South Africa’s Thanksgiving Table - Mielie Pap
Note: This article is part of EcoWorldly’s series on food and agriculture around the world. In the spirit of Thanksgiving, this week EcoWorldly writers are exploring environmental issues related to bringing food from the farm to your dinner plate and looking at food and farming in other cultures and countries around the world. Subscribe to our RSS feed by email to get all of these, plus our regular stories about the environment from writers living on six continents.
The majority of Thanksgiving dinners in South Africa would be based on a very large serving of Mielie Pap, accompanied by a vegetable stew and possibly a small portion of meat. That is if it were celebrated here!
Mielie Pap is a thick white porridge produced from maize meal and is the main staple of the majority of the people of South Africa. This is especially true of poorer rural people who might aspire to bread and rice but need to rely on maize because of its low price and the fact that they are able to produce and process maize in the household. The dominance of maize in the diet of South Africans is reflected by the fact that on average one third of South African’s calorie intake is supplied by maize.
Maize is also the basis for many other foods, including grilled green mielies, soft porridge, fermented porridges, dry porridges, non alcoholic fermented gruel and even a low alcohol beer. The use of maize is a cultural thing in South Africa. So I, as a descendent of British Settlers of a few hundred years ago, only use green maize (corn on the cob) while many people would only use Mielie Pap as an accompaniment to their braai (barbeque). However, the majority eat maize porridges two or even three times a day.
The position of maize as a staple is similar in other Southern African countries such as Zimbabwe, Zambia and Botswana, while the more tropical countries such as Mozambique use rice as a larger part of their diet.
In Central and East Africa maize meal is an important staple, but is supplemented by other products such as plantain and cassava, while in tropical West Africa rice, plantain and yam are staples. In some of the dryer countries such as Namibia and Mali, more drought resistant cereals such as sorghum and millet are important staples.
That is full of generalisations, but I think paints a picture of a continent with enormous variations in staple foods which relies heavily on products that can be grown and processed by the household farmer.
While the USA produced some 250 million tons/year of maize in 2003, Americans derived only 2.6 % of their calories from the direct consumption of maize. In contrast, South Africa produced around 10 million tons, but its population derived almost 33% of its energy intake from the direct consumption of maize. Uganda, which produced just over a million tons of maize, derived only 11% of their energy needs from maize, indicating that they have other cheap sources (plantain and cassava) of starchy staples. There have been major changes to the USA’s production with some 140 million tons a year of maize being required for ethanol for fuel in 2008. This is more than three times the maize consumed as food in Africa. One last interesting number is that 50 times as much maize is used for feed and food manufacture than is consumed directly in the USA.
(Note: These figures are based on FAO data for 2003, which is the only source of comparable data on maize consumption for South Africa, Uganda and USA. This was sourced through the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center.)
Interestingly, this means that many of Africa’s most food insecure people rely, not on the Indigenous African Cereals of sorghum, millet, fonio and tef, but on maize that came to Africa from Mexico. While there are several theories on the origins of maize it clearly originated in Mexico and its cultivation only spread into America and Canada in the first millenium and reached Africa somewhere around 1600.
“Mielie Pap” is eaten widely in Africa under a variety of names such as, posho in Uganda, ugali in Kenya, nsima in Malawi and sadza in Zimbabwe. Similar or related maize based dishes are eaten around the world, with grits in America and polenta in Italy being two well known related/similar products.
Sources: Earth Policy Institute; Wikipedia on maize, braai & “paps“; International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT); Lost Grains of Africa; Maize & Grace.
Photo Credit: Bitterjug at Flickr under a Creative Creative Commons license.
