Food & Romance

My Japanese Ginger is finally in full bloom. You can literally see the pollen inside the flower. This also happens to be the season for pawpaws. It has become a ritual to make a Fall solstice dinner using these two ingredients. Afro Futuristic is about getting the best ingredients with the most eclectic flavors. 

The recipe I make with these ingredients and French Lentils is called Ngwíkoraha. 

The name is inspired by a combination of Charles Darwin and a Gíkùyù proverb. 

I am not the only person who has been fascinated by this flower from Japanese Ginger. It looks like a form of orchid. Darwin was so puzzled by the fact that Orchid flowers did not smell. He went to his grave with the belief that orchid plants do have a scent. 

We now know that the orchids attract their pollinators, not by their scent, but with the shape of the flowers which mimics the sexual organs of their female counterparts. By the time the insects realize that they have been duped, pollination has already taken place. 

I therefore see some similarities between the orchid and Japanese Ginger except that they do have a scent, or I think they do. I should know them by now as I have been growing my patch of the plant for the last six years. They grow better every year and thereby produce more flowers every year. 

 I also looked at the cost of a single plant of Japanese Ginger on would cost me in a 2 gallon container online. One of the sites had a price of $39 dollars.The seller did not indicate if the Japanese Ginger was actually organic or not. Whatever the case might be, it would be reasonable to compare a salad and dish garnished with the sexy flowers compostable in cost to an expensive bottle of wine. But I am not a big buff of fermented grapes because I prefer to do my own.

I had never been served Japanese Ginger before I grew my own. But that did not deter me from trying. Eating high end food is not something new that I am inventing, it is part of my culture as well as a family heritage. There is a clan in my culture called Ambui who are known to brag about wealth and romance. A man from that sub-tribe would talk in jest amongst his colleagues and say that he would not die while digging yams but rather handling calves. That is a way of saying that he is wealthy enough to marry another wife who would bear him more children even in his old age. In cultural lingo, such talks where a person brags about his wealth or prowess has a specific name. It was referred to as kwÍraha. It was a common practice amongst good friends while they socialized over honey mead and meat. I am greatly interested in such matters as most people are as aware about the fun part of elderhood amongst our community, but traditional men in general. There also happens to be a very close intersection between food and fun. 

Yams for example were very closely related with sex and romance. The man of the family had his own garden where he would plant yams. The yams itself was trellises upon a special tree known as Mùkùngùgù. The tree and the yam are synonyms of any close relationship. It was a common idiom that every Gíkùyù understands.  The harvesting of the yams takes a lot of work and the process was very secretive in the old days. A man would go to the extent of harvesting the yam at dusk while naked. The idea was to keep everybody away while he is digging his yams. No man wanted other people to know which yam was dug as someone could come behind him and dig from the same hole he had dug. Since a man only dug out some of the yams in one whole and left others for another harvest, it would be extremely difficult to know if someone happened to come behind the owner of the yams and dug some in the same holes that had already been dug on the same day. For that reason, the whole process was a secret of the owner. 

Out of the nine sub-clans of the Gíkùyù, Ambui were the junior to the Anjiru. I happen to be from the Anjirù, the oldest of the nine daughters who formed the nine sub-clans. The sub-clans were known for their hard work and knowledge of the plants. So if the younger clan of Ambui would claim that they were wealthy enough to marry more than one wife, I am pleased to share more ways of ensuring that the Ambui have a challenger from the Anjiru. We too are not just older in age but also in “kwíraha”. I know I can expect a lot of love from my Ambui friends but I just can’t wait to see what kind of comeback I will get. 

While enjoying the preparation for my recipe, I remembered the Gíkùyù proverb that states that “Ngwíko ya arùme ní nda”. Loosely translated to mean that food is as intimate to men as sex. The orchid-like flower of Japanese Ginger makes a recipe that is intimate to me in more ways than sex. It is both flavorful, organic and original. But I would be dishonest to claim that having a sexual appeal doesn’t raise the stakes for the recipe. It’s a recipe that hits many notes and senses. Food without imagination is bland, boring and unfashionable. But the worst part of it is that such a classification makes a recipe unfit to be classified as Afro Futuristic Conscious Cuisine. It’s a cuisine that is beyond just being futuristic,  it is also scientific & romantic. Can you imagine if all the nine clans would come up with their own recipes of romance, science and futurism.  Since I am a Münjirù, I have taken my first stab at it, the rest can hire me and I will do sisterly and brotherly food justice by them. Kwíraha is romance and so is the Japanese Ginger recipe by a Mùnjirù. How cool is an Afro Futuristic recipe that taste great, keeps one healthy but also predicts how I will die, not in poverty but in love.

