DR. WESTON A. PRICE visited Africa in 1935. His journey into the interior began in Mombasa, Kenya, on the east coast of Africa, then progressed inland through Kenya to the Belgian Congo, then northward through the Belgian Congo, Sudan and Egypt.
Throughout his studies of isolated populations on native diets, Price recorded the contrast of native sturdiness and good health with the degeneration found in the local white populace, living off the “displacing foods of modern commerce” such as sugar, white flour, vegetable oils, canned foods and condensed milk. Nowhere was the contrast more evident than in Africa. In addition to their susceptibility to chronic diseases such as cancer, heart disease, intestinal problems and tooth decay, Europeans living in Africa showed little resistance to infectious diseases carried by mosquitoes, lice and flies. Price noted, “In all the districts, it was recognized and expected that the foreigners must plan to spend a portion of every few years or every year outside that environment if they would keep well. Children born in that country to Europeans were generally expected to spend several of their growing years in Europe or America if they would build even relatively normal bodies.”1 As we shall see, the African resistance to disease observed by Dr. Price stemmed not only from high levels of vitamins and minerals in the native diet, but also from the widespread use of a variety of fermented foods.
In many areas of Africa, even today, milk and milk products provide a large portion of calories. Africa shares the practice of herding—cattle, sheep, goats, camels, water buffalo, horses, donkeys, yak and reindeer—with Europe and large areas of Asia; in all these locations, dependence on lactating herds confers an advantage in terms of health and food security. In Africa, according to Price, “It was most interesting to observe that in every instance these cattle people dominated the surrounding tribes. They were characterized by superb physical development, great bravery and a mental acumen that made it possible for them to dominate because of their superior intelligence.”2
TRAVEL IN AFRICA was considered extremely dangerous in the 1930s. Price observed:
Dysentery epidemics were so severe and frequent that we scarcely allowed ourselves to eat any food that had not been cooked or that we had not peeled ourselves. In general, it was necessary to boil all the drinking water. We dared not allow our bare feet to touch a floor of the ground for fear of jiggers which burrow into the skin of the feet. Scarcely ever when below 6,000 feet were we safe after sundown to step from behind mosquito netting or to go out without thorough protection against the malaria pests… Disease-carrying ticks… were often carriers of very severe fevers. We had to be most careful not to touch the hides with which the natives protected their bodies from the cold at night… There was grave danger from the lice that infected the hair of the hides. We dared not enter several districts because of the dreaded tsetse fly and the sleeping sickness it carries.3
Yet the indigenous Africans exhibited a very high tolerance to infectious disease including malaria carried by mosquitos, typhus and fevers transmitted by lice, and sleeping sickness borne by the tsetse fly.
Price also marveled at the low rates of tooth decay among those Africans consuming their native foods. In fact, he studied six tribes “in which there appeared to be not a single tooth attacked by dental caries nor a single malformed dental arch. Several other tribes were found with nearly complete immunity to dental caries. In thirteen tribes we did not meet a single individual with irregular teeth.”4 Yet none of these healthy groups were immune to the rapid onset of tooth decay and degenerative disease that followed the advent of modern industrial foods. Dental deformities are very obvious in modern photographs of African tribesmen.
