Intro to Ghanaian Food

Those who know me in the United States know that I love to cook, and that I am a vegetarian. I have been a vegetarian since my freshman year of college when I abandoned meat and fish for health and environmental conservation reasons. When I travel, as I am now, the issue of being a vegetarian comes up often. It’s a struggle to walk the line between how you choose to define yourself and graciously adapting to the cultural norms and resource limitations of your new home. It can be challenging to explain why one chooses to abstain from meat consumption to fellow Americans, and it is even more of a challenge to do so in other countries. My personal compromise so as to allow me to accept the generosity of my colleagues and housemates who enjoy cooking or buying Ghanaian dishes for me to try and to allow me to experience such a big part of Ghanaian culture—it’s food—is to eat fish, avoid eating other meats, and to abandon worries about whether or not a meal was

prepared with meat. For example, stews made with meat often are made with large portions of animals attached to the bones; I will eat this stew but will decline the offer of including one of the hunks of meat in my serving. That said, in a single week I’ve managed to experience most traditional Ghanaian food. And I’ve enjoyed them all.

Where to buy Food
In Accra, most people purchase their food from street vendors. On nearly every corner, and often in several places in between corners in populated areas, there are little wooden frame boxes in which a particular woman will set up shop during the day selling semi-prepared foods. She will arrive in the late morning with coolers filled with rice or rice and beans and plastic bags or Tupperware (more often plastic bags) filled with the other ingredients needed to assemble a particular dish. Depending on what she is selling she may have a make-shift grill set up next to her stall or a make-shift deep fryer. Both the grill and fryer use as their base a large, metal pan that looks very similar to a wok. Sometimes the stalls will be painted to advertise what dish the woman will sell, but more often than not, you just have to know. Foods prepared and purchased from these stalls never costs more than 1 Ghanaian cedi (current exchange rate: 1 cedi = 1.45 USD) and are sold to you in little black plastic bags, the same kind as in the US elicit novelties are sold in. Soups, stews, rice, dough… everything is wrapped up in a plastic bag, tied, and given to you.

In addition to street vendors there are little restaurants known as Chop Bars that p

epper the city. One particular such spot near to my office makes big cauldrons of soup and stew beside the building and sells them either to people wishing to take them away to eat or to people who would prefer to sit a spell and eat at a table there. A healthy sized serving of stew with a large hunk of dough (more on this to follow) costs only 40 pesewes.

For those who prefer to cook, fresh produce can be purchased from street vendors who sell tomatoes, small red onions, spinach, okra, tiny spicy peppers, “garden eggs” (a kind of eggplant), eggs, pineapples, oranges, plantains, bananas, carrots, cucumbers, and coconuts. Often a particular vendor will only sell some of these foods and sometimes they will sell fish as well. Boxed or canned food items needed for cooking can be purchased from small convenience type stores. It is at these stores you purchase your “pure water” as well.

In Ghana you cannot rely on the tap water to be safe for drinking (if you even have a tap). You can purchase water in bottles, which is quite expensive at nearly 1.5 cedis for 1 liter, or you can purchase a large bag of ½ liter water bags/satchets which have 32 satchets and costs only 1 cedi. Suffice it to say, most people, myself included, drink the latter. Depending on the brand of water the chemical taste varies, but overall I find it to be quite tolerable.

There are some large grocery stores in Accra, but only in the center of the city near

the embassies and the western areas. The majority of these stores are run by the Lebonese and see anything you could ever imagine or want. Betty Crocker cake mixes, specialty sodas from the US (that actually cost less here than in the US), canned goods, frozen goods, Swiss chocolate, paper towels, paper plates, yogurts, icecreams… Shopping in the grocery stores however can be quite expensive and is not how the majority of Ghanaians get their food.

There are proper restaurants in Accra as well. Most are not traditional Ghanaian food and most are located in the western part of the city—Osu. Restaurants charge near American prices for their foods, and, in my limited experience, have the potential for making you feel quite uncomfortable due to the excess of wait staff and the scarcity of diners. One Chinese restaurant I ate in (not my selection) had only 3 tables occupied in an expansive dining room with nearly 15 Ghanaian waitstaff standing around the edges of the room watching you eat.

