Chatsworth foods and diet

On a normal day a normal family will have breakfast, lunch and supper.

1 Breakfast is made up of bread with a good layer of margarine.

Tea with milk and a lot of sugar (say 4 or 5 teaspoonfuls)

Maybe some porridge made from maize meal

2 Lunch is usually at just gone midday and comprises

1. Sadza, which is a staple of this part of the world.
2. Fried vegetables
3. A bit of meat.
4. A drink of water or some kind of juice.

3 Supper :

Is usually the same as lunch except that it is at about 7 or 8 in the evening.

In between people have snacks of maybe sweet potatoes, wild fruit, domestic fruit, boiled maize cobs, roasted maize cobs, popcorn, boiled round nuts, boiled cow beans, boiled maize kernels, etc. depending on the season. Sometimes people can snack on bread, crisps or sweets from the shop, but this only happens for a few days after pay day for those that work.

Those who can afford can occasionally have boiled rice or potatoes either as a side dish or as a main meal.

Zimbabweans never used to eat a lot of meat till recently. Most people now have chicken and beef as part of their diet. This, with the fact that we fry a lot in our cooking, and we use margarine a lot, means we consume a lot of fats on any given day. This is a huge health issue which is difficult to solve. The community views the use of cooking oils and meat as a sign of good health and affluence. It would be ineffective to try to wean people off fats.

I started by saying "On a normal day..." so what happens on a non-normal day? Well there are some days when things happen differently, such as when the family gets a visitor, when there is a family gathering or when there is a funeral of some other significant event. 

On these days the family feeds on sadza and meat based relish. The meat usually comes from a chicken, a goat, a sheep or a cow. People in Zimbabwe do not eat lamb. They wait till the animal is fully grown before eating it. 

The church, along with health practitioners, preach the gospel of fats reduction. We say people can still fry their vegetables but use less oil and more water, use a thinner layer of margarine on their bread and eat less meat. This saves money and improves health, both of which are good for the family. 

At church organised meetings, we tend to exclude meat from the menu, but we take our time cooking as best we can. We usually have people asking for recipes on some of our cooking. 

We also do cooking demonstrations to prove that food retains its taste even without lots of fats in it. The best way to approach this issue is to convince the ladies, as it is them that do the cooking. Once they fully understand the benefits, changes will start happening.

The problem is that some of us who are supposed to inform the others are not fully informed either. We do not have the full facts or the right presentations to show others. We have partial information and that slows down the information machine and makes us prone to some contradictions.

We would like some of you professionals out there to help us when you have time. One of the things we need to encourage is the eating of raw foods such as vegetable salads and fruit salads. These are nearly totally unknown here. People cook most of the available foods

We are going to publish a range of recipes for several different dishes as you would find them at Chatsworth and in the surrounding areas. You can try them where you are and see if you like them. You can also let us know your experiences as you try them. 

I have started collecting recipes and photos of the finished dishes and will publish them here in late as soon as is possible. Access to the Internet is a challenge: Bear with us. 
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