The Vegetarians Try Fufu

So, we knew coming into this that we may have to be a little flexible with our vegetarian ideals and diet in order to a) not waste away, b) not offend our hosts, and c) experience Ghanaian life as fully as possible. We also knew this might be a bit easier for me than for Bryson, who has been a vegetarian for about 15 years and has pretty much crossed the point of no return (meaning the thought of eating most any meat grosses him out). Last weekend, we were invited for dinner and threw ourselves right into our vegetarian dilemma – and got a taste of how hard this might be.

As far as most Ghanaians are concerned, if you haven’t eaten fufu, you haven’t eaten. Fufu is boiled plantains and cassava that is pounded together in a giant, wooden mortar and pestle until it becomes a slimy, dough-like ball of flavorless goo. This ball of goo is placed into a bowl of spicy, tomatoey stew, which makes it even gooier, and eaten with your fingers. The stew is cooked with some kind of meat, usually beef, chicken, or fish. On this particular occasion, it was fish. Oh, and snails.

Snails are something of a delicacy here. The ones they sell in the market are the size of your fist, but these ones were your average garden-sized snails. I have eaten snails before – in France, drenched in garlic and butter – but these were something different.

So, there we found ourselves, sitting under an overhang as the rain pounded around us, in front of a bowl with a fish head staring up at us and two grey curly-cues that looked like foreign creatures without their shells. And, of course, the fufu. 

Like I said, fufu itself doesn’t have much flavor, and in fact, they told us you’re not even supposed to chew it; you’re just supposed to swallow globs of it, smothered in sauce, in between bites of fish and snail. It’s mostly the texture that is difficult, for me. It’s like swallowing globs of sticky, uncooked dough. The fish I could handle, if I avoided the head. The snail was kind of a struggle. Grey, tough, chewy, with a slightly earthy flavor, it’s not something I would eat on the regular. Bryson contemplated tossing his into the bushes when no one was looking, but stealthily gave it to one of the kids to eat instead. Even though they had basically given us a child’s portion to share, we were the last ones eating by far.    

I have to say, I think we did pretty well. Our fellow obrunis here say there will be plenty more opportunities to develop a taste for fufu, and that we may even come to like it. We'll see. (Please send tofu.)