KFC & The Devil

KFC & The Devil

I was enjoying a guided tour by two phenomenal local ladies named professor Nyambura and Wanjiku of the food scene in Nanyuki.. We visited Nanyuki Permaculture Institute first before heading into town. Once in town, we went straight to the only mall in town. Not knowing what to expect, I thought I was ready for anything. But once we drove inside the mall, I was shocked by the first visible sign I saw. We had parked our vehicle right in front of KFC. I literally froze. All kinds of thoughts, none of it positive, flooded my mind. In a mix of awe, disappointment and curiosity, I walked inside. I did not smell the ubiquitous smell of the chicken being fried in the back but felt sad as I stared at the ugliness of the corruption and colonization of our food.

I was dismayed to see Kenyans lined up with their children in tow anxiously waiting their turn to poison themselves for a fee and a flirting moment of ephemeral high from fake flavors and hidden costs. I lined along for a while and pretended to be equally naive and ignorant of the business at hand. But even pretending has its limits. It was too much for me to handle. I was especially taken aback by the number of people behind me, especially when I considered the size of town I was in. It was not a major town and yet the numbers were high. Once inside, one of the attendants asked me if she could help me. I replied "where is the bathroom? She politely pointed in the direction of the bathroom. I headed in that direction.

I wondered if there could An be such a thing as a holy toilet and sinful toilet. All over a sudden, my urge to use the bathroom disappeared. I am now convinced that even if I died inside a KFC or any of it's partners in food crime, my body will probably not rot. My mind is so immune to these demons that my armor can not be penetrated. My greatest joy is to spread the that amor. I conjured an image of just food on the cross with McDonalds and KFC on each side to represent the two thieves.

As though to get an antidote for the poisoned environment, I walked into a healthy joint known as HealthyU. As I was looking around and enjoying the breath of fresh air, I saw a small bottle of Manukau Honey. I was amazed. I picked it quickly, just to touch it. I looked at the price. The bottle of 250 grams costed $40. That is probably half the monthly wage of a typical wage earner.

There you have it. These are the best of times and the worst of times, or at least some may think. The reality of the matter is food injustice makes all of us unjust in the end. We cannot grow KFCs in the world and expand organic Manuka honey indefinitely. One will have to give. If KFC gains momentum then we will have to contend with a small devil which we may call kfc or Killing Families Consciously. Fed long enough, the small devil will grow into a father devil that will become KFC. That is not something I am at all comfortable with. In the meantime, not all are worried about the food devils, big or little, as we already have a solution for it. Food literacy smokes all those devils regardless of size or color. In my small way, I have formed a regiment under the same title of Kabui Food Class(KFC), or if you like the real KFC.

That would be the easiest way to tell the story of my life: struggle for Food Justice. Afood, Amen and Thayù

Abaai & The Thieving Birds

.I visited Mwea, the rice basket of Kenya, in a bid to understand the quality of rice in Kenya. It’ was the second time I have been to Mwea . The first time was back in 2010 when I visited the offices of the government body that supports farmers with training, and all sorts of extension services. I spent a good part of the morning, that day in 2010, at those government offices talking to workers in various positions.

My basic interest was to find out if there was any organic rice grown in Kenya, with an ambitious intent to push towards that goal if the answer was no. Everybody I talked to in those offices, regardless of their position, was fully convinced that it was impossible to grow rice without chemicals. Chemical fertilizers to sustain plant growth, chemical pesticides to combat the bugs wanting to eat the plants, and chemical herbicides to destroy any weeds.

Since my visit was in the middle of the season, I missed the opportunity to see the harvesting process. All I saw then, and had seen before and since, was the farmers flooding the rice paddies and the process of transplanting the rice seedlings. I later came to learn that the most tedious stage is guarding against the birds. My main escort at the government offices was a friendly Embu lady. As we discussed rice production, she was liable to paint the devil as a bird. Once the rice was approaching maturity, the birds would show up early each morning, in flocks so huge that they could easily consume a hundred pounds of rice in just a few hours.

