My Meditation on International Women's Day

By Njathi Kabui

There is no greater area where Western thought differs from my indigenous culture than on the issue of women. It would not be an overstatement to say that we should not celebrate International Women's Day without first acknowledging these differences. I am culturally in tune with both my culture and Western culture to know that women in these two traditions carry very different weight. Yet, there are fewer areas that the blatant obliteration of my indigenous culture wrecked more havoc than in womanhood. That doesn't mean that my Gìkùyù culture was perfect or should be the global standard. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth. There are however great lessons worth noting and meditating on.

For brevity, let me point three distinct aspects I greatly admire and would gladly recommend today for their practical benefits.

The first and most amazing cultural practice was the ability of a barren woman whose husband died before the family having bore a single child to have a right to marry another woman. The second woman would have children on behalf of the barren woman. The barren woman would take the status of the late husband and the two women would raise their family without any prejudice. White women in America were being burned at the stakes for being witches around the same time. To this day, women's issues are deeply biased by sensless decrees that benefits neither women, children or men.

Secondly, women in my culture had their own hut which they shared with their daughters. The idea of a man and woman permanently sharing the same house had everything to do with colonial taxation on huts as a way of forcing locals into being laborers on British plantations in order that they may earn fiat currency for their tax dues. That practice caused many families to reduce the number of huts and thereby the annual tax bill. Having different houses or rooms for men and women might help the souring divorce rate.

Lastly, a woman was never married by a man but rather by the whole family. Marriage works better when the two families are closely connected. There two families entered into a blood alliance with each other. Such bonds were more supportive of the newly weds and harder to break. This is starkly different from the modern western marriages based on legal bonds that are based on a government certificate or a preacher's prayer. The history of the government and religious authority in the West have a checkered history of fiat culture and generally working against the interest of the common global citizens.

If I can use the oldest writings in Western tradition, the Iliad and Odyssey by Homer, we can learn a ton. The Odyssey, interestingly enough, starts with a wedding. All the gods and goddesses had been invited to that wedding except the Aris, the goddess of chaos. In retaliation, Aris threw an apple into the wedding premises that ultimately started a war and eventual destruction of the city of Troy. The whole book is about Trojan war. Well, an apple one day did not keep the doctor away, instead it caused the death of so many Greeks and destruction of the city of Troy. Aris, true to her nature, wrote that the apple she threw inside the wedding compound belonged to the most beautiful goddess at the wedding. The three major goddesses got into a contest with each other. Each goddess tried to bribe Paris, the judge, seeking his favor in the contest. Many deaths happened because of a spiteful goddess who offered another married woman to Paris as a gift for the vanity of being selected as the most beautiful goddess.

Amonst another Greek city of Sparta, the women fared worse. Married couples did not live together and the bride had to wear male clothes. It shouldn’t then surprise us that a culture that fences itself as being based on that of the Greeks would be so violent. That violence is bound to ultimately reach women. Such violence ultimately leads to a violent culture, country and globe. Like the Greeks, my village was divided by a different type of apple but nonetheless had a male deity. Our region was divided based on the church that was the first to camp in the area.

My oldest sister had to walk several miles to attend school at another village because the local village school was closed to her and my brother due to the fact that the Church of England discriminated against those families who were involved in the struggle for independence. The catholic church was more dominant in the next village and therefore accepted anyone that the Church of England did not accept. In other words, there was only one white way to learn and each had a religious gatekeeper. It is therefore no wonder that as Emperor Haile Selasi in a speech before the International League of Nations once said “ Everywhere is war”.

That is why as an indigenous man, I know that violence to women is violence to the whole world. The Greeks had a war that was started by the desire of the three goddesses' vanity of being the most beautiful and my village suffered violence due to the failure to follow the deity of the British who shed blood for the salvation of all. Yet few have seen that peace, especially the indigenous people. It is therefore hypocritical for the same people who have caused so much violence leading the call for peace, especially to those who have been on the receiving end of the violence and exploitation of the empire builders.

clarify that there is a great difference in how we look at this big day. That does not change the fact that many of the problems that indigenious people the world over are facing regarding women have roots in the injustices perpetrated on them by the biased western tradition. Like all traditions, there are some positive aspects and there are negative aspects.

I ought to clarify that there is a great difference in how we look at this big day. That does not change the fact that many of the problems that indigenious people the world over are facing regarding women have roots in the injustices perpetrated on them by the biased western tradition. Like all traditions, there are some positive aspects and there are negative aspects. Indigenious cultures the world over have their own adjustments to make as they remove any biases based on sex. Those gender biases, it has to be emphasized, are often and mostly if not always two ways. 

International Women's Day should actually last 9 days, 6 hours and 3 seconds. 9 days for every month that we  all spent in the womb, 6 for the average number of parents(including grandparents) and 3 for the three meals we have in a day. Each and every aspect mentioned above all has the testament of the power of women and the magic that takes place when it is complimented by the male power. 

The magic is also in the resulting balance, what we may call sustainability.  That we have major crises in the world is a sign of the imbalance of the relationship between the two sexes, but more of the women's energy. 

I am therefore in mood of meditation than that of celebration.  That meditation has allowed me to realize that we are fast moving towards extinction and the easiest way to get there is by causing inflation of womanhood, in other words by creating fiat womanhood.  In other words, by lowering the health and vitality of women, you lower the quality of everything about life exponentially.

One hundred uneducated and hungry women have a far more damaging impact on society than 1000 uneducated and starving men. Ironically, the Greek have one interesting story that can remind us that women can rise even in the face of the most severe bias. Antigone’s story is a great example. Her name gives away the whole tale. Her name literally means one of opposite opinion. Anti- opposed and gnom- opinion. Antigone refused to obey the king’s decree that her brother, Polyneces,  had aligned himself with a hostile neighboring city in a bid to overthrow the despotic ruler of Athens. The botched efforts led to the death of the brother of Antigone. The King decreed that the treasonous brother of Antigone should not be accorded a proper burial Antigone however disregarded the decree by the despotic ruler and accorded his brother the burial he deserved. 