Africa afforded Dr. Price the opportunity to compare primitive groups eating large amounts of animal foods with those following a more plant-based diet. The Maasai of Tanganyika (Tanzania), Chewya of Kenya, Muhima of Uganda, Watusi (Tutsi) of Rwanda, and the Nuer and Dinka tribes on the western side of the Nile in the Sudan were all cattle-keeping people. Their diets consisted largely of milk, meat, and blood (removed from living cattle) supplemented in some cases with fish and small amounts of grains, fruits and vegetables. These nutrient-dense diets provided large amounts of the fat-soluble vitamins Price discovered to be so necessary for proper development of the physical body and for freedom from disease. The Nuer especially valued the livers of animals, considered so sacred “that it may not be touched by human hands… It is eaten both raw and cooked.”5
These tribes were noted for their fine physiques and great height—in some groups the women averaged over six feet tall, and many men reached almost seven feet. Examinations of their teeth revealed very few caries, usually less than 0.5 percent. Nowhere in Price’s travels had he yet found groups that had no cavities at all, yet among the tribes of Africa that herded cattle and had access to fish, Dr. Price found six tribes that were completely free of dental decay. Furthermore, all members of these tribes exhibited straight, uncrowded teeth.6
Largely vegetarian Bantu tribes in central Africa, such as the Kikuyu and Wakamba, were agriculturists. Their diet consisted of sweet potatoes, corn, beans, bananas, millet and sorghum. They were less robust than their meat-eating neighbors in terms of physical size. Price found that vegetarian groups had some tooth decay—usually around 5 to 6 percent of all teeth, still small numbers compared to local Europeans living off store-bought foods. Even among these largely vegetarian tribes, however, dental occlusions were rare, as were degenerative diseases.
Many investigators have mistakenly claimed that Bantu groups consumed no animal products at all. However, some tribes kept a few cattle and goats, which supplied both milk and meat; they ate small animals such as frogs; and they put a high value on insects as food. Price noted that “The natives of Africa know that certain insects are very rich in special food values at certain seasons, also that their eggs are valuable foods. A fly that hatches in enormous quantities in Lake Victoria is gathered and used fresh and dried for storage. They also use ant eggs and ants.”*7 Other insects, such as bees, wasps, beetles, butterflies, moths, crickets, dragonflies and termites, were sought out and consumed with relish by tribes throughout Africa, a practice that continues in many parts of Africa today.†8 These insects are rich in the same fat-soluble factors found in blood, organ meats, fish and butterfat.
Whether their diet was carnivorous or largely plant-based, the African groups that Price studied supplemented the diet of pregnant women and growing children with nutrient-dense foods—including liver, insects and deep-yellow butter from pastured cows—that ensured ease of reproduction and optimum growth. The Maasai and related herding tribes placed the time for marriage after they set fire to dry pastures preceding the rainy season, after which green grass came up for the cattle to graze. They also took pains to give every pregnant and lactating woman, and every growing child, a daily ration of blood drawn from their cattle.9
The healthiest group that Price studied was the Dinka, a Sudanese tribe on the western bank of the Nile.10 They were not as tall as the Nuer groups, but Price considered them to have better proportions and to have greater strength. Like the Nuer tribes, the Dinka kept cattle, but also supplemented their diet with fish and cereal grains.* This is perhaps the greatest lesson of Price’s African research—that a diet of whole foods, one that avoids the extremes of the carnivorous Maasai and the largely vegetarian Bantu, and incorporates nutrient-dense milk products, meat, organ meats, grains and seafood, ensures optimum physical development and health.
FOR AFRICAN TRIBES that did not keep cattle, getting enough fat, and even enough meat, was a challenge. Although Vilhjalmur Stefansson wrote about fat consumption among the Eskimos, he also devoted several pages of his book Fat of the Land to the subject of fat and meat consumption among the African tribes.
Stefansson quotes his colleague Dr. Harley, writing in 1944, who noted that:
Meat hunger is striking and constant among the tribes I have contacted. Although meat of any kind was in great demand, the favorite cuts included brisket of beef with the fat and cartilages; hogs head, brains and fat; the liver of any animal; the hands and feet of monkeys, because of the fat content; and the skin and subcutaneous fat of a wart hog. Pig skin is never saved for rawhide and leather. It is too valuable as food, and is eaten after singeing off the hair, and prolonged boiling. Plump cow skin is similarly eaten. A lean cow skin will be saved for rawhide and leather.