The story of growing rice in Kenya was fascinating on two levels. The first one was an experience I had when I participated in what was called a “crop mob”, at a small farm in Moncure, North Carolina, 20 minutes from where I now live. Jason & Haruka, a young couple living in Moncure, managed to enlist over 120 people to help them set up the rice fields. It was the most powerful food engagement I had seen up to that time, and since then.

No money changed hands, and most of the people present that day didn’t know each other. Yet the amount of work completed was phenomenal. It's incredible that such voluntary cooperation could occur using incentives that had nothing to do with dollars. They were paid in good feelings and rewarded with the knowledge that they had improved their food system.

As I drove home from that so fulfilling crop mob event, which had been organized using social media, I thought hard about the day’s experience. The event was big enough to attract The New York Times to show up to cover the event. Food was going through a silent revolution and many were missing it. I wasn’t one of them.

I compared it with the cultural tradition called Ngwatio, my last equivalent of a crop mob in Kenya, when the village friends came to help dig a pond at a new farm we had recently moved to in Naivasha. There were similarities and differences. All the boys knew each other and no money changed hands. So here I was in America, reliving that most beautiful experience. I couldn’t have been much happier. It was like glimpse of home, but without the connection of knowing everyone.

I became very good friends with that couple, and also their loyal customer. From time to time, since that event, I would stop by unannounced and help out for half an hour, as we talked about food matters.

The rice from Jason and Hauka was the most expensive rice I have ever bought and consumed, but also the most flavorful. The rice we buy in the store is old, dried for storage and sale. Fresh rice, straight from the source as it was being hulled, is a much more enriching experience. Their seed crop was procured bu Hauka, who was a native of Japan. A pound costed more than a pound of organic pastured lamb from Whole Foods at $24. They later closed the farm, but I am so gratefulfor the chance I had to experience their legendary work in local rice production. It was the first time any rice, let alone that particular breed, had been grown in that region of North Carolina.

My excitement to visit the rice-growing region of Mwea was aimed at understanding the health implications of Kenyan rice, and the kind of culture that the rice was promoting. In the end, I did not leave encouraged. I was certain that the Kenyan community was headed in the wrong direction. Maybe that is exactly why the cultural practice of Ngwatio died, not able survive such a toxic environment.

As I drove along the farms in Mwea, I could see people working mostly just in small groups of wage earners. I realized just how alienating such a fiat food production system is, and how it displaces our values. The focus was not food literacy and togetherness, but just money. That level of disconnect prevented, as well, any knowledge or concern regarding damage to the food or the environment in which it was grown.

It was disheartening. The only thing I could remember to lighten my heart was the most commonly used word amongst my Kenyan government hosts during that 2010 visit. The word was "Abaai". I could have been excused for thinking that Abaai was a great legend amongst these rice growers. I mean a legend in the likes of Achilles.

As I drove home, I remembered the one act that Achilles, the Greek legend, was most guilty of, in regards to the environment and the water. I remembered that the river Xanuth was so angry at Achilles for killing so many Trojan soldiers that the river took the shape of a man, and asked him to stop the killing, as the river couldn’t take any more dead bodies and blood being dumbed into it.

In my own imagination, I invented my own similar legend, using the word Abaai. I fantasized one of the rice paddies crying against Abaai to stop causing so much blood shed to the community that would eat the rice grown with chemicals and the fires that burn the husks and the straw, at the end of the season, as seen on the photo. Like the Trojan war, that pitted the Greeks and the Trojans against one another, resulting in serious killings on both sides and no gain for either one, Abaai has turned into a goddess of violence, destroying the environment and the culture of Ngwatio, where no one will win this horrible battle, not even the thieving birds.

Is there any wonder why the rice from the paddies of Mwea, in the county of Embu, cost so little money to buy, but costs so much in damages when compared to the rice from Moncure? I didn’t buy any rice in Mwea, but if I had bought some, the true cost would be higher that $24 dollars a pound, when you factor in the environmental and health cost to the community. It is odd that when I was buying rice for $24 dollars for half a kilo, I thought I was buying the most expensive rice at the time.