Indigenious cultures have their own Antigone in their folklore. I know of numerous such stories in my culture. Today is a great day to meditate on each and every Antigone in our communities and support an environment that would nurture our women in a bid to restore sanity in our relationships, through justice. Nothing good will come out of any efforts that are not based on justice, equality and honesty. Any other way will lead us on the path of Polyneices, which literally means many troubles. One of those troubles is certainly our food. Having food trouble is itself many troubles in one. The unconscionable fact that those Polyneices food troubles are not experienced equally but have a both a gender, genetic, geographic and geopolitical bias. Those bias need to be antagonized just like Antigone did over 3 millenias ago. The Agikuyù have only to mditate on a bias going back about a century. It's therefore a huge bias to put all the women in one basket, pot or guard. Can you digest that?

My Quantum Calender of Poetic Flavors

In my indigenous Agikuyu culture, the Rights of Passage is such an important mark in a young man’s life that it really has no equivalent in modern Western tradition. I am tempted to compare it to the Jewish Bar Mitzvah ceremony which is an initiation of boys who have attained the age of 13 and are considered ready to partake in religious worship. But that temptation is quickly thwarted by the religious nature of Bar Mitzvah and the fact that the young men in my culture who go through the Right of Passage are still decades away from being qualified to participate in religious worship in any significant role. But I am not one of those Gikuyu folks who seem to think that it is such an honor to be connected to the Middle East as a sign of validation. The story of the Bible is quite problematic to me as it has a lot of baggage that those who are inside the faith are comfortably willing to overlook. That baggage has to do with the assumption of cultural superiority that is so close to the colonization of many indigenous people and also to the building of the Western empire. 

My interest in the indigenous Rights of Passage is that it is a way of marking time. In other words,  I am giving credence to the concept of having multiple calendars as a sign of tolerance and sophistication. That would allow me to stretch the concept of time to the rim of quantum combined with flavors. I am finding out that as I grow older, I have more time to reflect and to digest information and experiences in very different ways from the past. 

I am saying this as one who went through my own rights of passage myself . I was so excited about leaving boyhood and qualifying as an initiate such as having the privilege of dating and simply being respected.  But then I quickly realized that that right I had been so anxious to  achieve had its own set of challenges. I therefore quickly learned that in this life, not everybody is going to like you, be your friend, appreciate your kindness and leave alone reciprocating acts of sacrifice. My conclusion was to seek out those who were genuinely interested in being in your team and having you in their team. As it turns out, one develops a greater ability to access those one can get along with and the power to suppress the all common demon in all of such that promises convince and pleasure for short term fun while tarnishing delayed gratification as a curse. I love aging, if for nothing else,  for its ability to wear out that primordial demon. In its place I have a deep sense of gratitude for those who have equally overcome their own demons and develop an inner beauty only visible by the heart and spirit of those who have also initiated themselves into the same state through practice and discipline.

All the cells of my being celebrate whenever I run into such an initiate. They really don’t need to come out and verbally pronounce their accolades. Just by their conduct and sometimes just by looks, I can pick them. I will be the first one to admit that such occurrences are few and far apart for comfort. Yet I stay hopeful that the next such person is a call away, a flight of stairs up or down away or just a virtual introduction away. Thanks to technology, I can now add a WhatsApp group to the list of possibilities of places where initiates can be found. I am so happy to have met Namatsi through Kwetu Tahmeri. She is like a kitchen poet in my kitchen cabinet of my life, no pun intended. Humans are truly a microcosm of a government that, like cells, make up the whole country and ultimately the whole of humanity. It is clear that we will collaborate on some good work. It might be one or it might be many. The number or amount is not all that important, what is important is that the work will be important. It is on that account I perceived our relationship in quantum terms. Quantum particles defy general principles of physics in interesting was such as being in two different places at the same time. Having a quantum calendar of poetic flavors is similar to being ideological twin of sorts even though physically and biologically, we are connected in any tangible way whatsoever.

Since we both have deep appreciation of our culture and for African American culture of resistance, Namatsi reminded me of the closing of a poem of of of my favorite African American poet, Sterling Brown who is sometimes referred to as the Dean of African American Poetry, In the poem Odyssey of Big Boy, the reference of big boy reminds me of the fact that we are always children or that our childhood is ubiquitous throughout our lives regardless of what Rights of Passage we go through.  On the other hand, the Odyssey part of the title reminds me that a journey can cover a lifetime. Looked from that angle, the Rights of Passage might actually be longer than we typically expect it to last. Yet more importantly, it is not a one man or woman journey. It would make sense that we all need very solid accomplices along that journey. In the poem Odyssey of a Big Boy, Sterling Brown ends the playful poem with the wish that should the Big boy’s life come to an end, his only wish was that would want to be with ole Jazbo. I find the poem to be quite appreciated as the protagonist had a lot of fun with work and being promiscuous, including one married woman, who desired to be with his friend the most. That kind of relationship between friends is what I call quantum. It is a wonderful feeling to know that someone feels what you feel even without a word of communication. It makes my own odyssey across this rugged terrain bearable, especially in my own internal journey from boyhood to manhood. 

Odyssey of Big Boy

By Sterling Brown

Lemme be wid Casey Jones,
    Lemme be wid Stagolee,
Lemme be wid such like men
    When Death takes hol’ on me,
  When Death takes hol’ on me. . . .

Done skinned as a boy in Kentucky hills,
    Druv steel dere as a man,
Done stripped tobacco in Virginia fiel’s
    Alongst de River Dan,
  Alongst de River Dan;

Done mined de coal in West Virginia
    Liked dat job jes’ fine
Till a load o’ slate curved roun’ my head
    Won’t work in no mo’ mine,
  Won’t work in no mo’ mine;

Done shocked de corn in Marylan’,
    In Georgia done cut cane,
Done planted rice in South Caline,
    But won’t do dat again
  Do dat no mo’ again.

Been roustabout in Memphis,
    Dockhand in Baltimore,
Done smashed up freight on Norfolk wharves
    A fust class stevedore,
  A fust class stevedore. . . . 

Done slung hash yonder in de North
    On de ole Fall River Line
Done busted suds in li’l New Yawk
    Which ain’t no work o’ mine—
  Lawd, ain’t no work o’ mine.