“Wild meat in Liberia is seldom fat,” wrote Dr. Harley. “Even the fat of wart hogs is mostly subcutaneous. Antelope are lean all the way through. Even domestic cattle are lean. Consequently, it is interesting to note that certain animals which normally store more fat than others are preferred for that reason. These included the giant rat, called ‘possum’; the domestic dog, fattened by the Kpelle people especially for eating; the cow that has turned out to be sterile and so has never suckled a calf, but grown fat instead; porcupines; wart hogs; snakes; leopards in their prime, which are very plump and fat; and snakefish, prized because very fat.”11 The Africans knew the best sources of fat and specifically chose them over lean meat.
Dr. George Prentice, writing in 1923 in the British Medical Journal, noted that Africans “when they can get it, eat far more meat than the white people. There is no limit to the variety or the condition, and some might wonder whether there is a limit to the quantity. They are only vegetarians when there is nothing else to be had. Anything from a field mouse to an elephant is welcomed. The meat may still be warm when thrown on the ashes to cook, or it may be so old that the maggots have to be beaten out of it. Even the skin of a hippopotamus is stored away and cooked when other meat is scarce. It makes a dish something like a jelly. My native carpenter calls it ‘glue.’”12
According to an observer in 1993, the Sudanese are always in search of fat. When a villager wants to buy an animal for slaughter, he or she looks for one major criterion—fat—which also determines the price of the animal. After killing the animal, they collect the fat, roast it to melt away most of it as suet or as a cosmetic preparation for anointing the body and the hair, and consume the remaining crunchy lipid and protein matter.13
An important source of fat in the African diet is palm oil, which, unlike modern seed oils, contains almost 50 percent saturated fat. The red unrefined oil is rich in carotenes; dissolved in an oil, these carotenes are more easily transformed into true vitamin A than the carotenes in fruits and vegetables.
THE INDIGENOUS FERMENTED Foods of the Sudan: A Study in African Food and Nutrition by Hamid A. Dirar, published in 1993, is hardly a bestselling book or page-turner for bedtime reading. Yet this compendium of fermented foods from Africa merits the same attention as Nutrition and Physical Degeneration by Dr. Weston A. Price. Dirar approaches his subject hat in hand, so to speak, with awe and appreciation for the indigenous foodways of Africa and concern about the effects of industrial food on the health of the African people.
Sudan—now divided into the northern Republic of Sudan and South Sudan—situated in the center of Africa, is a kind of mini Africa, sharing borders with nine other African countries and occupying a stretch along the Red Sea across from Saudi Arabia. Sudan has seen countless waves of immigrants over the centuries. Dirar notes that it hosts many races and cultures, “from the nearly naked to the veiled, from the Muslim to the Christian to the pagan.” It contains approximately 372 tribes speaking as many as 250 languages and dialects.14
The dominant features of the two countries are the Blue and White Nile Rivers, which meet at Khartoum and then run north into Egypt, but more than forty other rivers and seasonal streams also traverse the Sudan. Rainfall ranges from zero to over thirty inches per year; the area contains many different types of soils and habitats, including desert, savanna, meadow and equatorial jungle.
Herodotus, Strabo, Pliny, Seneca and Diodorus all wrote about what is present-day Sudan, calling it Ethiopia or referring to the ancient Kingdom of Meroe, which dominated the region from about 800 BC to AD 350. The Kingdom of Meroe was famous for its iron industry and knowledge of metalworking. Agriculture and domestication of animals in the Sudan dates from ancient times; the people grew cereal grains* and raised cattle. Herodotus writes that the king of Meroe told visitors that his people ate milk and boiled meat and that most of them lived to 120 years of age. Strabo visited Sudan in 7 BC, reporting that its people lived on millet and barley and used grass, tender twigs, lotus and reed roots as food in addition to meat, blood, milk and cheese. Instead of olive oil, however, they consumed butter and tallow. An inscription dating from AD 350 refers to the consumption of grain and dried meat.15
What binds the long history and diverse people of the Sudan is the consumption of fermented foods—over eighty fermented foods nourish the inhabitants of this fascinating African microcosm. In fact, almost all foods in the traditional tribal diets are eaten in fermented form. In addition to meat, blood, grains and milk, fermented ingredients include organ meats, intestines, fat, bones, hooves, hides, bile juice, cow urine, fish, frogs, caterpillars, locusts and honey. Fermented plant foods include grapes and dates (for wine), all cereal grains, tubers, legume press cakes and wild leaves.