The gods and the doctors who will eventually deal with so many deaths, from the dead soil, to the mutant birds, to the undernourished people breathing the smoked air will all bear witness by saying Abaai, maya Mathabu ní ma mana.! Haha hatirí Thayù.

Surely the end result of this type ofviolence will be the same lose-lose of the Trojan war. The nail on the coffin will cone from the Lai. Of disconnectedness that people feel with the death worship of fiat money. You cannot have food relationships if your transactions are only monetary, especially with fiat money.

Maybe Homer was right when he said that man, of all creatures, is the most agonized creature that walks or crawls the earth. We, like the men of Mwea are agonized for thieving ways, just like the birds. The big question is who will guard us, not from the thieving birds but from ourselves?

End of July Prayers

chef Kabui

Ten foot Jerusalem Artichokes are all the evidence I need to prove the power of organic compost. The scraps of organic food from the kitchen are feed to earth worms, and they produce black gold. Most people use leaves that the city collects from people’s yards at the end of the Fall Season until the next Spring. As most lawns in the US are treated with herbicide and weed killers such Roundup, it is logical to assume that literally the whole pile of leaves are contaminated.

But the kicker starts even before urban houses are built. The first two things that home building companies make money on is selling the trees that they chop down and the top soil from the lots. After the houses are built, a small thin carpet of grass is laid on the dead soil left after all the top soil has been sold. That means that you have to constantly add chemical fertilizer to the grass to make it into the perfectly green lawn we all have become accustomed to. That means that that grass is terrible for composting, and worse for our environment.

For that reason, I bring back my banana peels and other fresh fruit peels to add to my compost. If I do dinners elsewhere and there are any waste vegetables, I carry them home, too. That is another reason why I will only cook organic food. That is the only way it would make sense. I tried to do a bit or inorganic cooking and it was disastrous. I want to live without any more guilt. I am old enough to know better. I now know that I can either make money or make sense, but I haven’t figured or seen anyone making both.

The biggest benefit is the lessons I learn along with my children. They just don't know yet the value and usefulness they are absorbing. My daughter was in charge of making the garden this year. It is her connection to who she really is and where she comes food. It all bows down to food. Food is our life, prayers and our being. Instead of saying Amen, we say Just Food, even at the pain of death. Death to Fiat Food. Thayù

Even you, Brutus

Njathi wa Kabui

Last week I attended a graduation of an important person in my family. I noticed that the parking lot was full of clean and expensive cars. It would have been unimaginable for such a festive celebration to celebrate 8 years of schooling during my time. I can remember the last day I finished my high school exam. My celebration, if you would call it that, was to do what I had always done at the end of each session. I left the city for my family farm in the village. I would spend the holiday with my mother helping out at the farm. I would also immediately reconnect with eating food we had grown ourselves. But that was then.

I parked my car and proceeded to the auditorium. Upon entering the auditorium, the importance of the occasion was made very clear from the sartorial code observed by the students, occupying the center stage. Parents, teachers, and other supporters were filling the seats, anticipating the graduation ceremony. The excitement was palpable.

But it was not the center stage that got my interest. Rather it was a long and well decorated table, conveniently placed near the back wall, directly facing the podium. The graduates sat in front of the podium and the parents occupied the sides and the back. Essentially, the long table was situated behind the parents. I really liked the set up.

But when I went for a closer look, I noticed that the well-decorated table had nothing on it except neatly sliced pieces of cake, on decorated paper plates.

My stomach churned. I wondered what kind of education system we are putting those students through. It was the clearest sign that such an education system is obviously divorced from reality. There is a health epidemic in this country as in much of the globe. The world is in the midst of a long pandemic, where almost an equal number of people are suffering from the crises of too little and too many calories. You would think that such a problem would be the easiest one to solve. All those eating too much would have to do is ship the those calories to those who would gladly relieve them of their surplus. But the solution is not so simple. To believe otherwise would be both naive and woefully misinformed.

One aspect of the problem we have at hand exists in a blind spot. The other stems from our Western national identity. We thrive on fallacies that, once debunked, would pull down the foundation of who we are. That is not easy for anyone. We might just realize that we are not be as powerful as we want to think, nor as just as we assume that we are.

