Thoughts on food from a recent cycling trip

Potatoes and pumpkins for sale along the road, Northern Zambia

As a first blogpost I would like to share some thoughts from a recent cycling trip. 

Veganism has been a big part of my identity since I changed my habits and perspectives about 7 years ago. Even though I feel

knowledgeable about the topic and quite certain my choices are the right ones, I still learn new things and have new perspectives shown to me all the time. I recently got back from a cycling trip through Zambia and Tanzania. In 2022/2023 my brother and I spent 14 months cycling from Berlin to Cape Town through East Africa, and so this was my second time travelling by bicycle through these two countries. Of course this time was quite different due to the fact that I was cycling with different people, cycling the stretch in reverse and also taking some different routes (especially in Tanzania). 

I had decided to join brothers Max and Fritz for a stretch on their mission to run and cycle from Cape Town to Cairo. They had left Cape Town at the end of March and I had been dreaming to get back on the bike and also see my dear friends again. I ended up flying to meet them in Livingstone, Zambia, and continued all the way up to Arusha in northern Tanzania. Because of my previous experience, I had some idea what to expect, but still the experiences on this trip have taught me many new things. 

When my brother and I arrived in Cape Town last year, one of the first questions people always asked us (when they discovered we were vegan), was “What did you eat?!” This didn’t surprise me. This is a question you get constantly as a vegan, even when you are not cycling across the African continent. Because I like to cook, this seems like a silly question and I often have no idea how to answer it because I eat so many different things, often including dishes that I don’t have a name for because they are made up on the spot. 

The question “What did you eat?!” regarding our cycling trip was however much easier to answer. We ate what everyone else ate (basically). And so this is what I want to talk about in this piece, the fact that there are so many assumptions regarding the life of people in different African countries. Of course I am no expert, but I have spent a considerable amount of time travelling through some of these countries, and meeting people from many walks of life along the road has allowed a fair amount of insight into the matter. 

If you stop alongside the road in Zambia, you will find Nshima if nothing else. There is always Nshima, and people will always ask you, “Do you know Nshima?”. Nshima is the staple food, and is a thick maize porridge which is usually served in big pieces with greens (fried up flat leafed kale or other wild leafy greens), beans and/or meat or fish. When you enter a small roadside restaurant, and ask what food they have, they will never mention Nshima or greens, but only the different meat options, and sometimes beans. At first this seemed strange, but soon I realised that Nshima and greens were a given. As soon as you go off the main roads, there are usually far fewer meat options, if any at all. Meat is a luxury, and mostly much more expensive than plain Nshima and greens or beans. 

On the roadside, there was not much variety at all when it came to vegetables. Tomatoes seemed to be available everywhere, and if we were lucky, onions, kale or green peppers. In bigger towns we would often try and locate the market place, which was mostly hidden in a back street, but it was completely worth it because here you could stock up on fresh stuff. At least you always knew, no matter where you were, that you get your hands on tomatoes.

On my more recent trip, our dinner generally consisted of a starch like cous cous, pasta or rice with a tomato based sauce. At lunch time we usually stopped at a roadside restaurant, where they mostly had exactly the same thing on offer. We asked about this and apparently restaurants are places you visit for practical reasons; to get a quick, reliable and affordable meal. Meals with a bigger variety of ingredients are usually cooked at home.

Max trying his luck at a veggie market, Zambia

Stoked to find veggies in Chinsali, Zambia

I always looked forward to lunch time because each little restaurant had its own special feel. Something that happened regularly in Zambia was that we would ask if they had food and would receive a definitive ‘no’, but after we enquired about the contents of the lined up pots on the ground, we would be shown all the different food they had. Even though the food options were usually the same, you got to really know the slight differences in the way the greens were cooked or the freshness of the beans.  

Plan B Restaurant, 'Your stomach wellbeing is our business'

Language is such a powerful tool, and it is incredible how much more one can achieve and connect with people when you know just a few words in common. English is one of Zambias national languages, so the need to learn local languages (there are 72!) was much less pressing. In one village when stopping to buy some ‘fritters’, I offered what little Bemba I knew to an elderly man. He was surprised and excited and then immediately asked me how many Zambian languages I could speak. Of course I would love to be able to be fluent in many languages, but even on a bicycle you pass through areas at a pace far too quickly to really get to know a language properly (especially when there are so many). Explaining this in English to a man who had high hopes for my language skills was almost impossible, but definitely got me wondering about his experience of our interaction. Here was this strange white lady, cycling through his village and she didn't even know his language properly. Or maybe he was impressed or confused.