Many tribes strongly believe that the consumption of fermented foods protects them from disease and gives them a long life. “He who does not eat fermented foods should expect disease” is a Sudanese saying.16 In particular, uncooked fermented foods and beverages rich in probiotic bacteria protect against infectious disease such as malaria.† Vitamin content and mineral availability increase during fermentation; fermentation also increases “shelf life” in the hot climate of the Sudan, and preserves food for times of shortage.
The Sudanese divide their many fermented foods into four categories: “staple” foods that provide a lot of calories, such as grains and tubers; “sauces” or relishes that are eaten with the staple foods, most frequently milk and milk products, butter or ghee, but also sauces based on meat, organ meats, fish, vegetables, flavors and meat substitutes;* alcoholic beverages including beer made from grain, wine made from grapes or dates, and mead made from honey; and “special” foods for festivals and occasions such as weddings, male circumcisions, Ramadan and for traveling.17 Many fermented foods are considered sacred, necessary for vibrant health; the one nonfermented food considered sacred is fresh milk.
Dirar argues for a cottage industry of fermented foods in Africa to improve nutrition of the poor and hungry, and criticizes the fact that fermented foods are denigrated or ignored by scientists and the elite. “Whatever their history and prehistory, fermented foods today hold a central position in the nutrition of the Sudanese. Their actual contribution to the well-being of man has never been assessed and they have been completely overlooked by the concerned agencies and individuals.”18
SORHGUM IS THE STAPLE food of Sudan, consumed as a sourdough flatbread† or sour porridge, usually with a “sauce” of sour milk. Over thirty different fermented sorghum foods and beverages, the preparation of which can be complicated and sophisticated, nourish the Sudanese. Without fermentation, sorghum is unfit for human consumption, as it contains many antinutrients: tannins, phytic acid and enzyme inhibitors among them. The grain is usually fermented in water, but sometimes in sour milk.
In 1951, 90 percent of the Sudanese used sorghum as a staple. Today it is still a major African crop—and not only for food.19 The stalks served for animal fodder, building materials, mats, thatches and fences for huts. Sorghum stalks are burned to make a product called combu, a potash‡ used in food processing.20
In folk medicine, a type of sorghum is used to cure whooping cough (although the most widespread treatment in Africa is donkey milk). A medicine is made from sorghum roasted almost to charcoal and soaked in water; the steeping water is given to patients suffering from nausea and loss of appetite resulting from prolonged hunger. Sour sorghum paste applied to the neck serves as a cure for a common sore throat. Smoked sour sorghum paste is a major ingredient in Sudanese cosmetics.21
There are many types of sorghum, including selected and hybrid varieties like milo and Sudan grass, used in other parts of the world and foisted on Africa as well. Some of these produce a whiter flatbread. But a variety called feterita is considered the best sorghum cultivar by Africans, used for fattening sheep, goats or cows for slaughter or for milk production. The Sudanese consider feterita as more nutritious than milo, and think its porridge is best for “fattening women.”* Peasants prefer it to white-floured sorghum, and even if pressured to plant the hybrid and whiter cultivars, they still prefer the old-fashioned feterita for their own porridges and bread. The academic bias against feterita is unfounded, as the native variety tends to provide more energy and is characterized by a large variety of polyphenols.22
But today, according to Dirar, the Sudanese elite have turned their backs on sorghum altogether, promoting the consumption of wheat, especially as white bread, and relegating sorghum to the position of despised poor man’s food. Dirar relates that one professor, upon hearing about a book that praised the use of sorghum, “felt very indignant and the next morning expressed his strong opposition to the idea of eating sorghum… as an unacceptable invitation ‘to go back’ after all ‘the progress the Sudanese have made’—presumably as wheat eaters.”23 Wheat may confer prestige, but it is an inappropriate grain for cultivation in the arid Sudan, requiring more water and deeper plowing than sorghum.