Learning takes humility. A lot of people outside of the U.S and the western model are suffering, just so that we might enjoy cheap resources such as oil and manufactured goods. The biggest impact of our insistence of being the center of consumption in the world is that our health has become cheap. In other words, exporting dollars, manufacturing and weapons has left us vulnerable. Eating poorly is the price we have had to pay for being a super power. In the end, we all are becoming losers. Those who are exploited for our comfort become twice poor, as they have less resources. Such victims imagine that if only they touched the hem of our garment, they would be whole again.

We “first-worlders” too, become poor twice, by killing our industries and our farms on one hand, and we become the Republic of Poor health, divided and depressed.

How can we teach children about everything else and not teach them about food? What kind of education failed to teach these children to avoid the truck that is coming their way, head on? The lifestyle diseases that America, and most of the “advantaged” world experience today, are tied to food, directly or indirectly. But our education system, intentionally or unintentionally ignoring food literacy as a foundation of essential general and cultural knowledge, is nothing short of subtle suicide.

As I stood behind the students and the long table of cake slices, I remembered the story of Julius Caesar, the one man who changed Rome from a republic to an empire. In 44 B.C., Brutus and his comrades stabbed his step uncle and his benefactor. All Julius Cesar, is reputed to have said was “Even you, Brutus?

How appropriate was it to have the cakes behind the graduating class. I couldn’t resist making the connection between the desert and the daggers that ended both the life of the first Roman emperor, and the friendship between Brutus and Caesar, not to mention the other accomplices. That betrayal sealed the fate of Rome, and its metamorphosis into some holy empire.

In 2023, the Afro Futuristic spirit in me silently asked our trusted western educational vanguards, even you, Brutal adults?

A Drum Beat For A Fingerling

During my last visit to my family farm in Kenya last year, I showed up loaded, as always. This time I wasn’t loaded in money, but  in all manner of goodies, and lessons to boot!

In many ways, the goodies and the lessons were too intertwined to be distinguishable. One example turned out so perfectly that it sounds like a drumbeat to me. I will tell you why.

I grew up on a farm for a significant part of my early life. When I finally caught that proverbial “midnight train to Georgia”, I figured that I was going into the future, where life was much simpler. I never for one minute thought that I would be back in the farming business again. I was fully convinced that life in the city was much easier, more fun, and admittedly, more civilized. Why would anyone want to work like a beast of burden in the village while the city life was always beckoning, with its flashy lights and limitless possibilities?

It never occurred to me that my thinking was the main logic behind colonialism, that my country Kenya had emerged from less than 15 years prior. The British wanted a future that rested on someone else’s back. 

I obviously didn’t know better then.  Now I don’t only know better, but I also do better. Doing better starts with actively and consciously decolonizing my thinking and my food. That is a taller order than most people would fathom.

That is why I carried organic fingerling potatoes in my luggage. I was keen to introduce a new variety of potatoes to my village. I obviously had more organic seeds with, me but I consciously chose to talk about potatoes, for its historical & symbolic effect.

Potatoes are a staple, and a colonial relic in my village. One of those colonial practices includes the planting of only a single type of potato. After a while, that variety would go out of style, and another one would be introduced and hold the monopoly. I know all too well what a dangerous set up that is. Even worse, I noticed that farmers would sometimes split one potato, and plant small pieces, to increase the number of “seeds”. That practice was prevalent in Ireland just before the Irish Potato Famine. The slicing of seed potatoes is the equivalent of inbreeding. The pollen from the same potatoes might end up pollinating the other potatoes sliced from the mother potato. When a virus hit the country, it wiped out the entire potato crop in Ireland. The tragedy of the potato virus was exacerbated since the Irish were growing only one type of potato. 

The Irish starved, and that starvation triggered the biggest exodus from Ireland in its entire history. 

In the urban areas, potatoes and corn form the majority of the food consumed. Fish and chips is the poor man’s lunch that harkens to our colonial relationship with the British. My home village is the potato basket of the major urban areas.

In comparison, the same virus hit Peru, but nobody even noticed. That was due to the fact that the Peruvians were growing over 400 types of potatoes.

