民以食为天，说到吃，国人当仁不让。与国内相比，加纳的饮食就是小巫见大巫，极其寒酸。我想这与经济发展程度有很大关系。记得小时候吃得也很简单，每天玉米粥、高粱米粥、窝头红薯、萝卜白菜，反反复复生生不息也。若和我国七、八十年代相比，应该说他们吃得要比我们好。当然我只能以我生活的北方地区作参照，也许当时别的地方不这样。

    先说说加纳的本土食物。

    加纳本土最主要的主食是木薯，上次在《种菜》一文中已经介绍过了。木薯加工相当复杂，当地人将木薯水浸晒干，磨成面，一点点撒入沸水中，不停搅拌，最终变成稠糊，然后用木棍击打，增加弹性，就做成了fufu面团，方法和国内打粘糕的差不多。在打好的面团上配上番茄炖鸡，或炸鱼和辣椒酱，就成了加纳的传统食物Fufu。另一种常见的食物叫Banku，是用发酵的玉米面和木薯粉做的，做法和fufu差不多，也是就着鱼或鸡肉吃。我只吃过一次Fufu，是去咨询家做客时品尝的，从那以后几乎再没吃过其他加纳本地食物了，说心里话，很不好吃，至少不合我的口味，所以一竿子打倒一片！另一个不爱吃加纳食物的原因是他们用手吃饭，没有筷子或勺之类的餐具。一般他们总会在餐桌上准备一盆清水，可以随时洗手。真是“习相远”啊！

    街头还有一种常见的小食品，煮花生，倒是吃了不少。小贩会把花生放到小塑料袋里，记得200赛地一袋，里面有十几个花生粒。一般我都是自己买，有一次让Sam去买，用英文告诉他给我买peanut，他听不懂，我很惊讶，说你不知道peanut，他说不知道，于是我费尽口舌解释，用英语解释没这么费劲过，足足说了2分钟，才终于解释清楚，他说是groundnut吧。说实话我只学过peanut，但猜测groundnut应该是就peanut，长在地里的坚果应该就是花生。等他买回来果然不错，原来他们那里用groundnut，而我惯用peanut，看来英语还真是很难学，同义词、近义词太多。

    另外给我留下深刻印象的是烤鱼和龙虾。实际上第一次接触烤鱼是在沃尔特湖，那里岛上有人专门制作和出售这种食物，考得黑黑的，泛着油光，大厨特别爱吃，可是我总觉得不干净，一次也没吃过。其实是自己心理有障碍，加纳的烤鱼应该比国内的熟食绿色干净得多！龙虾倒是吃了不少，我们这里离海边不近，所以大厨一周或两周去买一次，做法简单，就是蒸了沾姜醋汁吃，味道好极了，特别是对像我这样很少吃海鲜的北方人来说！

    接着再说说加纳的外来食物。加纳虽然贫穷，但大都市里不乏高级餐馆，一般都是外国人开的。西餐馆很多，意大利餐馆、麦当劳等，还有日本餐馆。中餐馆也不少，不过价格不菲，自己消费不起，只能和老板沾沾光。在加纳餐馆吃饭，当然要选中餐厅，海外游子对家乡菜的思念无以言表，没经历过的很难体会。我们常去的一家中餐馆记得叫“朝代”，在阿克拉很有名，老板是位女士，上海人，对我们特别热情。我们一去就会吃涮锅，可惜没有地道的芝麻酱做调料，而是用花生酱代替。当地人爱吃花生酱，只好入乡随俗了。顺便提一句，加纳的中国人不少，运气好的话还能吃上中国传统食物豆腐！  

    到阿克拉办事，中午赶不回去的时候经常到中国小餐馆垫吧垫吧，最常吃的就是炒米饭和炒面。这两种地道的中国便当到了加纳，也改头换面了。除了加上当地的人爱吃的洋葱、洋白菜、蘑菇等蔬菜外，还会加些糖，但盐放得很少，再配上炸鱼或炸鸡，还有辣酱，为的是迎合当地人的口味。吃惯了地道中餐还真有点不习惯。

Food in Ghana

Food is the paramount necessity for human beings. Speaking of which, I think Chinese cuisine is the number 1 in the world. Compared with it, Ghana food is so shabby just like a dwarf before a giant. Actually the quality of food is closely related to the level of economy. When I was a child the food was just corn porridge, sorghum rice porridge, steam bread of corn, sweet potato, radish, and Chinese cabbage everyday repeatedly. So relatively I think the Ghanaians were eating better than what were eaten in China in the 1970s and 1980s. Of course here I just made a comparison with the living standard in the north where I lived then, maybe in other areas of China the situation was different.