A sour, opaque sorghum beer called merissa or bouza† is an indelible feature of the African heritage. Sorghum beer is an effervescent, pinkish-brown beverage with a sour flavor resembling yogurt, the consistency of a thin gruel, and of an opaque appearance. Most of it is homemade and consumed daily within the family circle, although a few factories in the Sudan and other African countries produce opaque beer of a lesser quality. Brewing is a long process that first favors lactic-acid production and then alcohol production. The beverage is an acquired taste for Westerners, having a sour smell redolent of vomit. Merissa has an alcohol content of less than 3 percent (compared to 4 to 7 percent for clear beers), contains a large range of beneficial microorganisms, and is a rich source of easily assimilated B vitamins and the minerals copper, zinc, calcium and potassium. Pellagra, a vitamin B3-deficiency disease, is never found in persons consuming the usual amounts of sorghum beer. Since opaque beers are a fermented food, they are likely to serve as a source of vitamin K2, although no one has tested them yet for this nutrient.
Sorghum beer or Bantu beer is a traditional beverage of the Bantu tribes, and similar beers are made in other countries, including Egypt, Ethiopia, Kenya and Zimbabwe. Kenyans enjoy three traditional opaque beers: busaa from maize, chekwe from finger millet, and marwa from bulrush millet.
The traditional village process begins by soaking the grain for one to two days; the grain is drained and allowed to germinate, then sun-dried and left to mature for several months. The matured grain is then steeped in water, boiled and cooled; pulverized malt is added and the brew is fermented for one day. On the second day, it is boiled again and returned to the brewing pot for more alcoholic fermentation. On days three and four, more pulverized uncooked malt is added; on day five, the beer is strained to remove husks and is then ready to drink.
Africans consider opaque beer a nourishing food rather than a beverage, even a sacred food with mystical powers. Two-day-old infants receive merissa from their mothers as a way to protect them from disease—a practice discouraged by missionaries. Lactating women consume opaque beer to increase milk production. Many Africans believe opaque beers give extra strength to the blood and recommend it for anemic patients.
The colonialists dismissed the value of merissa and similar beverages, claiming that it made the people lazy, but in fact opaque beers are largely brewed for work and consumed in great quantities during working parties. Agricultural workers obtain 35 percent of their calorie intake from beer during periods of agricultural activity. Five pints per day is not unusual for a working man and daily beer consumption can be as high as ten pints. A traditional Sudanese saying on the building of an animal byre goes, “We, Nuer, cut the supports with beer, we cut the grass with beer, we build the walls with beer, and we erect the supports with porridge.”24
Thin sour porridges serve as child-weaning foods in Africa, along with sour or fresh raw milk, ideally goat milk. Fresh butter is sold in some markets for feeding small babies. Another weaning food is a sauce containing fermented dry meat and dry okra powder. The mucilaginous okra in the sauce helps the child take in as much meat and thin porridge as possible. The Africans believe that porridge is not enough for the babies; they must also have milk and meat. Many African fermented meat and organ meat products are ideal for weaning foods, as they are dried and powdered and can be easily reconstituted for babies. Indeed, in Africa fermented foods are ideal for growing children; they provide better availability of nutrients, particularly iron, better protein digestibility, and antimicrobial properties. Studies show that the friendly bacteria they contain survive stomach acid and help colonize the gut. They provide a strong protection against diarrhea.25
Another food for children is small pieces of sour sorghum or millet dough boiled in butter.* Children eat these once or twice a week for three to five months each year. African mothers believe this food protects children against catching colds in the cool rainy season or in the winter.26
