Food...for thought!

Guest House view from the front

View of the Golf course from the Guest House

It’s been a while since my last post but between the network outage where we lost internet connectivity for a few days and doing the monthly closing of financial books, I haven’t had a decent chance to put any updates here.

Anyway…this post will see me ramble about one of the most important necessities of mankind.

When I left India a few years back for my higher education, my family was very worried if I would eat well when I get to the US. I still remember that mom was so anxious that I had to pack half of my luggage with cooking utensils (which could easily have been around 50 odd lbs but I swear they weighed more than that), and I went through a crash course for a week on Indian cooking with my mom and aunt so that I could cook good food when I got here. It’s a totally different matter that I hardly cooked except in absolute necessity or when I had my cooking turn with my roommates when I lived in Blacksburg, Virginia. In Nashville Wal-Mart, Kroger and the microwave were my best friends. Needless to say, I am not getting into a cooking competition anytime soon.

Dining Room...meals are served at noon and 7 pm sharp
for lunch and dinner respectively

So it was pretty natural that my parents are pretty curious about the food that I eat here. And hence I decided to mention a little about the food we eat here and the people behind it.

The staple everyday is salad with dressings, rice, french fries or baked potatoes, baked vegetables ranging from corn and peas to asparagus, cauliflower and beans, and 2 varieties of meat from fish, chicken, beef, lamb and pork. I personally prefer the fish which is usually a barracuda but it’s not one of the tastiest of fishes I have eaten. I just love the fact that I don’t have to cook and the food is pretty decent too so this arrangement works great for me. However, I have been warned by some of the expats that with time my liking for the food will wear off.

Aaron, one of the cooks at the guesthouse
preparing our staple food item...rice

Dolo or Mr. Dolo as i like to call him
chopping some veggies

Right beside is the company golf course and it’s pretty decent. While I am here i think i should pick up on the game but anyway...I will leave a write up on the golf course for another day.
The guesthouse has 7 folks who are in charge of cooking (Aaron, Dolo, Moore, David, Agnes, Robert and Myers).

While we are on the subject of food, it’s pretty pertinent to speak about the cost of food here in Liberia. The country is economically weak and going by this website ranks as one of the really poor ones.

For a country than has more than 80% of the population living under the poverty line , you would expect that food which is a basic necessity should be pretty inexpensive. Logically, it would seem that higher population under poverty line means low number of jobs in the country which would in turn mean that the majority of the population would have to depend on agriculture for their livelihood. I was told about the high cost of living here in Liberia but I was like…really, how expensive can it be anyway. Well just check out the rates in USD in the menu below.

David grilling some chick'en.
He's the quite one

Myers...the chief among them in the pantry

It’s from a Lebanese restaurant in Monrovia (capital of Liberia) and the restaurant is by no means top class. I would rate it a 3 out of 10.

Trying to comprehend the reason on why food is so expensive in Liberia, I have come tothe conclusion that it is one of the ill-effects of a brutal 14 year civil war in Liberia between 1989-2003.

Robert...a server who thinks he
is the man in charge...lol

The land here is pretty fertile as you have seen from some of the pictures from my earlier posts. The weather is basically 6 months of rain and 6 months of dry season. Haven’t encountered the rainy season yet but from what I gather from speaking to locals here it seems like its pretty similar to the Indian monsoon and the summer until now seems a lot less intense than India. The land in India is also significantly drier than here.

Another guy who works at the guesthouse. He looks
after the garden and is seen slashing the grass here.
In the background is the security post
at the entrance to the guesthouse

Considering all the above facts it would seem that agriculture would be wide spread in Liberia but after going through an extended period of civil war the notion of agriculture was lost on the generation that survived the war and the one that is immediately following it. Almost all of the food in the country is imported and hence the higher cost of food. Agriculture not only requires hard labor for a developing or underdeveloped country but it also involves understanding the concept that you plant today and take care of it for a season or two so you can bear the fruits at a future time.

Prices at a regular restaurant in Monrovia

During the war, just surviving on a day to day basis was a struggle for majority of the Liberians. Populations were driven into subsistence existence when they were driven into the bush (that’s what they call here to say if you run into the jungle for survival). I can’t even imagine how it would be to forage for food everyday in the jungle. Unfortunately, this short term thinking seems to have permeated into the culture now.

A pem-pem with passengers

I was recently chatting with a local grocery store manager and he said that it does not matter if an average Liberian earns $300 or $3000 per month, a week after the pay day most of them are broke. Maybe he was generalizing but you get the idea…

It's petty difficult to fault anyone for being so short sighted since I have not experienced a war first hand so I am no expert nor do I want to be pedantic to them, I just hope that the new generation with better access to education and political stability manages to make the country self sufficient in providing food to its own population.

I did digress into a dense topic that perhaps would be better explained by a dedicated book but I will end this particular blog with a funny picture. I took this picture randomly while on the road. This is a motorbike taxi called pem-pem and it is a taxi on two wheels. I have seen 4 and sometimes 5 people crammed onto these pem-pem and that too on the highway. They have a less that stellar reputation for safety and it is no wonder why.