Done worked and loafed on such like jobs
    Seen what dey is to see
Done had my time with a pint on my hip
    An’ a sweet gal on my knee
  Sweet mommer on my knee:

Had stovepipe blonde in Macon
    Yaller gal in Marylan’
In Richmond had a choklit brown
    Called me huh monkey man—
  Huh big fool monkey man.

Had two fair browns in Arkansaw
    And three in Tennessee
Had Creole gal in New Orleans
    Sho Gawd did two time me—
  Lawd two time, fo’ time me—

But best gal what I evah had
    Done put it over dem
A gal in Southwest Washington
    At Four’n half and M—
  Four’n half and M. . . .

Done took my livin’ as it came
    Done grabbed my joy, done risked my life
Train done caught me on de trestle
    Man done caught me wid his wife
  His doggone purty wife. . . .

I done had my women,
    I done had my fun
Cain’t do much complainin’
    When my jag is done,
  Lawd, Lawd, my jag is done.

An’ all dat Big Boy axes
    When time comes fo’ to go
Lemme be wid John Henry, steel drivin’ man
  Lemme be wid ole Jazzbo;
  Lemme be wid ole Jazzbo. .

Living in exile, we all need our own Jazbo as we are far from family but also quite different from our family. Namatsi the poet sounds and feels like Ole Jazzbo. Those in activism will most likely know the value of such a soul in our life. I was so touched that I made a recipe to mark that connection.Since I can write poetry to mark the connection, I marked the connection in the quantum calendar of poetic flavors. It is a great feeling to be mature enough to know that my Odyssey involves having quantum rights of passage across gender and culture. Who knows when Ole Jazzbo will come knocking into our lives. I will keep making flavors and hope that many of them will mark time and encourage friendships that are quantum and meaningful enough like that of Ole Jazzbo. In the same light, I hope to have a similar relationship with food too. In other words, I have a mission to cultivate and consume food that treats me so well that I feel like I am with Ole Jazzbo. In doing so, I will be creating the best worlds both inside and outside of my body. What a jazzy life that would be. A life of friendship and food justice has to be a life of true spirituality, or another way of saying flavorful, poetic , quantum existence. With such a life, time is no longer marked by the revolution of the earth around the sun but by the heart beats and vibrations that beat in unison as a form of singularity. 

Decolonization of Greasy Tastebuds

Decolonization of your Greasy Tastebuds

Here is a perfect example of how a village was killed through oil and the potential it has to resurrect itself.

This is a summary of an essay I am working on. It started as an idea many years back when I learned about the Proctor and Gamble scientist who came up with the idea of hydrogenation. That complex process resulted in making liquid oils solid at room temperature by adding an extra hydrogen atom to the molecule. For a while, the white lard made from cottonseed oil was used for making soap. But in 1911, P&G introduced Crisco as a so-called vegetable oil alternative to butter and lard, common kitchen ingredients in cooking and baking. Doctors and rabbis were hired to promote the hydrogenated lard as kosher and healthier.

That story took me back to a night when my brother took me to a free monthly movie event popularly known as “Cinema Leo” which is Swahili for “Movie Today”. In my neighborhood, the young people knew the monthly treat by another name: “Watoto Kaeni Chini” which means “Children sit down” in Swahili. Those were the actual first words right before the movie would start. The movie show was held outside at a dusty soccer field where a white screen was set up and the movie emitted from a projector atop a VW kombi.

It was at that movie that I saw an advertisement of our local Crisco known as “Wakenya Kaeni Chini”. I am obviously stretching the truth. But I could also be telling the truth about the name which the local Crisco brand was hiding. The local Kenyan brand was called “Kimbo” and it was a rival to the yellowish Crisco competitor, “Cow Boy ‘cooking fat’”. Those two brands were king. They were both owned by the same company.

What I didn’t know then is that cotton, a dirty word in the lexicon of African American history, continued to colonize people in my village without a clue about what was happening.

To make the long story short, Crisco and other hydrogenated oils were later found to cause all manner of health problems including infertility and liver problems. In fact, the brand was sold by P&G, ostensibly to avoid all the baggage of liability.

For me, with a firm grasp of how problematic cotton has been in the history of exploitation of the southern Black community, as well as the role that cheap Southern cotton played in building the British Industrial Revolution, including the destruction of the Indian textile industry and the colonization of Kenya and many other countries, I couldn’t miss the connection between that exploitive history and the consumption of toxic oil, first in my Kenyan village, and again in Mississippi and Tennessee where I would later learn about the greasy truth.

Here is a story of an advertisement I remember from over 4 decades ago that convinced my young mind that these oils, loaded with toxic chemicals, were superior to our local animal lard. Many years down the road, many people are paying a hefty price for being ignorant of the political subterfuge that major food companies play on the masses just to make profit. The advert I first saw at the first movie night I attended featured a couple in the kitchen all happy around the hearth. The wife was busy preparing to cook while being entertained by the jovial husband seated comfortably across the wife. But things changed abruptly once the wife added some lard into a cooking pan that was being heated on the fire. The lard started bubbling everywhere and burning the husband who didn’t look amused at all. The next clip show the mother being advised to use Kimbo cooking oil and the happy mood in the kitchen returned. The message was clear even in my young mind.: animal lard was for loosers.

If eating the apple made Adam realize that he was naked, eating hydrogenated oils in my village and the American south made me aware that my food was colonized by a greasy lie. That was then. Now the pizza and foreign chicken joints like KFC craze is the new version of hydrogenated oil. Few with the means to patronize these foreign joints dare miss out on a visit to these restaurants during an outing or a special occasion. Like the parade of the many happy customers who wear cotton clothes, stained by the blood and sweat of Southern slavery in the old South, or those modern sartorial masters donning garb from problematic cotton grown in India through exorbitantly priced GMO seeds which have caused the suicide of hundreds of thousands of farmers facing the loss of their family land on account of debts tied to those seeds, the facade around cotton continues to this day. Many in the highfalutin West know that the word Crisco actually stands for crystallized cottonseed oil. This oil from cottonseeds that are heavily reliant on chemicals, is sold as a vegetable oil. When has anyone heard of cabbage oil or spinach oil? Yet the oil acts like a food bikini, hiding the most important things while showing what few would care to see.

