Africans vastly prefer tough, tough meat,” said Robert Sietsema, longtime restaurant critic for The Village Voice. “They will eat tree snails that are so tough you would have difficulty distinguishing it from a section of rubber tire. “For them, eating something for dinner is not an appreciation of tenderness. It is an appreciation of toughness, and they want to really chew on the meat and enjoy it because meat is so rare.”
I am not making this up. Yes. This was published in a story about African food in New York City in this weekend The New York Times which went about “What is African food.” See here. This comes a few weeks after two prominent New York food bloggers felt compelled to “debate” whether the city’s people are ready for a “high-end African restaurant” since “high-end” and “African” don’t apparently go together. Like we care anyway. For a better treatment of African food culture, though, you’d have to turn to Al Jazeera. Like this program on Kenyan “street food” (in two parts) here and here.
I love AJ food shows – in fact I love that you don’t have to be pretty with good skin and overdressed to be interviewed on AJ. They did a terrible job on their recent show on African Renaissance – “is it dead” kinda query. So even their news editors have been infected by the Mugabe = Zimbabwe = proof that Africa is going nowhere hysteria. But their real people’s food show is untouchable…Damn Bro, is this my blog?
The tone of the articles rubbed me wrong, too – very “can people accept this freaky stuff?” It’s just food. People eat food. Argh.
[...] ignorancia la gente está preparada para pagar precios de restaurante pijo por platos africanos. Me entero gracias al blog Africa is a country (África es un país) que hace un par de semanas unos críticos [...]