Waste Not Want Not

The waste not want not doctrine is observed closely in Accra: used goods of every kind are available so long as you know where to find them, and most people are very sensitive about wasting food.

For example, it's common for people eating chicken to eat the bones and cartilage.  In the US, the only person I've ever seen eat chicken bones is my grandmother, who grew up during the Depression, and she only eats the marrow.

Many also put their leftovers to good use.  The other day, my neighbor prepared a meal for his uncle and I that consisted of banku (a fermented mixture of ground cassava and corn with a texture somewhere in between tamales and mashed potatoes) with smoked fish and "pepper," a salsa fresca-like sauce made out of chilies, tomatoes, onions, garlic, and ginger, all fresh.  When the three of us had eaten our fill, there was still quite a bit of pepper and some fish bones left at the bottom of the communal bowl.  For dinner that night, the nephew simmered the mixture in oil, transforming it from fresh pepper into tomato stew, another popular local recipe that essentially consists of the same ingredients.

That same day, these two also introduced me to a local drink called chibuku or shake-shake.  Chibuku is the lightly alcoholic juice (around 3.5% by volume, they tell me) that brewers squeeze out of malt that they have already used to brew beer.  The chibuku that we bought was produced by the brewers of Club, the most widely-sold beer in Ghana.  The drink is slightly carbonated (that's why the closed carton looks inflated in the first picture,) mildly sweet and full of a fine sediment that mixes with the liquid when you shake the carton or swirl your glass, hence the name.  I found it pleasant and refreshing enough, especially with food (although most Ghanaians won't drink anything until 30 minutes after eating) but I'd be surprised to see it become popular in the states.  It costs about $.75 a liter whereas Club usually costs between $1.50 and $1.75 for a 22 ounce bottle.  If shake-shake really is 3.5% alcohol by volume, then a carton of it has about 7.5% more alcohol than a large bottle of Club.

And that's what struck me most about chibuku: it's so clearly a product of the ingenuity that Ghanaians apply in building their consumer habits around the hard scrabble realities of life in the global South.  It's tasty, relatively cheap (albeit not compared to certain locally produced hard liquors), and most importantly, made from readily available resources.

To my neighbors and other Ghanaians, of course, the drink is more a treat than a sign of relative poverty.  The nephew, a devout Christian, recently told me that while many Ghanaians recognize that their diets are defined by their purchasing power, they give thanks for all their meals, bountiful and meager, and are not bothered by the lack of variety in the food they eat.  The message seemed to be that pleasure is fleeting but life is precious.