Maize, millet, cassava, teff, false banana, rice and black gram are other staple foods in Africa, all of which are ideally consumed in sour fermented form. Raw cassava contains many poisons and must be fermented to make it edible. The inhabitants of Congo consume bacteria-fermented cassava called chikwangue, similar to lafun, a fermented cassava paste produced in Nigeria. Gari, a fermented cassava food of Nigeria and West Africa, is eaten with bean flour or fish and has a decidedly sour taste. Fermented breads in Ethiopia include dabbo, a leavened bread made from wheat, fermented teff pancakes called injera, and kocho, a fermented food made from corn and the pulp of an Abyssinian banana plant. The fermented product is baked as bread or cooked as porridge. Ogi, fermented maize cake, is popular in Nigeria while the inhabitants of West Bengal make a yeast fermentation of millet called thumba in sections of bamboo.27 In Ghana, the inhabitants soak peanuts, corn, millet and cassava, sometimes adding tamarind, a very sour fruit, for acidity.28
In the Sudan, kawal, a strong-smelling fermented leaf protein, is used as a protein substitute in times of famine.29 Fermented oilseed press cake made from peanuts or sesame seeds is another popular fermented food. Fermented watermelon juice can serve as a substitute for water during dry periods.
AFRICAN FERMENTED MEAT products almost defy description—or belief! Hamid Dirar describes many unusual fermented animal foods, some of which have never appeared in the scientific literature before.
First on the list are a variety of milk products similar to buttermilk, yogurt and sour cheese. Fermented camel milk serves as a treatment for many diseases.
In Africa, meat is traditionally eaten from freshly slaughtered healthy animals,† especially for festivals, but is also preserved by sun-drying, smoking, salting or a combination of these techniques, usually after an initial fermentation. The Sudan has more than ten different fermented meat products, the main one being shermout, fermented and sun-dried meat, similar to a jerky, but which includes the meat fat. Powdered shermout is a frequent ingredient in sauces, soups and stews, in spite of the fact that the dried fat gives it a putrid flavor—a taste that appeals to Africans raised on it, much like the taste of strong cheese appeals to Westerners.30
According to Dirar, consumption of decaying animal carcasses was—and still is—common among hunters. One early colonist reported that the meat of crocodiles and hippopotami was devoured by the Nuer even in an advanced state of decomposition.31
A product called miriss, made from pure fat, is “probably the most foul-smelling fermented food in the country,” reports Dirar. Even so, it is a common product for sale in marketplaces. Made with the caul covering the outer surface of the stomach of a ram or ewe, sometimes mixed with the small intestines (emptied of their contents), it is pounded to a paste, mixed with potash, and fermented for two to six days. (Miriss can also be made with bone marrow.) Caul fat miriss is a white, smelly paste with the consistency of mayonnaise and keeps at room temperature for nearly a year.32
The Sudanese traditionally prepare small intestines by emptying them of their contents and letting them ferment for about three days. Potash powder is added to the mix. They spread the intestines in the sun to dry, then cut them up and sell them in small bundles in the marketplace. When powdered, the ingredient can be added to a relish or sauce.33
Intestine balls are made by emptying the components of the alimentary track from the rumen to the rectum by pressing and squeezing. The intestines are then washed, chopped into long strips and sun-dried. Long strips made from other organs such as the liver, spleen, lungs, heart and kidneys are also hung in the sun to dry; during this process, they undergo partial fermentation. In about five days all the meat is dry enough to be pounded together. Powdered potash, a little salt and some water are added to the meat meal, and a paste is prepared by hand-mixing and kneading. The stiff paste is molded into rounds the size of tennis balls, then slightly flattened and allowed to dry in the sun for eight more days. The fermented intestine disks supposedly keep for months. Like the other fermented meat products, they can be powdered and added to sauces.34
