Where you buy your food in Uganda

High school classmate Sadie Struss traveled to Uganda one day to visit a friend and help facilitate training sessions for Special Education. Before the trip, I asked Sadie if she would blog about it, and she made it her mission to record everything about food that she could.

In Uganda most families have personal gardens, but they also go to a market to buy food that they don’t grow themselves. Supermarkets are just starting to arrive. Here are some pictures from a variety of markets.

As you enter the market, you see lots of goods for sale. Clothes, shoes, books, tubs. etc.

This market in Entebbe had a covered area where the food was kept.

One thing you can buy in the market is dried silver fish. These fish are used in a soup and other dishes. I ate some later in the week so you will see pictures of them prepared.

That's silver fish in the blue bag.

You can also see the other foods that are available. Mangos for example were 1,000 shillings or about 30 cents. Next to the bag of fish are oranges. Oranges are not orange in Uganda so they think the name is very funny.

Meat is also available in the market. If you bought something like chicken, you would be buying a live chicken to take home and kill and clean. I did not eat meat while traveling.

Beans are a major part of the Ugandan diet, as well as dried green peas.

Next up: Street foods in Uganda.

B is for Beef (and Lamb)

Fellow Lawrentian Gabrielle Prouty Stratton moved to Australia one day, and I finally got around to asking her about life in the Southern Hemisphere.

When Hannah first asked me to write something about my food experiences in Australia, the first thing that came to mind was meat. Like Americans, Australians consume a lot of meat and produce a lot of it too, leaning toward beef and lamb in particular. In my current location in the city of Armidale, New South Wales, one doesn't even need to drive outside of town to see evidence to this fact, as there are both sheep and cattle within the city limits. However, the most startling difference between the two countries is that most of that beef and lamb here is grass-fed and pasture raised.

While there is plenty of local lamb being eaten in New South Wales,
 this is wool country and the sheep here are primarily Merinos.
Photo credit: Gabrielle Stratton,

Even after living in Australia for almost a year, I am still astounded by the size of this country and how few people inhabit it. To speak broadly, the population density of the U.S. is 88.6 people per square mile, where Australia is a measly 7.3 per square mile (for comparison, think Montana—6.9 per square mile). Therefore, there's an awful lot of open land for sheep and cattle to graze. Take the largest cattle ranch in South Australia, which is roughly the size of New Hampshire. Or that there are grazing herds in the Northern Territories and Queensland that number in the hundreds of thousands. Or the fact that 860 cattle could disappear from Cape York without a trace. (That was only three years ago.)

A cause for celebration

My friend Maria is teaching English in Georgia this spring and summer (the country, not the state). I asked her to write about the food, because I know nothing about Georgian food. Or Georgia, for that matter. Three weeks in, here's what she has to report. 

The food here is attached to Georgian communal collective culture. Here in a little mountain village, people live similarly to the pioneers with everyone congregating in the one room in their house where there is a wood burning stove. The family I live with has grandparents who live with the family, the father who does something with the environment (the language barrier is difficult), the mother who is cooking constantly, and their two teenage kids who take turns on Facebook for most of the evening. Modernity meets the villages...

Hospitality is inextricably tied to the culture. My family has friends and family over every evening. They often stay for a few hours. Even if someone stops by, the cakes and fruit appear. They have the most wonderful type of cherries here, which they also press into juice. I just went on a run past everyone's grape vines in their backyards. My family has a fair amount of vines that they press into wine that seems to carry them throughout the year. They drink wine. Lots of it. People tell me that there are few alcoholics in Georgia because they never drink alone. Perhaps it’s true because every day seems like a cause for celebration. They have these supras, or Georgian feasts, which can last for hours.

The motivation of people to work hard and be independent is rare. People value their families above education. I have two co-teachers who are Georgians who learned English in the national university in Tbilisi and teach in the village. Since I have been here, they have asked me to teach by myself because they had to go home for a birthday party or something.... The mentality is just as important to understand as the food.

A is for Apples

This post was written by Brian Corner, with whom I served on the Hampden Park Co-op board of directors.

Growing up in New Zealand, I was fortunate to enjoy some of the tastiest apples in the world. It was a family tradition to make the three-hour drive up to the major fruit-growing region of Hawke’s Bay each May, and fill up the boot of the car with as many boxes of apples as could be carefully tumbled in, bought direct from the orchards. We bought Granny Smiths mostly, as they kept well, but also some Splendours (super crisp!), Golden Delicious, and in later years, a new variety called Braeburn, discovered in 1952 in a New Zealand orchard, and now grown around the world.

After a fragrant ride home, the apples were boxed up again, some hessian sacking nailed on top to keep out pests, and the boxes put under the macrocarpa hedge.



Buried there in the cool shade, the apples would stay fresh throughout the rest of autumn and winter, and even into the spring. An apple was the standard fruit to go with the marmite (and other) sandwiches for school lunch—other fruit was a rare and unusual treat.

Yet apples were much more than lunch fodder. My parents were well ahead of the times in their efforts to “eat local,” and I grew up surrounded by a bountiful and expansive garden, including an apple orchard of about ten trees just outside the living room. These were dwarf trees, packing a lot of varieties into a fairly small space. I remember Cox’s Orange Pippin, Kidd’s Orange, Peasgood Nonsuch (massive apples up to a pound each!), Sturmers, Golden Delicious, Gravenstein, Irish Peach, and Granny Smiths, as well as one or two varieties whose names we never knew.



Apples early and effortlessly exposed me to profound ideas. I learned that fruit came in many radically different varieties with names that hearkened to a different time, and that were worthy of cultivation, even if they were not—for whatever reason—the varieties one saw for sale in the supermarkets. I was fascinated that plants could be grafted, such that the dwarf apples we grew had above-ground scions that defined the fruit type, grafted onto a rootstock that might provide such traits as disease resistance. It was stunning to me that you could so readily mix-and-match “body” parts with plants compared with animals. I was told that apples grown by seed wouldn't be true to type, although admittedly I never checked to see what happened to all those apple cores tossed over the hedge. And I gained an appreciation for the different virtues of each apple, e.g. the Irish Peach apples were eagerly awaited as one of the first signs of summer, often being ready just after Christmas Day.

I also learned the reality that growing fruit (largely) organically was incredibly challenging: usually the codling moths would win, giving us many unwanted caterpillars in our school lunchboxes; the yield from the trees was patchy and reduced greatly by not-infrequent droughts or late frosts or hailstorms; and I never really got on top of the marauding blackbirds with a fondness for apples, despite my best efforts to shoot at them from the living room windows with my brother’s air rifle. As a result, most apples we ate as children were commercially grown, not supplied from the home orchard. Yet it would be a grave mistake to draw the conclusion that one should therefore simply eliminate all the work and fuss that goes into a home orchard yielding only a few wormy apples, and buy one’s fruit from the fruiterer. By planting a garden or an orchard, one is also planting ideas in young minds fortunate enough to be in the vicinity, and susceptible to this quiet subterfuge. Curiosity is sparked, education becomes effortless, and eventually, one reaps knowledge and wisdom—fruits that last a lifetime.