It doesn’t take a genius to see the potential danger lurking in the shadows of my village. Though I didn’t have 400 unique types of Peruvian potatoes to carry, I decided to start with one: the Fingerling Potato. I planted the 1 pound, 8 ounce bag, or about 680 grams of seed potatoes in December of 2022. There were probably 15 potatoes planted that day. Today, 6 months later, we went back to check on the experiment.

We couldn’t have been more surprised. For one, a single one of the fingerlings potato plants had a massive potato that was over half a pound. Secondly, the original potatoes we had planted produced many times more potatoes. In the past six months we had left the newly planted seeds almost entirely alone. We took very little care of them and did not spray anything. The rain was no where close to being sufficient, but we still managed to harvest a decent amount.

Finally, I was amazed by the three attractive colors of the potatoes. There was the white ones; then there were the brownish red ones and the most wonderful purple ones. It was easy to mistake the purple fingerling with a purple sweet potatoes. I am not a big fan of potatoes, in fact I don’t eat potatoes, but I am also practical. If someone else is going to eat a potato, it would be prudent that he or she does so with the least harm to the environment with the toxic chemicals and chemical fertilizers. It’s also wise to fend off anything that could potentially crash our food shed. I am also a firm believer in futurism and I have no way of predicting what discoveries can be found for the use of the Fingerling or it’s extract. It’s better to have it and not need it instead of the other way round.

After the harvest was done, I looked at the biggest potato that came from the small fingerling potato; it was pleasing in my sight. I immediately thought about the bees that must have pollinated them. I wonder whether those little pollinators could tell the difference between a death worshiping “fiat potato” from an organic, pure variety, as, to us humans, they’re all potatoes by name. We will probably never know for sure. But that doesn’t mean it’s impossible. Perhaps they could detect the difference. Assuming they did, it is logical to assume that a new dance was invented to communicate the message. I would call that the pure Fingerling bee dance.

I only wish I could have been there to play the drums for the bees, while they did their Fingerling Dance. My whole focus would be to wake up my family, and the whole village, and tell them about the wonderful abundant possibilities on the other side of our colonized food system. 

A logical way out of that colonial fakery is to giver it a finger. After all that Finger is a major part of the Fingerling Drum Beat. The Fingerling Drum Beat is all about giving life and nurturing justice. Anyone with doubts can visit my village and taste it.

Eat Organic Meat

You might think that this is a joke but I can tell you what my research indicates. Organic pastured lamb like the one you see here is becoming more and more rare. This particular one has to be shipped here all the way from New Zealand. As more and more land in the world is consumed by toxic GMO crops that use over twenty billion liters of glyphosate and tons of chemical fertilizers, the space available for growing healthy meat will continue to be squeezed into a rare commodity.

I don’t need to tell you what that will do to the price of pastured organic meats. The outcome is not only quite predictable but has been played out numerous times in the past and in nature.

The perfect example was the introduction of Indian cows in Africa, first in Eritrea by the Italians and later in Kenya. The Italians were implementing the agreement made at the Berlin Conference to colonize Africa.

Those Indian cows had been exposed to rinderpest virus and had developed a resistance to it. The African cows and the wild animals with hooves, otherwise known as ungulates were immediately ravaged by terrible disease. So many buffalos, wildebeest and zebras died that the lions started starving and eating humans instead.

All the famous tales you hear of Africans and their Indians counterparts who were building the Nairobi Mombasa railway were part of this tragic experiment that brought rinderpest to the continent. Many tacks of land were abandoned as people migrated to area that were further away from the man eaters. These abandoned tracks of land are part of what become the national parks in East Africa. There was a major famine that occurred around the same time. Many Africans starved as the animals had died and others could not farm due to fear of the Man Eaters. The decline in ungulates caused the growth of thick bushes that promoted the proliferation of tsetse flies in areas that had been free of tsetse flies. Africans started suffering from sleeping sickness.

The irony of it is that the fiat tourism scam that is touted as a major source of foreign currency for those countries is heavily dominated by the citizens of the same countries that brought both the rinderpest as the latest human virus in the form of seeds and chemicals that are the current “man eaters”.

