A wonderful thing about eating in Kenya was the freshness of the ingredients. Two decades ago a person I used to meet often on wildlife trips in India was involved in setting up cold chains across the country. He was starry-eyed about the potential to bring fresh fruits and vegetables into the city. Now, when I see tasteless one-year-old tomatoes on sale in a supermarket in Mumbai, his words sound to me like the shattered dreams of internet pioneers. Kenya is not linked together by cold chains. The food is brought into markets as quickly as possible by those who grow them. The outcome is fresh and flavourful.
Neighbourhoods vendors in Nairobi have fresh produce, and even out on highways you pass long lines of green grocers. The one you see in the photo above is a typical shop. We bought a bag of oranges, like those you see hanging from the roof, and they turned out to be immensely juicy, sweet, but with the tartness of a citrus. We were looking for something to eat on the move, so we weren’t interested in the potatoes and onions , although they looked pretty good. I eyed the tomatoes longingly, I knew how good they were here, but the rest of the party was not interested.
The watermelon is great is Kenya, and it is possible to buy just a slice. Anthony had one while we dithered. The pumpkin caught my eye. I hadn’t tasted the pumpkin in Kenya yet. MONT made some at home later, and they were as nice as I could imagine they would be. I didn’t see pumpkin flowers on sale; that’s a great delicacy, but one that seems to be unknown here.
It was curious that there were no interesting new things to discover. Potatoes, onions, and tomatoes exhausted the list of vegetables on display. I’d expected to find lots of leafy vegetables: amaranth (lidodo in Swahili), cow pea (likhubi), even jute and pumpkin leaves, but they weren’t visible. Maybe there is some degree of specialization, and we needed to look for a different shop for those. But that was for another time. Now we’d found enough fruits for the journey.
These veggies look organic…are they?
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I’ve no idea. I wouldn’t be able to tell organically grown vegetables by their looks.
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Fabulous 🙂
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Indeed
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Very nice post and photos – so interesting!
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Thank you
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Fantastic post and view of different foods!
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Thank you
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Everything’s fresh, wow!
And I feel surprised at my own comment thinking isn’t this how it’s supposed to be, and here this seems like a wow moment ….
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🙂
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One year old tomatoes? Oh my.
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If there was a shrug emoji, I would use it here 🙂
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I love this phrase, “…the shattered dreams of internet pioneers” Very fresh food was one of the best parts of living in China back in the day. Carrots that actually tasted like something — that was HUGE surprise after eating only the wooden stuff in American supermarkets.
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Thanks.
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Interesting, IJ. We found the same situation in Fiji–no leafy vegetables. It turns out the climate was too hot to grow them. There were a lot of root vegetables–as you mentioned.
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That’s interesting about Fiji. I think it may be different, because Kenyan food uses a lot of leaves. I guess I need to write about that one of these days.
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Yes, I’d like to read that.
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