Food

What are your favorite foods? Do you groan when dinner turns out to be pork chops, and beg for a hot dog instead? (or a PB-and-J?) What are some of the foods that your mom and dad make you eat because they say they're good for you?

In the villages in our part of Congo, the main food comes from a plant called cassava. People can grow it easily, but it often grows wild in the forest areas. Both the leaves and the roots become food. The roots are thick, thicker than carrots. After the roots are dried, the woman pounds them into a flour. Did you know that you may have eaten something with cassava flour in it? Another name for cassava is tapioca. We use it in tapioca pudding, and also to thicken some other puddings or foods.

In Congo, they mix the cassava flour in boiling water to make a kind of thick paste, or mush. Then they take a cassava leaf to pick up some of the mush to eat. The leaves are good too, so they eat it all. Usually they have something like fruit, or avocados, or some kind of soup with it. Once in a while they have a little meat with it.

For a special occasion -- like at Christmas and New Year's -- a family may have chicken and rice. That is a big treat for the kids (and for everyone).

There are fruit trees all around the village, planted by people's homes or just growing in the forest. There are several kinds of bananas (did you know there were more kinds of bananas?), plantains (a banana you can cook), orange, grapefruit, lemon, pineapple, passion fruit, guava, mango, breadfruit, coconut palms, and others.

In the top photo, this woman is pounding cassava root into flour. Do you recognize the fruits in the other two pictures? Pineapple and mangoes!