The last place I can think of at the moment where you might purchase food is from individual

sellers on the street. Women walk around with big baskets or buckets on top of their heads holding everything from plantain chips and yams to pure water satchets. Boys carry bags of apples, loaves of bread, or push carts with Fan Ice, an icecream like product. These women and boys walk through traffic selling their goods to people stuck in taxi cabs, cars, or tro-tros (busses). You could almost do all of your grocery shopping sitting in traffic. You could do more than just your grocery shopping in traffic too—CDs, DVDs , Q-Tips, toilet paper, phone cards, superglue, and the list goes on.

What Food to Buy
I am quite fortunate in that the office I work in is staffed entirely by Ghanaians, so come lunch time, I have expert help at choosing which street vendor to purchase my lunch from and to suggest new things to try. Every day I go out with Becky, the office manager, to buy lunch for all who have requested something. It is my goal that before I leave I have the knowledge, the confidence, and the linguistic ability to purchase my own street food. I think I’ll be able to do this quite soon, actually. My first week of lunches included the following:

Dish 1: Waakye (sounds like watch-ee)
Waakye is a mixture of rice, beans, spaghetti noodles, tomato paste, salad, and gari (dried and ground cassava in granules like cornmeal) and is topped with hot sauces and red palm oil. You can have it topped with an egg, a piece of fish, or a piece of other meat if you choose. I prefer to take mine with an hardboiled egg. It’s not too spicy of a dish (by Ghanaian standards), and is actually quite tasty.
Now when you read all of the guide books, among the things they tell you not to do are: 1) eat street food and, 2) eat salad. On my first day, at my first lunch, I was eating both. All is well so far, but you do wonder if you are tempting the fates. My logic goes something like this: if everyone else in the office chooses to eat the same thing I do and they aren’t ill, it should be okay for me too. Though I may have to go look up the study referred to by this article and re-evaluate my love of waakye: http://www.modernghana.com/news/10266/1/waakye-eaters-prone-to-contamination.html

Dish 2: Banku and Okoro stew (see top picture, bottom bowl)
Banku is a doughy mixture made from fermented maize and cassava and boiled. You use the banku to eat the okoro (okra) stew. The okoro stew is made with tomato paste and okra and in my case had fish in it as well. These were little

fish with many fish bones. I love okra and liked the concept of okoro stew, but the fish were just a little bit too fishy for my liking. You eat this dish with your hands, as you do most Ghanaian dishes.

Dish 3: Fufu and Light Soup Don’t ask me what is in light soup, because I don’t think I want to know. It is spicy and delicious, but I’m pretty sure it has every imaginable kind of meat cooked into the broth. People call it “goat stew” (which makes sense given the number of goats living in this city), but in retrospect, I wouldn’t be surprised if there were some bushmeat in here too. Either way, I was sure to only have the broth put into my plastic baggie. Fufu is similar to banku in that you use it to eat your stew. Fufu is a combination of cassava or plantains and maize but they are pounded together by two people working as a team: one uses a huge wooden pole to smash the plantains and maize and the other uses their hands to fold the mixture over as if kneading dough. Having watched this procedure a few times now, I’m always terrified for the woma

n who folds the dough over in between poundings by the wooden stick as the timing between the couple must be just perfect for her to avoid having her hands smashed.

Dish 4: Kenkey and Pepper Stew (see top picture)
There are 2 types of Kenkey: Accra kenkey and Fanti kenkey. Both types are made of fermented maize in the same process as banku only these balls of fermented maize are wrapped in leaves before being boiled. Accra kenkey is similar to a tamale, wrapped in corn husks. Fanti kenkey, on the other hand, is boiled in what appear to be banana leaves. Again, you use this dough to eat the stew it is served with. This stew was the spiciest of any I’ve had so far, and perhaps my favorite. I love spicy food, and things could even be a bit spicier and I would be happy.

Dish 5: Jollof Rice and Fish
Jollof Rice is a traditionally Muslim dish coming from Senegal and the Gambia and is quite similar to “dirty rice” served with Creole foods in the United States. It is spicy and cooked with tomato paste and onions, salt and spices including chili peppers, nutmeg, and ginger. You can cook it with meat or without meat.

Dish 6: Groundnut Stew and Chicken
I didn’t eat the chicken in this groundnut stew prepared by one of my housemates, but the stew itself is made with peanutbutter, chilis and palmoil. Maybe there was something else in it… but I’m pretty sure it was quite basic. It was tasty and not too spicy, and had a red shimmer from the palm oil. Most, if not all, foods here in Ghana are prepared with a healthy portion of palm oil. There is just no way around it.