But not all are being fooled. No more taking the old orders of “Children, Sit Down”, as I dutifully did in my youth at the free monthly movie. I therefore made a sumptuous alternative that satisfies my appetite in a way that commercial chemical pizza and chicken, cooked in chemical oil that had been heated beyond its smoke point many times over. I called the recipe Wakubwa, Swahili word for grownups and the opposite of “watoto” or children. I am no longer a child to believe everything I hear without examining it. Just for fun, i used the oxtail, cooked black eyed peas,, pastured eggs, fresh oregano, parsley, greens, shiitake mushrooms, cumin, cloves and black pepper. All the ingredients were carefully chosen and then cooked in shape of thick bread or pizza. It was cooked slowly on top of the stove within fifteen minutes. The recipe will be available to anyone who requests it by email. I tested it on my children and they gave me a thumbs up. I now say it loud that it is possible to decolonize your ideas about food. But it has to start with recognizing the snake and the apple that will tempt you. Then you can arm yourself with the skills to understand and attend to your taste buds.

Stop Picking Your Poison

Chef Njathi Kabui’s Thesis in One Lesson

It’s been very close to two years since I became a student of Chef Njathi Kabui. In that time I’ve not only been trying to swallow his Afro Futuristic Cuisine, but also the key element of his 30-year thesis. The first part is the easy one. I love his unique cuisine. If I were to compare it to Bud Light’s catch phrase, I’d say “Tastes great, more filling.”

A few months ago, he introduced me to a new word. It’s a word for which we’ve lost the concept, many decades ago, but I think it perfectly describes his cuisine. The word is batian. See? Even Google doesn’t recognize the word. It’s a verb that combines concepts which, for us today, don’t go together. It seems like a contradiction. Batian means to fatten or to get fatter, but in a specific way. It means to fatten, but in a way that also improves, lets its subject get better, and heal. Chef’s food batians. To say that it feeds is only part of the story. To describe his cuisine fully, we need to resurrect a word like batian.

While his cuisine is very easy to swallow, the second thing he teaches is, strangely, much, much more difficult. His thesis, which he’s had well developed for over thirty years now, is that our food is lacking nutrition and in most, if not all cases, is actually toxic to human health. He’s like all of the California cancer warnings concentrated into one person. In short, he’s teaching anyone who will listen, to “stop picking your poison”.

We use that phrase about poison blithely, and almost a century of tradition. I’m 53 years old, and I think I’ve heard it for as long as I can remember, in reference to alcoholic drinks. Apparently it goes back a few decades before that. Around that time, Australians exercised brutal honesty and renamed their pubs “poison shops”. But Chef Kabui isn’t just trying to help alcoholics. He uses this concept for not just hazardous drinks, but he argues that our food is just as bad, or even more insidious, than the toxic stuff we happily chug in poison shops.

I love the word insidious. It means “sneaky evil”.

Chef teaches that our food is insidious, having become both sneaky and evil. Through a long chain of events over the last two centuries or so, the human diet has evolved to depend on a globally centralized production and distribution system which is built on many values, none of which include nutrition. Remember, batian is to feed in the way that fattens, strengthens, and heals. Our food system today values convenience, price, flavor, texture, dependence, well-established supply chains, popularity, etc. Batian is not in the equation.

This situation has created a world of alcoholics and food junkies. We are so lost to the concept of batian that we know and even embrace the fact that our food and our drinks are killing us. We take mental pills to cope with the situation. We tell ourselves that this world is a “lone and dreary wilderness” we are fated to wander, until we finally escape into the paradise of the grave. We convince ourselves that we’d rather die than change our diet, which so many of us do with full commitment.

As I’ve been explaining to my friends, family, customers, and acquaintances about my adventure in food with my Kenyan Chef friend, they seem to have as much trouble swallowing this core element of his thesis as I have done. They ask me if it’s okay to have french fries occasionally. They ask if the toxicity of our food can’t really be managed through eating less and exercising more. They suggest that “organic”, or non-poisonous food, is just a scam in order to sell food ingredients at higher prices. They look for the FDA to explain the benefit of Chef’s cuisine through a nutrition label, in effect asking me to point to the government’s recognition of Chef’s thesis. In short, I’ve rarely met a person who, learning about Chef’s thesis, smoothly absorbs the information and really thinks about it. Instead, I run into a mental immune system which has evolved to make us okay with poisoning ourselves every day with our food and drink.

The things that our global food system values aren’t theirs alone. The resistance to Chef’s thesis, mine and everyone else’s, isn't a symptom of a centrally imposed set of values which are authoritatively forced upon the world. Remember the word insidious? Sneaky evil. The food system we have is our “friend”. It’s like the snake in the garden of eden. Over the centuries, it has adapted to the values we all hold, but which our ancestors couldn’t afford to pursue, when food was much more difficult to obtain. Our global food system is like a bartender, offering comfort and advice, while serving dose after dose of poison to his or her willing victims. Like a bad psychiatrist, it gives advice which keeps the client coming back, not what will cure and heal. In doing so, it has helped foster and reinforce the toxic food values we all hold today.

For example, I love canned food. It’s convenient. It’s reliable. It’s got so many cool flavors and textures. I love my frozen meals. Same reasoning. I love the microwave. So convenient and quick. I love fast food. It’s fast, and I pretend that it’s food. I love sauces and sandwiches. Pastas and meat patties. The list goes on. Fizzy drinks in a bottle or a can. Hot dogs and potato chips. And when I want to “eat better”, I grab a bag of “salad” and throw on some “dressing”. In none of these values is the concern for nutrition. Convenience, texture, flavor, and the joy of sharing a meal with friends and family are the values I was taught to swallow along with my fiat food (food only by decree). Besides, don’t we know that the government takes care of all that detailed stuff? They’ve got our back, don’t they?

This leads us to the biggest mental obstacle to swallowing Chef’s thesis, along with his food. It’s something I think most of us have said at one time or another. If we haven’t said it, we’ve definitely heard it. It’s the phrase: “If it was that bad, someone would have told us.” Or another variant, “How can millions (or billions) of people be wrong?”

It’s taken me a full two years to choke down Chef Kabui’s pill, his thesis about our global food system. I think I’m just now really starting to believe it. His message is a horror story of betrayal and doom. He’s like the prophets of the Bible, declaring a disaster which nobody wants to hear. But, like them, he also offers a cure, or a way to repent.

