Namibian locavores?

In keeping with the Ruesink family tradition, no log-book would be complete without some details about FOOD!
Food that fits the climate:
1. Stale tortilla chips that we brought from Seattle are now crispy.
2. Katie has discovered ice cream cones, best consumed in the heat of the day with big licks, a face covered in stickiness, and always just barely ahead of the drips.
3. Water: we are drinking perpetually (except for Katie, who has her own opinion about these things). Water throughout the country is potable if it comes from a tap (so we’ve heard, and it certainly seems true in Windhoek – no GI distress at all to report). Still, we appreciate the filter that we brought from the US, as it improves the taste of municipal water: we’re just not the sort to spring for bottled water.
4. Tea (and coffee): Namibians do not drink iced tea or coffee. It’s hot hot hot, even though the air is as well. In fact, if we ask for “hot tea,” we get strange looks – is that something special? different? The standard tea is 5 Roses brand, very well steeped. Rooibos, native to south Africa, is also common. As Katie has attended meetings and briefings with us, she has had many opportunities to try her practiced skills at “tea parties” with real china (under close supervision). She particularly enjoys putting in A LOT of sugar, stirring, and snitching any sugar that misses the cup and falls on the saucer.

Local food:
The bare fact of the matter is that this country is dry. All the introductory ecology textbooks are borne out here: low evapotranspiration leads to low productivity. Low productivity means it’s challenging to grow local food. You need 15 hectares of land to support a single beef cow; goats and sheep can be stocked at six times the density, but (we calculated) the space of the Rutabaga Ranch near Willapa Bay would only allow us to keep a half a goat. More intensive animal production, such as broilers, eggs, pigs, dairy cows, all require feeds, and these require more soil and irrigation than is possible in much of Namibia. Eating local, therefore, takes on a somewhat different challenge here. From ecology and history and (we’ve heard) some perverse subsidies, much of the food in Namibia is imported from South Africa. Ecology: there’s more productive land there. History: Namibia was a protectorate of South Africa, and it’s still considered a sign of status to purchase South African products. On our first evening here, Alan went to a South African chain general store, described as “a bit like Walmart”. All the items he brought home had been imported. Since then, we have looked carefully for Namibian products: we can buy Nammilk milk (only whole; South African milk comes in different fat contents and is usually irradiated so needs no refrigeration) and yogurt (Katie particularly enjoys the sweetened fruit versions). We can buy Waldschmidt eggs from near Windhoek, and, as we’ll be teaching about chickens in a few months, we hope to visit their farm. We can buy Namibian fish, but this is apparently an unusual product for consumption in the country: only 2% of the extensive fisheries of the Benguela current are consumed within Namibia, and most of that by tourists. So, we’ve begun to try the local beef (ground, it matched the low fat content of Bud Goulter’s grass-fed beef near Willapa Bay – and all the cattle we’ve seen have been very rangy), sausage, kudu, and oryx (stuffed inside a pepper for JR’s tasty lunch today). We’ve become fans of “Fruit and Veg City” just down the street, where we buy apples, oranges, nectarines (all smaller and tangy-er than in the US), papayas (called paw-paws?), grapes, plums. F&V City prides itself on fresh local produce but includes all of southern Africa as “local”.

On Saturday 1/19 we attended our first Green Market, or Bio-Market, a sort of farmers’ market equivalent. The good part: fresh, organic, and mostly local food (exception: dried nuts and fruits, purchased from S Africa and beyond [probably, given the dried cranberries!] and packaged for sale here). The ambivalent part: 99% white for both sellers and buyers, our first time to experience this slice of Windhoek life. Booths included: homebaked bread, rusks, and crunchies (granola bars); eggs and home-slaughtered chickens and geese; vegetables such as lettuce, spinach (Namibian type), aubergine (eggplant), zucchini, patty-pan squash, maize (corn), parsley; sausage and cheeses; dried herbs; ground beef and ground game. One booth had vegetables purchased from a variety of nearby locations, including Khomasdal, which we understand is a suburb where some non-whites were resettled in the 1950s. We bought honey with comb from the only bee-keeper in Windhoek, who had suffered quite a few stings even though he reported that African honeybees are not particularly aggressive in summer when lots of flowers, especially acacia, are available. The honey is dark and pungent. We also bought prickly pear fruits, because we heard that, like Washington cherries, they are only available for a short time each year. Peel the fruits and slice the sweet, seedy inside to eat raw.

Oysters: In a way, we’re in Nambia due to oysters. There’s not much to report so far, except we first encountered them raw on the half shell at the Kalahari Sands Hotel (and casino) for Sunday brunch. They tended towards the “east coast” style (“watery”, we say on the West coast), with nothing in their guts. Alan refused to try them: I found them to be quite pleasant, slightly briny and sweet, even with a little lime squeezed over them. The brunch also included green-lipped mussels (Apparently from NZ, as their introduction has not been allowed in S. Africa or Namibia), available on the “salad bar” cooked in a sort of vinaigrette, and as an addition to a “choose your own” stirfry. The oysters must have been popular, because by the time I got to the iced section, there were only a few left.

Namibia does have an excellent combination of characteristics to produce salt: a marine coastline with tremendous evaporative solar power. The Salt Company (I kid you not) can be seen from the Salt Road between Swakopmund and Henties Bay: a conveyor belt drops salt in an outdoor pile that is several stories tall – this must be the first separation of salt from the other materials picked up from salt ponds.

It’s different!
1. Namibian pizza: soft crust with tomato sauce, mushroom and baloney pieces, cheese on top. It’s good! 2 out of 4 of our first lunches.
2. “Natural” products are difficult to find: Peanut butter and many juices contain added sugar. Soaps are full of chemical scents, and (we gasped) laundry detergent still has phosphate. The lowest amount we found at Pick and Pay was 3%, and the highest 30-40%!
3. Spinach: in southern Africa, refers to something that is much more like our chard, eaten raw in salads or cooked. Cheap and delicious! JR’s idea of heaven. For AT and little KCR, potatoes are also easily available. And a potato is still a potato.
4. Bread: There are essentially no name brands (not even Wonder bread!) Instead, each grocery/bakery has generally 3 types of sliced bread, all in very square loaves: white, brown, and wheat. Personally, I was hoping for a little more German influence – crisp crust, chewy inside. Even though the crusts are almost indistinguishable from the rest of the loaf, Katie still wants them cut off!
5. Another type of bread that’s characteristic of Namibia is brotchen (with a double dot over the “o”). These are 4-5” white rolls, sliced in half and topped with a variety of savory options open-faced. So far we’ve tasted: egg salad, cheese and tomato, and thinly-sliced smoked game with tomato and pepper. We’re pretty sure brotchen are indicative of german influence!