Suya – Officially off the menu?

And on that poster, one of the key advices was that Nigerians must stop eating Suya – that age-long delicacy which even foreigners come here to look for. In East Africa they call their Nyamachoma (the name alone sounds quite chewy!).
Then “only me waka go front”, see this huge banner in front of one hospital in town stating ‘This Hospital is Ebola Free!!” I wondered at the bizarreness of this claim, given anyone with any illness should be welcome at the nearest hospital. And how can they really tell. Are we then to take it that the likes of First Consultants Medical Centre, where Patrick Sawyer took his Liberian wahala to, didn’t just pray well enough to avoid that misfortune? Now that that hospital has lost a couple of their brave staff, including Dr Stella Adadevoh, are the remaining hospitals meant to avoid any contact with Ebola victims?  Some have alleged that our doctors have chosen this time to go on strike just to avoid any ebola contact as they don’t have a clue what to do. And no one wants to die. The Hippocratic Oath doesn’t cover life and death situations I suppose.
But back to the Suya/Nyamachoma matter. I used to think that viruses died when their hosts die. But then, I’m not a scientist. That was what they taught us long ago. Maybe today’s viruses have developed the capacity to live for decades after their hosts die. Or to withstand fire at 500 degrees, plus all that chili pepper the ‘Malams’ pour on the Suya. Admitted though, before medical people start to rain down on poor me, our people ought to be cleaner in the way they prepare food. But it’s not an African thing. Indians, Thai, Chinese, in their native modes, combine dust, smoke and so on, in getting the right flavors out of their food. And we all love what they prepare. A world better than fish and chips! I recall someone agonizing that Indian food, when prepared anywhere outside of Mumbai never tastes like the real thing. And he was advised to import some of the dust and street smoke from the Bajaj tricycles in downtown Mumbai to get the right stuff!
Talking about hygiene though, it’s only someone who is not a reality TV freak like me that would not have seen what goes on in many kitchens abroad. I hope you’ve eaten your dinner before reading this; but I’ve seen waiters ‘pee’ in the food they serve at swanky restaurants – when they thought they weren’t on candid camera. I’ve seen angry attendants cough up a generous phlegm, spit it and mix it with the delicate food they are serving at some of those restaurants as well. I’ve seen many who pack Spaghetti from the floor where it had spilled and straight back into the plate for serving to eager customers when they thought no one was looking. So maybe, they need for better hygiene at restaurants is a universal matter. I know some countries – like Singapore – don’t joke with standards.
But can and should we give up Suya? I know many more – disbelievers all – would have immediately obeyed this new instructions, as it is coming from Oyibos and we usually don’t have faith in any of our own. Just how many times have CAN warned the faithful from eating Suya? Even recently, the Anglican Bishop of Enugu, Emmanuel Chukwuma, issued another ‘divine’ warning, which no one heeded, as religious as we claim to be. But coming from white people, we believe they must be right, and suya, bush meat and the rest, must be bad.
Whether this Suya matter is true or not, the whole matter took my mind to those rare beef steak I ate, alongside my British friends, at that Gentleman’s club in Pall Mall, next to the Institute of Directors. After visiting that club – where you must wear a tie and jacket or you would not be allowed in – even I developed a taste for ‘raaare’ steak; that type that when you slice it, you have blood streaming out from inside. I can actually say that I found rare steak tastier than the fully cooked one. Abroad, when placing an order in a restaurant in the midst of a group, only a bush man asks for well-cooked fish, meat or even, eggs. That is in Europe. How come they never caught mad cow disease from drinking so much cow blood, I cannot tell. Maybe it’s because we aren’t the ones helping them do the analysis.
Neither can I get off my mind, the image and taste of raw fish and beef inside that Sushi I ate at the Sushi Bar at Paddington Underground Station, and the one my colleagues asked us to go to, to celebrate our graduation, somewhere around Leicester Square in 2006. You had to squint, wince inwards and swallow the expensive raw and cold Japanese food, just to show the rest of the group that you know ‘how far’. How come the Japanese don’t catch any rare epidemics from their eating of raw things – including some say, frogs, lizards, toads, cockroaches and whatnot – well, I cannot say. The other day on FB, we saw a Chinese woman as she beheaded several house rats kept in a cage, in order to make another Chinese delicacy, the type we will queue up at Shoprite and elsewhere, to buy in canned products.
But what can we do? What can I do? Nothing. I’m running scared. The mixed look of consternation, righteous anger and bewilderment, on the face of the Chief Hunter outside Lagos, interviewed for Al Jazeera, is not very reassuring, but it tells a message; that maybe we are not all wrong. The man settled down to eat the head of a monkey and that freaked even me, out. Something doesn’t totally jive about the whole issue. Just how many of our staple food will we be asked to avoid? It’s sounding to me as if some snobby medics somewhere just believe everything about us is dirty, and that they can sit on their high horses and dictate what we should and should not do. But even if they are right, where are our own patriots, our own scientists, to give us second opinions. Where are the control experiments?