Silently and consistently, Chef has been building a set of farms in Kenya. I call him a druid sometimes, because he holds his land sacred, and fights like a warrior to protect it from any toxic influences. The foods he grows there are magical in their purity and in their ability to batian. He has identified other suppliers around the world who are doing what he does, if not quite as religiously. “Organic” is the label most use to accomplish the same thing he’s doing on his farms, but many are pure in name only, which has led him to do what he’s doing in Kenya.

The horrible truth I’m trying to swallow along with the delicious meals I eat off of his cuisine is that I live in a world of addicts. Like the videos of homeless drug junkies in the streets of San Francisco, and other major US cities, who have embarked on their various projects to “help” the homeless, we are wandering our own streets with vacant minds and hollows where our bump of nutrition should be. As fat as we are, we are starving for nutrition and purity in our food, which, for our ancestors of more than 200 years ago, was the primary requirement for the food they produced and consumed. You and I have been born into a world where we’ve inherited a global addiction, where the entire human race, with very few exceptions, has lost the common knowledge of farming, having traded it for dependence on a centralized food authority.

Chef’s message is simple. Stop picking, and eating, poison. Through his cuisine he attempts to compete with marshmallows, soda, and saltine crackers. He can’t offer poisonous apples which outcompete our poisonous apples, so he offers oranges instead. All we have to do is work slowly, consistently, and happily, to re-train our taste buds and our pallets. Oh, and we have to learn how to cook. And, we have to completely switch our supply chains and the contents of our pantries. And maybe re-learn how to farm. See? Simple.

Okay, maybe Chef Kabui is asking a lot. I know he is, because while he’s been preaching for over three decades, he’s found very few addicts willing to begin the recovery process. I’m starting to truly understand why. It’s like being in a religious bubble where everyone around you tells you that the invisible, the contradictory, and the impossible is the truth. When your barber, your teacher, your family, your government representatives and clerks, your realtor and your plumber all agree that what seems nonsense to others is actually the truth. It’s very tough to go against such a tide of opinion.

We live in a world where we’re all each other’s bartenders and therapists. We all belong to the same fiat food and fiat drink religion. We are the opposite of alcoholics anonymous. Imagine an A.A. meeting where alcoholics meet to drink more, not less, with drinking games for everyone to play, and sporting contests streaming on the walls. Oh, I guess that’s just the local poison shop. Well, our cities, our grocery stores, and our restaurants are all poison shops, according to Chef.

That’s his message. It really is hard to swallow, because he’s accusing the governments of every nation, the suppliers of nearly all of our food and drinks, and nearly all of the chefs of the world, of a massive global conspiracy to value flavor, convenience, abundance, etc. over, and in place of, nutrition. He’s accusing the global supply chain of serving junk for us to eat, and of destroying the concept of a healthy form of the verb “to feed”, like batian. It’s a major accusation he delivers to a multi-trillion dollar global business model. Not only that, he’s accusing the global medical system, including the health insurance industry, of complicity in these crimes, profiting from an ever-expanding customer base of poisoned humanity.

Is it any wonder that his message is hard to swallow?

The biggest problem I’ve found is that his thesis gets stuck in my throat, so to speak. Yes, it’s hard to swallow, but I can’t spit it out, either. The reason why so many people find his message so appealing is that he’s right. The evidence is everywhere.

I remember going on a quest, shortly before I met Chef Kabui, to discover what the best human diet really was. I watched five different T.E.D. talks on the subject, and they all had wildly different theories. I read so many articles with contradictory advice that I had to give up. Chef’s thesis explains the difficulty of my attempt. He claims that humanity lost its dietary brain almost two centuries ago, in exchange for modern food convenience, abundance, and all the rest. He tells me that there are, even today, a few people around the globe, like himself, who grew up with an uninterrupted indigenous connection to those ancestors. Some humans never forgot how to eat. These relics of a lost civilization have been slowly and nutritiously chewing their way through time for generations. But they are becoming more and more an endangered species.

Isn’t that a weird concept? Humanity, those of us who still know how to eat, is becoming an endangered species. We’ve had a kind of evolutionary split. I keep telling Chef that he’s an alien. But the truth is much more frightening. He’s one of the last representatives of a nearly lost humanity. We’re the aliens. When he first came to the U.S. to get “the best that the first world had to offer”, he was handed a hot dog and a Coke from 7-11. That was the birth of his thesis. He knew something was very wrong, when the cafeteria food from his university made him sick, and the convenient and fast food offered everywhere was like that first hot dog and soda, being sold as food. He was one of the last of his tribe who had grown their own food, eating nothing but the freshest farm-to-table cuisine, where nutrition was still the standard.

For my alien, human, Chef teacher, the message is so simple. Stop picking your poison. He never has voluntarily chosen what most of us so easily choose every day. He’s eaten only the best food he could find his whole life, first from the hands of his parents, and then, as a foreign student in the United States, deliberately, out of a strong survival instinct. He’s raised his two children on his tailor-made cuisine, in an attempt to batian, in an otherwise toxic food environment.

But for the rest of us, man what a job we have in front of us! Here in my 50’s, my youthful health tickets have nearly all expired. I have nothing left of my free health-lunch. All the health I have, moving forward, has to be earned and deliberately maintained. If Chef is right, then I have nowhere to eat but my own kitchen. There aren’t even any restaurants. I’ve checked! Some say “raw”, and others “organic”, but the ones I’ve found so far offer real food in name only, “having a form of godliness, but denying the power thereof.” There’s my religious background coming through.

We human mutants of today have the job of rediscovering the ideal human diet. Fortunately, we have access to Chef Njathi Kabui and a few others who are still human, as alien as they seem to us modern people. Speaking from personal experience, his cuisine is very accessible and very delicious. The ideal would be for us to produce the ingredients ourselves, but that’s the Master Class level of learning. In the meantime, there are suppliers of mostly pure food ingredients we can tap into.

They say the first step to recovery is to admit that there is a problem. I believe Chef is right, and that we all have a major problem. We may be slightly better off than the drugged out zombie homeless of San Francisco, but we’re not nearly as unrelated to them as we think. I’m getting better at implementing Chef’s curriculum, but it’s so hard. The best, like any recovering junkie, is to join a community of one other person who thinks like you do. With just a little support, we can do it. With a lot of support, it will be easy.

