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Post Tagged with: "preparation"

Palm Fruit Soup from the Gambia

May 6, 2022

Meals are often more flavorful and fresh in the developing world where ingredients are sourced locally and additives and preservatives aren’t much of an option. During the course of my recent assignment in The Gambia, I not only tasted the local food but also was able to document its creation. For the everyday meal here, cooking is an event, an art, a sacred ritual. It’s labor intensive and nothing is ever wasted. Why would you want to toss out food when you put so much effort into making it? This cooking demonstration, hosted by teenage girls Fatoumatta and Bintou, was created as part of ChildFund’s Food Waste Challenge. Grab your mortar, pestle, and if you can find it, some palm fruit, to follow along at home.

One step ahead of the Cyclone

September 12, 2013

You may have had the unfortunate experience of having your seaside vacation interrupted by a thunderstorm, or worse, a hurricane. Imagine if such a storm were responsible for wiping out not just your vacation, but your family’s income and food supply for the coming year. This, while unthinkable for us in the developed world, is a menacing possibility each year for families in Madagascar, an island nation of 22 million in the Indian Ocean. With 3,000 miles (4800 km) of coastline, it’s hard for Madagascar to avoid being a stop on the itinerary for cyclones sweeping through the Southern Indian Ocean. I recently spent time here with CARE documenting some of their disaster risk reduction programs. A cyclone, as a hurricane is called in the Indian and southern Pacific Oceans, can destroy acres of the rice paddies that produce Madagascar’s staple crop. But what if farmers could harvest their crop[…]