The colon of sheep or goat stuffed with the animal’s chopped small intestines and caul fat is tied up and hung in a safe place to ferment and desiccate. A common practice is to smoke this “sausage” by hanging it in the smokiest part of the house.* Smoke prevents infestation by insects, cures the surface of the sausage, adds flavor, and contributes to the safety of the product. The product resembles summer sausage or Lebanon bologna. It is usually cooked, but slices can be pounded to a powder and added to sauces.35
Bones, with their attendant fat, marrow, tendons and meat scrapings, are chopped, fermented, crushed into a paste, mixed with potash, and then fermented a second time. The bone paste provides yet another ingredient for sauces and can also be sun-dried in large balls. The Sudanese refer to these fermented bone balls as the “food of kings”! Similar products exist in other parts of Africa. The calcium-rich bones are not wasted!36
A dish reminiscent of the beatee prepared by the American Indians is um-tibay, prepared by removing and emptying the alimentary tract of a slaughtered gazelle. The intestines, heart, kidneys, liver, spleen and all the bones except the neck bones are chopped into small bits and stuffed into the rumen. The “sausage” is tied up and allowed to ferment for about three days, then buried in the hot sands and embers of a fire and left to cook slowly overnight. The Sudanese eat the product fresh from the fire or use it to make sauces, or even as a flavoring. The sausage can also be cut into strips and sun-dried.37
Beirta is a festival food. The process begins with the slaughter of a fat billy goat; the lungs, kidney, liver, spleen, heart and caul fat are chopped and mixed in a pot, along with about four pounds of chopped muscle meat and a pint of fresh milk. The mixture ferments in the covered pot for four days. After the addition of a dash of salt, the mixture ferments for another three days. The finished product has a strong odor and a faintly sour taste; when stored in its fermentation pot, beirta does not spoil due to its high fat content. However, it is customarily used to prepare sauce for wedding feasts. Whereas a rich man can slaughter as many animals as he wants for a feast, a poor man can feed all his guests with the fermented beirta added to a sauce. Freshly slaughtered, one billy goat provides enough food for ten people; fermented, it can feed one hundred. The Africans argue, “How can you feed a hundred persons on the meat of only one he-goat if you do not ferment it?”38
Other traditional fermented foods include rabbit and whole game, caterpillars, locusts, frogs, gallbladder and bile juice, and cow urine, which is fermented for up to nine months.
Fermentation of skin, hides and hooves is still common. Today in the cities and towns of the Sudan, boiled calf, cow, camel and lamb hooves (excluding the hard caps) are consumed by many as a delicacy. The slimy soup has a reputation as a food for bachelors.39
Fermented hide makes a tasty snack. Fresh hides are buried in mud for a few days to undergo fermentation, or buried in wet ashes, then cut into thin strips and dried in the sun. Powdered fermented hide is used as an ingredient for sauces as well.40
While Africa does not have a reputation for the production of many fermented fish products—that distinction goes to Asia—they are indeed produced in many areas, especially to preserve a seasonal fish harvest. Fish are mostly preserved by smoking, air-drying and salting, but sometimes they are fermented, especially in the Sudan. The Nuer may become entirely dependent on fish during lean months of the year immediately preceding the rainy season. Sudan boasts four major fermented fish products, as well as a fermented roe similar to a product made in Italy and Greece. One food is made of the whole intact fish. Fermented fish sauce has a horrible odor, but many consider the taste superb. Another product is a paste made from whole fermented oily fish.41
The lungfish emerges from the mud when the land is drying out. Fermentation in large pots preserves the bountiful harvest. The thrifty Africans recover and consume the nutrient-dense oil that rises to the top of the pot.42
Another fermented food consumed throughout Africa, and universally ignored by most researchers, is a paste made from dried shrimp and hot peppers. This strong, spicy condiment is a rich source of fat-soluble vitamins, especially vitamin D.