I wish you all the best. Where there’s a will, there’s a way. Let’s do our best to stop picking our poison. Instead, let’s rediscover the joy of eating well. May we all batian.

Triple Crown Banana Dance

This must be the month of bananas and for good reason. January is the beginning of the dry seasons and the end of the two growing seasons. The two seasons in our traditional calendar was that of Mbura ya Njahí and Mbura ya Mwere. Mbura ya Njahi was the reasonably longer and heavier rains named after the most prominent bean known as Njahi, while Mbura ya Mwere was much lighter and shorter and was most ideal for millet, the grain it is named after. Those two types of food very very important to the food security of the community as well to the culture of my people.

It is sometimes easy to underestimate the value of food in driving and sustaining the healthy culture of my community. In other words, foods that were grown in my community feed more than bodies or stomachs. The security and the health of the community went beyond caloric intake. Having a healthy culture meant that there were certain community activities that kept the functioning of the community as smooth as possible.

There was no better time to understand the role food played in the creation of a functional culture than the month of January and the two crops of bananas, millet and Njahi. Millet for example was a grain that was pound with a grind stones or in a big wooden mortar and pestle in a colorful team event that involved singing and interesting conversations between women relatives or mothers and daughters. The pounded millet flower wound make porridge for breakfast or regular snack. The fermented millet porridge was also the default drink consumed during the work gangs by young men and women known as Ngwatio( a word with the connotation of borrowing). These Ngwatio was a group of local villagers coming together to tackle heavy duties such as breaking new ground or digging previously farrowed land and preparing it for the next season. No money changed hands and all one had to do is answer a similar call from the participants. This events were fun and mostly finished with a dance in after work. It was one of the happiest farming events full of great fun and productivity.

The month of January was typically dry and one of the lightest in terms of work. There was a much needed break for our farming community and therefore equally ideal for dances too regardless of any Ngwatio or not.

Bananas are too important of a food to cover it in this post and I will save that for the last post this month. Suffice it to say that bananas would be consumed both as food and as fruit in the form of ripe bananas.

It is therefore a great joy to have an award winning banana in our short growing history in our ancestral home. Right next to our compost pile, this banana of Kíganda has a record of 16 suckers and mature banana with 80+ count that are perfectly healthy and ready for harvest. The banana must either have sent roots into the compost or the compost piles sends some of its nutrients with the rain water that flow downward during the rain season that supposed to have ended last month. Whatever the case we are all together delighted. This is a reason good enough to remember and celebrate the sustainable practices that our culture has designed but have since been neglected at a terrible cost to the food security and sovereignty of the community and the general mental and overall wellness of the community. Progress might be doing the same old things better and not necessarily 🦍 aping ideas whose application might not be tried and tested. At least for now, we are dancing of our big win in the race towards a sense of self.

Thayù

Pidn Gimoro-Boo Accord

The fabled Boo banana has been going places since the first post that has so far reached 27 thousand eaters. One of the cool places it landed is in Kisumu. Kisumu is the place I first attended school. A relative was working there and I was lucky to join him briefly. I remember a tomato plant that was growing just beside the main entrance. My brother was so agonized about leaving it behind that he toyed with the idea of uprooting it and taking it with us. On second thoughts he decided against it, but it was too late. The poor tomato plant had already been uprooted and it is quite unlikely that it survived. 

I thought about it for a long time as It was my chore to water the plant. I never forgot about it and hoped that our neighbor Akinyi and her family would enjoy it. That was about 50 years ago. For the love of food and the Akinyi who scolded anyone who looked down on me due to my ethnicity we shared some eclectic tomato seeds that might be new in the area such as Purple Cherokee tomatoes. It wasn’t accidental either, I am in Cherokee county now and feeling at home just like I felt at home in Kisumu courtesy of kind souls like Akinyi. I learned my first lesson about the stupidity of cultural and ethnic prejudice in Kisumu. The experience prepared me for new flavors and fight for justice. I am happy to pay the half century debt just in time before the jubilee forgiveness of debt. 

The six packs of seeds for bribery to the co-owners of The Peasant Shamba, namely Cynthia the Green Grass Snake, Alfonso the Cunning Chameleon, George the Randy Frog, Osama the Fat Obongo Bongo, Matilda the Slay Butterfly and Aluoch and Oluoch the free birds. We believe in justice and so do our beautiful ladies ( suckers) so everyone gets one packet of seeds of his or her choice. 

Let freedom ring at the Peasant Farm, where our in-laws believe that all creatures are worthy and none is more equal than the other. If the Peasants Shamba team works together like the mighty team of Gor Mahia,, your counterparts and in-laws from our farm, the Mugudanda team, will promise to attend the first harvest of the daughters of Boo/Bùù Banana  with an appropriate brew. Let freedom ring from Peasant Farm by the shores of Lake Nam Lolwe (formerly colonized as Lake Victoria) to slopes of Kirínyaga mountain ( formerly colonized as Mount Kenya). May we all look forward to that day that all those involved in this great union will enjoy a meal together and hopefully I can be accorded the privilege of choreographing an Afro Futuristic recipe worth many cheers. I can already imagine the reaction of Cynthia, the Green grass Snake, with a quip after her first bite of that Afro Futuristic dish prepared with the fabled Bùù from the slopes of Kírínyaga and tended in the shores of Lake Nam Lolwe , with “Dher Kado Okuyu'' (eccentric remark signifying a great taste ) and at the sound of her voice, Pidn Gimoro Accord will take effect for another 500 years of literacy, peace and prosperity. Food justice would have accomplished what many other efforts had failed. Pidn Gimoro/ Thayù and Thayù literally means plant something /peace. That is essentially what Food Justice is. 

Thayù Thayù /

Pidn Gimoro 

Food Security Icon

A juxtaposition of Kabocha Squash from our backyard in NC and in our backyard in Naivasha, all grown from the seeds of one Kabocha Squash. It is the first time we have grown them successfully in Naivasha. 

Kabocha Squash is my favorite pumpkin/winter Squash of all time. This pumpkin carries as much history as it does flavor, texture and distinctiveness. 