First I’d like to introduce Ghanaian local food.

Cassava is the staple food in Ghana which I had already introduced in the last episode Growing Vegetables. The processing of cassava is very complicated and I only partly witness how it was made. Roughly it is like this that the cassava is first socked in water and then dried in the sun and next grinded into powder. Then the powder is scattered into boiling water with continuous stirring till it turns into heavy paste. Finally, the paste is beaten with stick to make it easy to digest and then it turns into Fufu paste. The method is like making Chinese glutinous cake. Adding some chicken stewed with tomato or fried fish with spicy sauce to the paste and it turns into Ghanaian traditional food Fufu. Another commonly seen food is Banku which is made by the mixture of fermented corn powder and cassava powder just like making Fufu, and then add some fish or chicken and it is done. I only ate Fufu once when I was invited to dinner by a local consultant and then almost never ate any other local Ghanaian food. To tell the truth, the Ghanaian food is not delicious at all, at least to me, so I took the part for the whole! Anther reason why I didn’t like it was that they ate with their bare hands without any tools like chopsticks or spoons. Normally they would prepare a basin of water on the dining table so as to wash their hand readily. How different the customs are!

The most common snack in Ghana is fried banana chips. Everywhere on the street you can see venders selling them in the container on their head. The bananas used to make it are very big, twice as big as those usual bananas. Some venders just put the food into the container without any sanitary protections, so I dare not eat it for I thought it was not clean. To be frank, I was afraid that I might get sick.

There was another snack that I ate a lot, that is boiled peanuts. The venders usually put a dozen of peanuts into a small plastic bag and sell it for 200 Cedes. I enjoyed eating it and would buy it myself, but once I asked Sam to buy it and told him in English what I wanted. To my surprise, he could not understand “peanut”, so I tried to explain it to him but it was so hard to explain a name without the sample. With two good minutes I finally make myself understood. He told me it might be groundnut. To tell the truth, I only know the name peanut, but guessed groundnut must be the same as peanut because the nut growing in the ground should be the same thing as what I meant “peanut”. It turned out that they were the same. In Ghana they usually call it groundnut but I only know peanut. English is really difficult to learn for there are too many synonyms and near-synonyms.

Other kinds of food impressed me deeply are baked fish and lobsters. As a matter of fact, I first knew baked fish in Walt Lake, where some people are specialized in making them. The fish are baked very dark with glistering light. The chef was very found of them but I didn’t like at all for I thought they were not clean. But that was just a kind of psychological barrier and the fish must be much cleaner than the ready-made food here in China! As to the lobsters I ate a lot for the chef would buy them once one or two weeks for we were not far from the sea. The cooking method was very simple, just steamed them and ate with ginger juice; it was so delicious especially to a northerner like me who seldom eat sea food.

Then let’s talk about the foreign food. Though Ghana was very poor then but in big cities there were many high-ranking restaurants which were run by foreigners. There were lots of western restaurants such as Italian restaurants and MacDonald and Japanese restaurants and of course there were a lot of Chinese restaurants. The prices in these restaurants were very high that I could not afford myself but fortunately I could enjoy them with my boss. In Ghana if you go to a restaurant the first choice definitely is Chinese restaurant. The longing for the overseas expatriates to taste home food is so strong that it is not easy to understand by those who never experience it. We often went to Dynasty which was very famous in Accra. The boss who was a lady form Shanghai was very warm to us and we would always eat hot pot. It was a pity that there was only peanut butter instead of sesame butter. The locals like peanut butter so they have to do as Romans do when they are in Rome. By the way there were so many Chinese in Ghana that if you were lucky you could eat Chinese traditional food tofu.

When going on business trips to Accra I would take a snack in one of the small Chinese restaurants there if I could not get back before noon. Usually I would order fried rice or fried noodles, which are genuine native Chinese food but in Ghana they are modified to cater to the local taste. Some vegetables such as onion, cabbage, and mushrooms are added to them with some sugar but less salt. Besides, fried chicken or fish with spicy juice were also added. You really need to adjust yourself for a while before you can accustom to the new taste.