the word, njuthí, meaning raw. Since a salad is a form of raw dish, the word for something that makes the salad much more attractive would be our equivalent to vinaigrette. Funny enough it is just one letter off from my name.
Ironically, the first Njuthi was named after my first student who paid for a class using cryptocurrency. She was also the first person to pay for a couple. Though the couple did not finish the class as agreed, they opened the door for the next couple of Kenyans living in Australia. TTLT is her mission name and she is still in the class with great plans.
That she used cryptocurrency to pay for the class is very symbolic as the whole idea behind cryptocurrency is to offer an alternative to fiat currency which robs the currency holder through inflation. That kind of robbery through inflation is exactly the kind of robbery I have observed in food by pushing food that leaves us poorer, much poorer, over time as the case of KSH. 460 million shillings above demonstrates. It is kind of neat to have the first couple paying for the class in a currency that is designed for the same mission that my food is designed for. Talking about design, the recipe in focus is the first one since the publication of a book on food design by Franseca Zampollo in Italy that was published this week. Contributed an essay and was profiled in the book. It was great to see a picture of the traditional kitchen in my village home in a big book.
I therefore named my finest Njuthi in honor of the work she has done over the last two years.
Please visit my website for the recipe that she had paid for to make it available to all. It is our gift and celebration for all the good things that each and everyone out there did to push life worship.
Eat well and worship life.