you are what you eat

There have been a lot of changes in my life since moving to Uganda... but one change I don't think I've ever mentioned is my diet. What I cook and what I eat have changed pretty dramatically since moving to Kampala... And there are various factors that have forced this change upon me. One being that there significantly less pre-made food options at the grocery stores. And by "significantly less," I mean almost none at all. No frozen dinners, soup cans, or cookie dough in a tub. So, that means making everything from scratch. And then another significant factor is the lack of an oven. For the past year, I've done all my cooking on the stove-top. So I've had to learn to cook a completely different range of items, which has actually been pretty great!

Another interesting observation is that if you look at what I cook, I'm practically a vegetarian. This might be pretty shocking for those of you who know me well... Because I used to cringe at the sight of raw onions and always picked tomatoes off my sandwiches. But no longer. I might eat meat a couple times a month, if I get a chicken dish when we go out for Indian food or the rare cheeseburger-occasion at Apple Ice. But I used to eat meat every day. Often multiple times a day. In fact, most times I didn't really feel like I had eaten a meal if it didn't have some sort of meat in it.

And surprisingly, I like the change. Don't get me wrong- I still love the taste of meat, and I'm not giving it up all together, but this change in my eating habits is something I'd like to bring back with me to America when I return.

Kind of along the same lines, I've been doing some reading recently about the food industry in the US.... This book called Eating Animals is kind of haunting me.... It gives several moral arguments about the mistreatment of animals at factory farms, but what really got me turned off from eating as much meat as I used to was the fact that chickens are being genetically altered and medicated to grow faster and larger for more consumption (and therefore profit). The majority of the chickens we eat in America are drugged up mutants. Scary.

In Uganda, you might see the chicken you eat running around a few hours before the meal: free-range to the max. And I feel like this is a case of life here being more simple and somehow ahead of the US eating habits. The big trends of eating local or organic or free-range are all happening in Africa already! So funnily enough, as people in the US are moving in that direction, people in Africa are ahead of the eating-trend curve. And I think that's something I really am going to miss and hope to somehow recreate in America.... Eating more fresh produce, making things from scratched, less preservatives... It will definitely be an adjustment, but it's one I'm looking forward to making. Especially once I have an oven again!