Journey to the Center of the Earth: The Divine Comedy for Vegetarians

The other day Mus returned home from town, all smug and excited, to inform me that he had bought a deer from a hunter. He said he was so excited about it, he had called his mom while he was still buying the deer and told her he would bring her some the next time he came to Accra. She laughed at him. I did, too. He's like the housecat who proudly lines up mice on your doorstep, happily bringing home the bacon.

He was so excited I had to go and take a peek. This “deer” was a small antelope the size of a farm rabbit, and he'd stuffed the whole thing in a sack and put it in our tiny, RV-sized freezer. It didn't even fill the whole freezer.

Mus, who has been hunting before, could easily have dressed the game himself. But only a few days earlier, Wasila, a 13-year-old girl we live with, had been bragging about how she was so good a dressing game. So Mus decided to give her the chance to show her stuff. And she lived up to it. She decided the game was too small to skin, so she singed the fur off (I left for this part, knowing full well what that would smell like). Still, I wondered, do we skin rabbits before eating them? I feel like we do.

I told the family about how many American kids have never killed an animal themselves, or helped skin an animal, or even been around a dead animal (short of roadkill, I guess). They laughed so hard at that idea. I think it's kind of sad, really. I recently read “Animal, Vegetable, Miracle” by Barbara Kingsolver and in the book, she talks about how, during her years as a city dweller, some of the neighborhood kids would come and see her gardening, and be amazed that vegetables grow in dirt. They thought the idea was disgusting! It makes you wonder if Americans can get any further from the origins of our food. Our relationship with our lunches needs some serious counselling.

In that spirit, I'm going to show you a few pics of Wasila dressing the deer. Vegetarians be warned- some of the photos may make you gag. Anyway, the long and short of the process was she singed the skin, then gave the whole animal a bath in soapy solution (they were going to eat the skin, too) and then they gutted the deer and roasted the meat. I tried a bite of it and was amazed that the meat was not red meat, like venison at home, but white and very similar in taste and texture to poultry. It was pretty tasty- I'm usually not one for bushmeat, as they call wild game here, because I worry about it's freshness. In fact, I'm really not one for meat at all here, come to think of it. But Mus bought the deer freshly killed.

Wasila is singeing off the fur- smelly!

We roast it awhile...

Then she gives it a good bath, before gutting it and roasting the meat.

Here's the finished product- sorry for the cliche, but it really looked and tasted like chicken!

Now, before I continue, I should say that I am not an actual vegetarian. I enjoy vegetarian food, and I eat more like a vegetarian here than most actual vegetarian obrunis that I come across. I am a conscientious objector to factory farmed animals and would eventually like to get myself out of the CAFO food chain, but I don't morally object to meat. The little guy we roasted the other day, for example, lived a perfectly natural little antelope life, gallivanting through the rain forest like a Disney movies (if that's the mental picture you have of life in the wild, I'll let David Attenborough tackle that preconception) until he died a quick death when he fell to predation and entered the food chain. And as all animals must consume other life forms in order to live (hey plants are living beings, too, man), I'm okay with eating Bambi. Since I don't recall anyone giving me the option of being a plant or one of those sulfur-eating bacteria, I have no qualms about eating other life forms. I have no say in my biological make-up, and I can't imagine it's bad karma to eat to survive.

But for those of you cringing out there, there are wonderful vegetarian options here too. Just the other day Mr. Yacobo returned from his farm carrying wild mushrooms! He gave us two giant mushrooms which Mus cooked in groundnut (peanut) soup.

That said, I have to say that I'm really excited about another new food source- TOFU! I'm one of those weird non-vegetarians who love tofu. The family we live with makes really good, fresh tofu (turns out, the processing to make tofu is more simple than making cheese.) They've been selling it around Obo and it's going fast!

And since it's fresh, it turns out way better than the tofu I've bought at home. Yesterday I made really yummy curried noddles with tofu.

Here's the process by which tofu is made...

First, you take soybeans to the mill, where they have machine that grinds the soybeans into a paste. Then you ad water to the paste and mix it until it becomes a thick liquid.