food. you knew there would be one about food.

food! it's the thing i would make a career of, if i had no other, more pressing interest in that respect.

south africa: filled with delicious things for not a lot of money. let me show you some conversions. a bag of twelve tomatoes for US$.80, and eighteen eggs for US$3.80 (what? we like omelettes), and three papayas for US$2.75, and a bag of "soup mix" with seven raw vegetables and little white beans, big enough to last me for four meals for about US$4. a 12oz jar of garlic and ginger paste for US$1.25. a half pound of spinach for $1.50. a loaf of bread for $1.20. pretty much every three days we have an international house potluck in someone's room, and we eat like vegetarian royalty. in fact produce is such a deal i could probably be a vegan here more affordably than an omnivore in brooklyn, geez (that is if you don't do community supported agriculture, which our slice of brooklyn has).

speaking of food: the gentleman who organized our trip to kruger/tshulu/ha-makuya invited a friend and i back to do some "extreme bush cooking" for a group of anthropologists from uchicago who are coming out for one of his programs. although we are still arranging this informally, it appears that he is unfamiliar with paella or quinoa or millet cold in a salad, and has been trying to do things like make risotto or falafel for large groups over a campfire. from scratch. ambitious, yes...but possibly suicidal?

soon: bringing vegetarian paella
to the elephant families of kruger.

in any case i'd be grateful just to cook with venda women, the very same who built tshulu camp from the ground up, carrying water for mortar from the river. uphill. singing. they did this little by little, like my mother helped build her family's house in dubrovnik, back in the day. but without any electricity or plumbing or paved roads, right. now there's a full kitchen in tshulu with two fridges and a big industrial stove, all running on solar power, spewing forth happiness whenever guests arrive.

frame of reference: http://www.maplandia.com/south-africa/northern-province/
we were about 20km from the mozambican-south african-zimbabwean border intersection there.