The pumpkin originated in the Americas where it is believed to have been domesticated long before maize. It was introduced to Japan around 1541 by the Portuguese. It is partly for that reason that some associate this pumpkin with Japan. The word Kabocha comes from the word Cabaca which the the Portuguese word for guard.

The beauty of Kabocha squash is that it is the only pumpkin I know that gets better with age. In fact the pumpkin should be stored in a warm place for at least 13 days after harvesting. The longer you wait the more the sugars forms and the sweeter and farmer it gets. Kabocha squash can store for as long as 6 months, making it a top food amongst the foods I recommend for food security and health. Eating well doesn’t mean compromising on taste. I hope to spread these jewel far and wide in my community and elsewhere. Some seeds will be heading to Kisumu as soon as they cured, eaten and the seeds dried up. 

Some of my favorite recipes feature this pumpkin and butternut squash more than any type of pumpkin. It is great in stews, soups as well as a breakfast item.

Thanks to Munene Anthony and Chiro GI for tending this most wonderful addition to our cornucopia basket of flavors and vitality.

Kabui’s Wager

Kabui’s Wager

The cure to Pascal’s Wager

Pascal’s Wager

For many years I've had some small knowledge about an argument for faith in God, known as “Pascal’s wager”. It wasn't until recently, I'm embarrassed to admit, that I gave it the thought which such a mental landmine deserves. It was a recent discussion with a very religious coworker of mine which inspired me to give it much more attention. I had left all religion nearly a dozen years before, and this fellow thought to entice me back to deism through Mr. Pascal's famous wager.

I looked up the synopsis of the idea for the purposes of this essay. It goes like this:

“Pascal's Wager is an argument in philosophy presented by the seventeenth-century French philosopher, mathematician and physicist Blaise Pascal (1623–62). It posits that humans bet with their lives that God either exists or does not…if God does not exist, the individual incurs only finite losses, potentially sacrificing certain pleasures and luxuries. However, if God does indeed exist, they stand to gain immeasurably…”

As a result of my religious upbringing, I was programmed with religious tolerance. I knew there were many other faiths besides mine, and that others were just as entitled to their beliefs and conclusions as I was to mine. I simply knew they were wrong, probably in the exact way that they knew for sure that I was wrong.

Now, I’m strongly questioning the cost of such tolerance. Not just the tolerance of one religious nut for the nuttiness of others, but tolerance for an epistemology (approach to knowledge) which demands so little in the way of objective validation.

Let’s look at the famous wager a little more closely. Pascal, or those who talk about the wager now, argue that the cost of faith is minimal, while the potential rewards are literally out of this world. Should we say “unfathomable”?

Right at the beginning of this argument is a monstrous contradiction. A member of God’s “chosen people” is very tolerant of other people’s freedom to employ faith as they wish, simply because they know they are one of God's people, while unbelievers (of their faith) are not as fortunate. It’s a crazy mind game the religious play with one another, telling themselves that they are extremely tolerant, loving, and forgiving, while what hold this condescension in place is a “knowledge” that those who reject their own belief are going to hell, not to the supposed reward which their doctrine says awaits them at death.

So rather than, as Pascal’s wager supposes, the gamble of a belief in god imposing nothing more than minor inconveniences, we see that even the most faithful must face the ultimate Eternal Russian Roulette and hope like hell that they picked the one true church, if it happens to exist on the earth at the time. My religion of origin taught that the “true church” only appeared among various societies infrequently, and was often absent for centuries and at a time. So the starting cost of Pascal’s wager couldn’t be higher.

If we assume that you are lucky enough to be born into a family of “god’s chosen people”, and that your god is the actual god, not a false god, mind you, let’s explore the further supposed “minimal” inconveniences of a new child or young adult accepting Pascal’s wager.

Steffan Moleneaux of freedomainradio.com once provided a great example of the mental cost imposed by religious epistemology on a child. He talks of a family at the dinner table, where parents and siblings pass containers of food to one another, as normal. But at this meal, one of the dishes is a bowl that contains some sort of invisible apples. The newest member to this faithful family sees everyone else, one by one, reaching into the seemingly empty bowl, and removing something invisible, which they bite into without any noise or other observable clues as to the magical food’s mysterious nature. Each older family member supposedly really enjoys their chewing and tasting experience. As the bowl is passed around, eventually it makes it to the youngest, the new kid. Now it’s their turn to look into the bowl and into everyone’s eyes, as they expect them to reach in and take an “apple”.

Religious doctrines across the earth, all 4500 or so of them, are presented to new family members in a very analogous way as Steffan Molyneaux’s bowl of invisible apples. A baby is taught by their family and community to use their mind and senses. They are taught to expect consistency, objectivity, and rationality from their world. Everything they learn is taught in this way, with just one exception. Like a bowl of invisible fruit at an otherwise sensible family dinner, the child is asked to accept the idea that rationality applies to everything in the world that they do, think, and discover, with the notable exception of all things “spiritual”.

The problem with this logic is that the definition of “all things spiritual” includes life, death, and one’s mind. When religions refer to things that are “spiritual”, what they do is hijack everything that is human. Love, joy, peace, long suffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, and temperance are all human faculties. Many religions, however, teach their members to treat such aspects of human nature as somehow “divine”, “spiritual”, or “mystical”. They’ve claimed as “theirs”, something that is as natural to humans as breathing. Just as the gay community seeks to hijack the rainbow as exclusively their exclusive property, while having no effect on the physics of a rainbow, religious communities attempt to hijack the nature of the human experience, and claim it as the virtues or the vices of their own specific doctrine. They haven’t changed or described a secret aspect of the supernatural. They’ve merely redefined the natural so it can enliven their narratives.

So the second casualty, or cost, to accepting Pascal’s wager is rationality. That poor child at the family dinner must make one of two no-win choices. The most common choice is to reach for an invisible apple at the cost of having to then fake reality from that time forward. The second choice which almost no child is equipped to make is to reject the thinking of their faithful family members who will be providing their next several years of key life support, labeling them as crazy, deluded, or perhaps actual enemies in some freakish imaginary eternal war. What kind of post-traumatic stress could you hope to avoid in such a nightmare scenario?