Max and handwritten menu on the wall of a restaurant, central Tanzania

It is beautiful how even without a common language, one can still communicate if you just try read the other persons body language and try to imagine what it is they might be saying. 

I've gotten slightly sidetracked by language, but in some way it is very connected to the topic of food in my experience. When you are travelling by bicycle, you rely so much on other people to find food and water, and so the majority of the words you learn are food items. In Tanzania, Swahili is the national language and English is hardly spoken. More than half of all the Swahili vocabulary I learnt in Tanzania was food related, and I learnt a fair amount of Swahili. 

One such example are the different words used for rice in Swahili. 

Mpunga: rice plant 

Mchele: rice in its uncooked form 

Wali: cooked rice 

Rice is a very important part of Tanzanian cuisine, and is grown in different parts of the country. For example, the rice grown in the southern highlands near the city of Mbeya is called Mbeya rice and it is cherished by the local people. It is the best rice I have ever tasted. Rice is often served with beans, (wali na maharagwe), but you usually receive an enormous plate of rice with the tiniest portion of beans on the side. This encouraged me to learn the phrase “Naweza kupata zaidi maharagwe tafadahli?” Meaning “Can I have some more beans please?”. 

Rice and Beans, Tnazania

Various pots of food and beautiful bench, Tanzania

Timing is everything when finding food along the road. A common breakfast in Tanzania is chapati (a fried flat bread) and chai (ginger spiced sweet black tea). Chapati is also commonly served with soup as another breakfast option, or with beans or a meaty stew for dinner. Fresh Chapati is one of the most delicious snacks when you are on the bike, but finding it is often impossible. Getting to a restaurant at 8am, the Chapati is not yet ready, but getting there at 9am or 10am, the Chapati is sold out. There is obviously a high demand, but still this is very frustrating. The timing of making Chapati is also different in every village, so even if you know the general rule, you will still often be disappointed. The same applies to finding lunch. If you stop every day at the same time for lunch (around 1-2pm)  you might be lucky with the lunch options, but if one day you feel hungry slightly earlier or continue cycling until say 3pm, the food will either not yet be ready (“bado bado”) or be finished. It is definitely an interesting thing to get used to, especially if you live in a city like Cape Town or Berlin where you can order anything at any time of the day. 

Fritz and early morning Chapatis and Chai, Tanzania

Hand washing station outside shop, Zambia

"Welcome customers, even if my restaurant may look small, but the welcome is big & warm"

Eating with your hands: 

In Zambia, cutlery is never brought out with a meal. At the entrance to each restaurant, no matter how small, you will find a bucket with water and soap to wash your hands. Either this or you will be brought a bucket to the table and someone will pour warm water over your hands from a jug. Even if you are sitting outside, and there is no bucket, someone will come and pour water over your hands before you get your food. The topic of hygiene is something I also find super fascinating. Even though at first glance some practices or spaces may seem dirty or run down, there is always a focus on cleanliness. The chairs may be falling apart, but they are fixed with wire, the floor may be chipped and cracked but it is constantly being swept and mopped. After someone has left a table, there is always a lot of food left lying around, a complete mess, but it is immediately tidied and cleaned. There is pride in the upkeep of your space.

Beautiful interior of a restaurant, Tanzania

The way you eat Nshima (or Ugali, as it is called in Tanzania) is by making a small ball of the maize meal with your hands and then shaping it into a kind of scoop to scoop up the sauce. Eating with your hands as a white person always attracts a lot of attention, but so does asking for a spoon. So in the end you just need to get used to the fact that you will draw a lot of attention, no matter what you do. 

I feel I could write a whole blogpost on all the funny interactions I had or looks I received just because I was a white person travelling in predominantly black populated areas. It is also something I probably think about more so than the general European tourist, coming from South Africa where racial issues are a big topic of discussion for good reason. 

I will however move on, as otherwise this piece will go on forever. I want to tell you a short story about a wonderful woman named Brenda. 

My brother and I met her last year when cycling down through northern Zambia. It was around lunch time and we happened to spot this little restaurant which was relatively hidden, with no signage whatsoever. Brenda was sitting outside her tiny kitchen of about 2mx 2m, braiding her hair. She was halfway done when she spotted us pushing our bikes into her neatly swept backyard. She smiled and jumped up welcoming us, her comb pushed into the unbraided side of her beautiful hair. Initially she informed us that she didn't have any food left, but then said she would happily prepare us anything we wanted. We told her we didn't eat meat, and she said no problem. 

