10. Roadside maize, rural Mozambique
I grew up eating roast corn at the Minnesota State Fair, so you can imagine how stoked I was when I saw a similar product being sold on the side of the road in Africa. But Africans, like Native Americans, call their corn "maize", and it has as much in common with the sweet corn of my youth as a Hershey bar does with a raw cocoa bean. Burnt, unsalted, and tooth-splittingly hard, roadside maize is garbage. I spent the rest of the three-hour ride flossing the kernel skins from my teeth with the Minister of Agriculture's business card.
9. Coffee with ants, outside Nampula, Mozambique
I was visiting a client, a white Zimbabwean who'd opened a vertically-integrated chicken slaughterhouse outside Nampula.
"Coffee?"
"Sure."
"It's instant. Is that okay?"
"Sure."
"And I think the ants got into it. Is that okay?"
"..."
There they were, floating, swimming and drowning. I drank two cups.
8. 3rd bag of dried pawpaw, Jinja, Uganda
From the same proprietor responsible for the sublime dried watermelon. But dried pawpaw (aka papaya) is tough and fleshy, and the naturally puke-y smell of the fruit is only compounded by the drying process. But I was hungry, and had three bags, then spent the next two days on the toilet.
7. Motoke surprise, Kampala, Uganda
Motoke are big green bananas; they're the staple food of Uganda. And like most African staple food, you're basically getting a bland heap of nutritionless starch. The "surprise" turned out to be salt. I thought Africans didn't understand irony, but the motoke surprise proved me wrong.
6. Mushrooms with dirt, very rural Mozambique
The toothless village elder offered me some of his lunch, and I thought it'd be rude to refuse. The mushrooms had been hand collected in the bush, then stewed in hot sauce. They hadn't been washed. If you ate this every day for 50 years, you wouldn't have any teeth either.
5. Milk and honey, Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania
Moses led his people through the desert for this? The "milk" was fermented to local tastes, which meant it was halfway to kefir but without the lumps. The honey was insipid and far too sweet. It all came in a plastic pouch with a three-month expiration date.
4. Cheeseburger at the Monte Carlo hotel, Maputo, Mozambique
My friend recommended this "surprising treasure" to me. He'd previously tricked me into eating a heaping spoonful of weapons-grade hot sauce, so I assumed it was just another one of his pranks. But he swore it wasn't! C'mon Greg, if you're out there, and you're reading this, this was a joke, right? This thing tasted like dog food with mayonnaise.
3. Chicken with botulism, Gurue, Mozambique
I have a lot of courage, foodwise, but this was foolhardy. I knew it was bad the moment it was placed in front of me, and still went through two drumsticks and half a breast before waving the white flag. Then I spent two days in the Catholic mission, puking and shivering. For the next month, I couldn't even look at, much less eat, a piece of chicken, which for a bird aficionado like me is a serious statement. The fact that I was consulting for the poultry sector at the time didn't make things easier.
2. Dinner at any ex-pat oriented restaurant, anywhere in Africa
People often have this mistaken impression that I'm out here deep in the bush, slogging away with the peasants digging wells or breeding cattle or something. The truth is that I spend most of my time with other white people. The development "industry" is the most twisted and bloated scam imaginable, and the fact that a desperately poor African city full of sick and starving people can support three competing Thai restaurants is a symptom of its decadence. The meals are usually passable, and sometimes quite good, but the behaviors of your dining companions intolerable.
I mean, I know they don't have black people in Denmark, or wherever the hell you're from, but even you can't be so blind as to miss the neo-colonial implications of berating the quality of the "service" during your $40 four-course meal in a country where most people make less than $100 a year. These aren't colonial times (although I know, secretly, you wish they were), and that man is not your servant. He is a poor and desperate and probably illiterate human being who you are (nominally) here to help, and if you complain one more time about how he screwed up your drink order, I'm going to put this chinoiserie chopstick through your fucking eyeball. Now shut the hell up and be grateful for what you have. Let's all eat our food as quietly and quickly as possible so I can get away from you assholes and retire to my hotel room, where I'll resume my nightly ritual: drinking six slugs of whiskey and re-watching a knock-off DVD of Gran Torino.
1. You gotta wait for this one, too, but trust me, it's worth it.
Coming up, the best (and worst) African foodstuff
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