Before you rush to feel sorry for the “poor black cursed race” just remember that the whole colonial enterprise by the British was first perfect in Ireland. While there were no man eaters or rinderpest in Ireland there was a close example in the potato famine just 50 years before the rinderpest saga. The potato famine was so bad, obviously aggravated by the British Colonialism, that the Irish became man-eaters them in the form cannibalism. The only recoursefor the Irish was to migrate from Ireland in droves. The family of the late president JF Kennedy was part of those migrants. Millions of Africans affected by the rinderpest virus couldn’t migrate to U.S or other parts of Europe like the Irish. Funny enough, Barack Obama was elected as president 45 years after the death of JF Kennedy.

Unlike the Irish who migrated elsewhere, we are facing a modern crisis that we cannot runaway from. The famine and rinderpest conditions have been replaced with more modern money making merchandise in the form of toxic chemicals and toxic seeds that is turning the food system in “man eater”. Laws are being passed to make it illegal to save and exchange seeds. In Kenya, there are talks of a bill to will criminalize the use of cow manure to grow one’s food. Here is “food Berlin Conference” geared towards the colonization of what I call “just food”. Our food system appears as though it is infected by tsetse flies and hence suffering from sleeping disease or shall we say sleeping nutrition? This type of food is so good at putting us to sleep that the whole world has developed a strange disease that has put us to sleep maybe we can call this disease “Naptitude”.

April Fools Food

Today is the first day of the month of April. It easy to forget that the calendar we use is relatively young, and that it has just as much politics behind it as it does astronomical science. Even less obvious is the idea of how our calendar revolves around food.

Many are aware of the definition of time by the position of the moon, the sun, or both—hence lunar, solar and lunisolar calendars.

The truth of the mater is the current Gregorian calendar, named after Pope Gregory XIII, goes back to 1582, when the calendar jumped from October 3 to October 15. That jump corrected the Justinian calendar, which had been in use since 45 B.C. The Gregorian calendar was first accepted mainly in catholic countries in Europe and the colonized territories of those European countries.

In other words, the calendar in use today has imperial significance. That is not a hard thing to detect. The original Roman calendar had ten months. March was the first month and it was named after Mars, the god of war. In total, 4 months were named after Greco-Roman gods, and 6 months were named numerically.

To this day, September, October, November and December are the three month with numerical names. But those four name’s don’t represent the correct numerical position of those months. September, October, November and December were the 7th, 8th, 9th and 10th month respectively.

Two months of July and August were added and named after Julius Caesar and Augustus Caesar respectively.

Indigenous people under the influence of the Papacy lost their indigenous calendars, the majority of which revolved around the local food production. I have been talking to many elders, as well as scouting for information amongst the many books written about my culture, as I have come to suspect that many of the food issues that we are currently facing globally is largely due to the fact that we are not in alignment with our calendar, and by extension, with our consciousness. It is practically impossible to be normal and healthy using a calendar of the empire. The reality of the matter is that the Empire calendar we live under has facilitated the creation of the most destructive period in recorded history, better known as Anthropocene.

It is a very strange feeling for an indigenous person who is in tune with his natural calendar to live under Anthropocene. I have meet many people who consider themselves very wealthy, but their calendar was way off the natural cycle of time and space. Not all are lost. There is an emerging interest in something different from what we currently have.

I call the attempt to liberate oneself from the jaws of the vicious calendar and culture Anthrofoodism, the act of eating and living in a manner that is aligned to our indigenous evolution, and to the principles of indigenous time and space. The failure to gain that level of literacy is bound to make one a victim of April Fools Food.

May I ask you if you know what date it is today? Better yet, I could just ask you if you know your food date today.

Remember that the word April comes from the Latin word “Aperiio” which literally means to open up; implying the opening up of flower buds. In my indigenous language, the month is named Mùthatù, probably from the fog that appeared during that time of the year. To mark the month, an ancient Roman rite was performed in which young men would carry strips of goat skin and ran around the streets naked in celebration of fertility. Today, a similar tradition continues by the carrying leaves of palm around but for a different reason altogether. Yet the roots of that practice goes back to the fertility rites in Ancient Rome.

I am celebrating my “openness” into fertility of of my indigenous consciousness and the realignment of my concepts of time and space. Central to that alignment is food. For surely, falling a victim of April Foods Food has to be the perpetual antidote to openness, fertility or life in general. That is what I term as death worship.

I highly recommend that we each consider doing likewise. If you don’t, you may be living under an April Fools Food Calendar.

Thayù Thayù