As we waited in her dining area, every few minutes she would stick her head through a tiny hatch in the wall asking if we eat eggplant or carrot or chilli. Each time with a massive smile on her face. When the food eventually came, she had prepared us one of the best meals we had had in ages, with many vegetables, and chapatis made from scratch. The welcome was so warm and wonderful and the food made with a lot of love and care, I ended up putting her restaurant on the iOverlander app (an app used by overlanders and cyclists to find food and accommodation). We left full and happy. 

Brenda in her kitchen, Northern Zambia

A happy Max, Brenda and I

More recently, as Max, Fritz and I approached this little town on our way back up Zambia, I told them about Brenda and her epic food and vibe. Even though it was past lunchtime, I thought I should definitely pop my head in to at least say hello and maybe get some take away Chapati. I arrived at her place, and it was exactly the same as before. Brenda was nowhere to be seen, but there was a man there who said he would call her. The next thing I knew, she was running towards me with the biggest smile on her face. “My sister!” She gave me a big hug and welcomed me just as she had before.

She remembered that I didn’t eat meat, and immediately offered us complimentary tea while she prepared us some fresh food for takeaway. As she cooked, she excitedly and proudly told me that she had had some other bicycle tourists visit her through my recommendation. We chatted about our shared love for cooking, and I thought about her situation more deeply. With her tiny kitchen, cooking on charcoal, and employing a man who was drunk half the time (who offered me a wrinkly carrot in exchange for my sunglasses!).

Besides all of this, her positivity and love for what she was doing was inspiring, and her laughter contagious. Before arriving at Brendas place that day, the three of us were all feeling a bit down and unmotivated. But after such a beautiful exchange, we felt invigorated and keen to get on the road again. If any of you ever find yourselves passing through the town of Nsansamwenje in northern Zambia, do go and visit Brenda and her delicious food! 

This story is just one among so many and I wish I could share them all, but that would be writing a book. One last thing I’d like to touch on though, relating to eating animals in East Africa, is how factory farming is becoming more and more prominent.

Kuku Kienyeji, Tanzania

Something that is commonly advertised in restaurants is “village chicken”, or “kuku kienyeji” as they say in Tanzania. Kienyeji means local, but also implies that the chicken is the real or authentic version. Alternatively you get Broiler chickens. I had heard about this before when traveling through Kenya, but on this trip had another insightful conversation about chicken farming with a Kenyan man working as a consultant for a big chicken farm in Tanzania. It is strange, the places and situations one finds oneself in, but these also allow for learnings that otherwise wouldn’t take place, and engaging with people one generally wouldn’t meet. A farmer we had met in Zambia had given us the contact of another farmer in Tanzania who had offered to host us free of charge, and of course we accepted the offer gladly. A warm shower and a bed (and some interesting conversation) were always welcome. As we arrived we realised the complete absurdity of the place, being so different from the way we had been seeing people farming so far. Most local people had small subsistence farms and their chickens ran around in their front yards or in the streets (making them “village chicken”). We now entered a facility where we were asked to disinfect our hands and feet which felt quite unnerving.

That evening we had dinner with Michael, the Kenyan consultant. Over dinner (which included some chicken from the farm) I asked Michael about his views on how this more commercial chicken farming was being incorporated into Tanzanian culture. I was confused as to where one might buy these factory farmed chickens, because supermarkets weren’t really a thing, especially ones which had an operational cold chain. He explained to me that most of these chickens were being sold in live animal markets. 

Market place, Iringa Tanzania

Generally eating meat was not something people did every day because if you owned a few chickens, you couldn’t just slaughter one every second day, as village chickens took many months to mature. Factory farmed chickens on the other hand, make eating meat much more accessible. Eating broiler chickens is still seen as a luxury, as the meat is much more tender compared to that of chickens who have spent their lives scavenging and running around. In Tanzania Broiler meat is still more expensive (but getting less so) and the idea is to make chicken meat more affordable for everyone. This idea is contrasted to those held by many people I know in South Africa, where eating free range meat is now all the rage, because “it is much more humane”. This again is a topic worth an entire blogpost, but I wanted to share with you that opening our ears and trying to understand where people are coming from is of such value. It allows us to be more reflective and thus more able to engage in conversation and break out of the bubble we are so often trapped inside. Even though we as humans have such vastly different life experiences, we have most things in common. We are all trying to survive, we all want to feel love and connection to others, and we all share a responsibility to care for our earth and its inhabitants.

It has been the greatest privilege to travel and have these kinds of conversations. If any of these topics interest you particularly, please do comment and leave a suggestion for the next post. 

In the meantime, Eat More Plants!

Me and about 100 children showing me where to find water, Zambia