I could go on, but after my discussion with my friend, the horror of Pascal’s wager truly came into my view. What it is proposing is that one set aside their rational mind in order to accept a random set of mental programming that they hope, despite all evidence, rationality, and in the face of billions of dissenters, might be accurate, and greatly reward them–not at some point later in their life, like a most good investments, but long after any investment could sensibly matter–once they are in their grave.

I know very well the religious rebuttal to my conclusions. My religious family members and friends would advise me that I certainly don’t have to give up my rational mind, but only a small portion of it, which needn’t interfere with the objective scientific approach to the rest of life. That’s what my friend told me. But it is a blatant lie. That child, and everyone who accepts the gamble of faith must pay terrible and life-changing costs in their personal lives. The reason why they accept such costs and refuse to see them or their magnitude is that they are all under the illusion that they’ve already won the eternal lottery, so price is no object. Observe the interesting fact that even the Bible refutes Mr. Pascal, referring to a reward in heaven as a “pearl of great price”.

The more I consider the magnitude of the religious scam that has persisted throughout human history, supported by such appologists as Pascal, the angrier I get. Of course, all I’ve referred to so far are the personal costs. But the child being conned into taking their first invisible apple foreshadows the greater cost of Pascal’s priceless pearl–the social or economic cost.
Consider the fact that our civilization today is descended from thousands of years of slavery. Our species has never been free of it, except for the occasional pockets of brief freedom, when peaceful people were able to cooperate and to produce without the fear of pirates. Despite the history lessons, slavery persists to this day, having evolved into the incremental slavery of democracy. For the vast majority of our history, we’ve been plagued by the dogma of “might makes right”. Those with power, from tyrannical parents to the Genghis Khans of our nightmares, have used this excuse to enslave and plunder the productive within their reach, for all of our social history.

Humanity has never had the sense of a flock of sheep or a colony of ants to work productively together for any length of time without getting possessed by the demons of envy, fear, and the desire to control one another’s lives. We already fear our neighbor more than any other living thing on earth or in heaven. In this toxic environment, how well do you think we can afford to add the insane variable of Pascal’s wager? The devastating one-two punch of “Might makes right”, and “In God We Trust” has kept our ancestors crawling through pain and poverty, and with today’s power-enhancing technologies, it threatens to cause the end of our species.

Our pirate heritage and religious addiction has resulted in a global culture of death worship. Pascal may have sold his wager with the biggest understatement on record when he referred to “finite losses”. Finite just means “less than infinite”. For those who have paid the price in death, sorrow, and fear, as we’ve struggled against institutional stupidity, the losses have been infinite, as they encompassed everything in their shortened lives. I’m no longer remotely interested in considering Pascal’s wager. The cost is monstrous, and any god who would require such a thing could only be a nightmare in any possible heaven.

Kabui’s Wager

There are many wagers I would make. One of my absolute favorites is the one I discovered almost two years ago when I met a Chef from Kenya, Njathi Kabui. He proposed a wager which is focussed on this time here on earth, and on a subject which he calls “life worship”, centered on eating well.

From the fantastic visions of heaven discussed by Pascal to Kabui’s earthly passion with food, the two wagers represent opposite poles. Pascal, despite his scientific interests, was shackled by the mystical. Kabui is empowering himself and his audience through the most realistic and practical of all life-support: our food.

The reason why I call this essay Kabui’s Wager is because Chef’s thesis is so much harder to swallow than the products of his kitchen. He proposes that over the last 200 years or so, humanity has lost the common knowledge of the most basic skill of our ancestors–how to eat. Like religion’s hijacking of natural human feelings, Kabui claims that technological and political errors have hijacked humanity’s natural ability to eat. Mass production of food has erased the common knowledge of farming and sustainability from most of our minds, and a centralized global food system has deleted most of the nutrition from our food, replacing it with flavors, textures, low prices, convenience, popularity, security, etcetera.

I started taking a course from Chef Kabui almost two full years ago, and it has definitely enhanced my life. How can I summarize his coursework and state his wager? I mentioned death worship above, and I believe this has contributed to the fall of human food sovereignty. Our food today is killing us. Our dependence on government leadership and our super-abundance of “foodstuffs” leaves us senseless in the face of hotdogs, icecream, and high fructose corn syrup. Through his classes and lectures, Chef is trying to expose the full nature of the modern day character of our ancestral death worship. He’s trying to fight it, and I think he’s found a way.

Kabui’s wager is that we gamble with our life when we eat today. He claims that what we now call food is only food by decree, or fiat food. Every time we eat from the centralized global supply chain, we incur ever-compounding losses. On the other hand, if we were to eat food such as what he teaches in his Afro-futuristic cuisine, with nutritious and cleanly produced ingredients, our eating experience will be win-win, and will show rapid positive health results.

Chef Kabui asks that his students and listeners consider his thesis about the present alarming nature of today’s food system and gamble on his cuisine. I’ve had so much fun, here on earth, gambling on his ideas for life worship centered on my kitchen, that I’ve completely lost all interest in life after death worship.

[rework Kabui’s wager to reflect Chef’s son, Kabui, and his challenge to deal with the world, his dad, and the thesis of Just Food. At age of 4, Kabui could run on a treadmill for 56 min. At age 5 he saw his dad working out and managed 100 pushups. Today he’s competing easily with school kids 2 years older than him in running, He’s the #3 runner in his school, and the #2 & #1 position is held by 8th graders. Afro Futuristic Cuisine is like nutritional steroids. At age 9 he could easily do 20 pull ups. These kids are being raised by a dad who has lived his whole life fueled by nutritional steroids, so he is very energetic. Their dad keeps them active in summers, compared to other kids, spending a lot of time outdoors. He would take them on 2-4 mile runs. Sometimes they would run for 2 miles, then go play tennis. That is a typical summer routine happening 2 times a week. ]

[we are teaching students of JFU (Just Food University) to take Kabui’s wager. That wager doesn’t expect complete acceptance of his claim that we’ve lost the battle for our food, but that they make a bet on it being true. This will allow them to take the life-saving action necessary to save their health and to restore humanity’s food sovereignty. People know without the personal experience of eating off of Chef cuisine that food is a danger as well as their life support. J.F.U. offers the possibility that there exists a set of ingredients and a cuisine that offers food which is just life support, without the danger.]