Yes, they were until I arrived in Europe. I had to break the habit of eating with my innate natural tools for food—hands, and teeth.
Eating foods with our hands and tearing meat with our teeth was how we ate when I was young. The beauty of Ekiti land, a tribe in Yoruba land, was sitting in a circle of family and at functions, eating food with these two natural tools.
Ekiti’s gastronomy was solid food. They are foods that you could mold into a hard ball and probably knock someone’s head off with (a joke).
- Iyan—cooked yams pounded to make them fluffy—is the top food in Ekiti Land. Iyan with Egusi soup and bush meat is the greatest Ekiti dish.
- Amala—made from dried yams or unripe plantain in those days—was number two.
- Ewa—black-eyed peas flour is used to make moin-moin and akara.
- Eba—made from cassava flour and Koko tubers—is considered the least enjoyable and a poor man’s food.
All foods in Ekiti land were easy to eat by hand, but not the rice that was gradually making its way into the Ekiti food menu at the time. So tiny, so grainy, and so some adults refused to eat the rice, considering it children’s and birds’ food. (Ounje eye).
The Portuguese introduced rice during their colonization of Africa as early as the middle of the 16th century, but it was a rare food, mostly eaten on Christmas Day. It’s still good; we coped by eating with our hands. I could cup rice into a fair-sized ball with my hand, chew a little, and swallow. Eventually, it resulted in the local manufacturing of small wooden spoons to make eating rice easier.
On getting to Europe, I discovered fork and knife cutlery are standard, a must in gatherings to eat almost all the food. Some people cut and diced their food into tiny pieces with their cutlery before eating them at the first function I attended.
Can you imagine how I felt watching these people and having to eat with a fork and knife for the first time? To get a sense of how I felt, read my upcoming book, Fascinating Temptations, the second series of the Lost Tradition series.
What are your thoughts on this? Don’t be afraid to share your wide-eyed stories or topics you’d like me to cover in my next blog.