Food Demonstrations

Elizabeth and I finally got around to doing food demonstrations with some local women. I have worked on nutrition before and have found that it is a real problem in Cameroon. People do not often eat the right proportions of food and focus on starch-heavy diets. We are trying to promote balanced meals and fresh vegetables. Food culture here includes a lot of boiling, often for hours, removing a lot of the nutrients from the vegetables. Elizabeth and I therefore chose to do some cooking lessons to promote improved diets. We attended a women’s group meeting and taught them how to make salad, vegetable soup, and grilled green beans. We shredded cabbage and cut up tomatoes and carrots and put hardboiled eggs into the salad and created a vinaigrette dressing. I told the women they could even eat tomatoes raw and had them try some wedges. They thought that was absolutely hilarious and I don’t think any of them will ever do it again, but the salad was a bigger success. 

Those women chowed down! They loved the dressing and were happy that it didn’t include mayonnaise (commonly used here) as it was “more economical.” Even the kids came in to eat the salad. And, two weeks later, three of the women who had attended our meeting prepared salads on their own and invited us over to eat them! Success! We also made a simple vegetable soup. The idea here was that it is similar to their other foods but that they would not end up throwing out the water (and the nutrients with it). The women also loved this. We put in cabbage, carrots, potatoes, green beans, and a few other random items. We cooked in a traditional kitchen over an open fire, which really pleased the group. “This African woman!” was shouted a lot. We finished the lesson by preparing the green beans, which were very tasty, but not as much of a success as the other dishes. Apparently lightly cooked greens are just too different from the local food. The women tasted it and ate it, but they were not gone and people weren’t fighting over who got to eat what as they did with the other meals.