That stuff in the garden I thought was bamboo? It’s sugar cane.
This is just the latest in a long, long list of things I am ignorant about. Like lemons. They start out so small and round and green I thought the current object of my affection was a lime tree.
My lesson in sugar cane was presided over by Saidi, who is the Renaissance Man of the house, executing with exacting perfection everything from wiping down the porch chairs to making sure we pay our water bill on time to collecting the amapela before they fall with a thud and rot on the ground while the mzungu who leave here wonder what the hell that fruit actually is (it’s a guava, by the way). I heard him chopping something, and I wondered if it was time for a new crop of bananas. Then I saw him bent over what I thought was bamboo.
“What are you doing?” I (think I) asked in poor French.
“Pour manger,” he says (which leads me to believe my confusion was clear, if my question was not.).
“Tu peux manger bamboo?” I’m trying to imagine how he is going to cook these thick pieces of bamboo, and what they will taste like. It seems very unappetizing. He smiles—he’s too polite to laugh in my face—and says, “Non, non. C’est…sugar.”
I’m blown away.
The excitement I feel about this requires some context. Before Kigali, I was in New York City—and in Boston before that, and West Virginia before that. Despite the rural connotations of the latter place, the one I mostly call “home,” I have always been disconnected from my food. It’s not like I’ve never seen a cow—we passed them on the bus ride to school—but I simply don’t associate those hulking grass-munchers with the ribbons of ground beef, laid out nicely on styrofoam trays and excessively saran-wrapped, sold at the Kroger’s. There are many, many steps between growing the things that become my food, and the grocery store I pick them up in. Even when I can reduce the number of steps, by shopping in NYC’s “green markets” or by buying (pricey) organic meats at the Fairway, I still don’t really know what part of the cow the ground beef comes from.
If I had figured this distance out earlier, and realized how fascinating those steps are, I would be rich and famous and on a book tour like Michael Pollan. Instead, I just sit here, gazing at the sugar cane Saidi chops as if Brad Pitt had just pulled up a lawn chair in my garden. Sugar is a myth to me—a legendary plant that inspired slavery, and then slave rebellions, in Haiti, that spurred protests against taxes, and then the American Revolution, in Boston, that became a symbol for British abolitionists. It’s an exotic plant with a serious role in history. So for me, there’s something almost magical about living in a place that grows sugar.
Like, to my left.
I just wanted to tell you how much I enjoyed this post. It’s really funny to me, I’ve read it three times so far! I feel kind of bad though, ’cause I feel like I’m laughing AT you.
There is a way of cooking and eating bamboo, and the bamboo shoots are pretty good, they are used in some Asian foods.
I’m white and I know what sugar cane is, and what lemons look like growing on the tree. I don’t know if I’m the exception or you are 🙂
It may just be because I’ve grown up in Florida (citrus everywhere!) and my grandpa used to bring home sugar cane and cut me off pieces to chew on when I was little: amazingly good by the way, you should try it.
Heh, thanks Reese. There is indeed a good deal of what the high-minded litcrits call “self-effacement” in this particular post, so I welcome the laughing at me.
Yeah, I used to pick out the bamboo shoots from my Chinese food when I was little. Hate the stuff, still do. I like it growing in a little vase in my living room in New York…but not on my plate.
Jina, I’m really becoming addicted to your blog! Have you read Sweetness and Power, by Sidney Mintz? Very apropos to this post…