In many areas of Africa, consumption of animal protein is low; but the animal foods that are consumed—fermented organ meats and whole fish, shrimp paste, frogs, small game and insects—are extremely high in fat-soluble vitamins, which ensure that all the protein consumed is efficiently assimilated. For this reason, even in areas with low consumption of animal foods, excellent physical structure and good health predominate.*
MORE THAN FORTY YEARS after Weston Price’s epic visit to Africa, Drs. Edward Williams and Peter Williams wrote of their experience treating Ugandans at the Kuluva Hospital in the West Nile district of Uganda.43 By the late 1970s, the nomadic cattle-herding tribes had largely disappeared from the region. The inhabitants who remained were peasant agriculturists, a mixture of Nilotic tribes, whose diet consisted of grain (usually millet), cassava flour, lentils, peanuts, green vegetables such as spinach and cabbage, and bananas, supplemented with small amounts of milk, meat and fish. Williams and Williams made no mention of the widespread practice of insect consumption—a common mistake among modern investigators. Millet was “processed at the homestead.” Tea had become a favorite drink and sugar was very popular, with the average daily adult intake reported to be at least 100 grams (almost seven tablespoons). Peanut oil and cottonseed oil were recent additions to the diet, replacing the more nutritious palm oil and sesame oil. Both cigarettes and alcohol were available, but used only in small quantities.
The doctors associated the local emergence of diabetes with sugar consumption. They found that high blood pressure had become more common and could usually be reduced by cutting back on sugar. Dental caries had become more frequent. But other diseases and health conditions—ischemic heart disease, constipation, hemorrhoids, varicose veins, appendicitis, thyroid problems, ulcers, arthritis, anemia and kidney stones—remained rare. The doctors believed that the native foodstuffs still protected local populations against the incursion of refined foods.
In an article on the Africans of Zimbabwe, author Dr. Michael Gelfand reported that by 1980, Western foods such as white bread, refined sugar, jam and tea had become popular.44 These were usually eaten between the main meals, which still consisted of native foods, including stiff maize porridge, vegetable relish and some meat or fowl. Diabetes had increased but other diseases remained relatively rare. The exception was high blood pressure, which Gelfand discovered to be quite common when he began his medical practice in the 1940s. He observed that hypertension in a Zimbabwean did not seem to predispose him to coronary heart disease. Obesity was rare in Zimbabwe—whereas it was endemic among more Westernized Africans living in South Africa.
Drs. Williams, Williams, and Gelfand noted the fact that the likely culprit in the slow emergence of dental caries and diabetes was not animal fat, but refined sugar. Nevertheless, their articles form part of a collection whose editors are firmly committed to the lipid hypotheses, namely that animal products and saturated fat, not sugar, are the main contributors to the Western plagues of atherosclerosis, diabetes, hypertension and obesity. While Dr. Price’s Nutrition and Physical Degeneration moldered in obscurity, Western Diseases: Their Emergence and Prevention, edited by H. C. Trowell and D. P Burkitt, received widespread attention. Price noted that all healthy African groups had good sources of animal fat, and that the healthiest groups did not consume plant foods in excess; Burkitt and Trowell, however, postulated that the increase in Western diseases among Africans is due to a reduced consumption of plant foods containing dietary fiber. The 1970s work of George Mann is conspicuously absent from Western Diseases. Mann studied the Maasai tribes and came to the politically incorrect conclusion that their high-fat diet did not predispose them to heart disease.*45
But Burkitt and Trowell were firmly committed to the U.S. government’s dietary goals, namely the replacement of animal products with grains, as a way to “prevent cancer and heart disease” and “forestall world hunger.”
Based on Burkitt’s work in Africa, he concluded that many Western diseases that were rare in Africa were the result of lack of fiber in the diet. He subsequently wrote a book, Don’t Forget Fibre in Your Diet, which became an international bestseller.† He also argued that the natural squatting position for defecation protects the natives of Africa and Asia from gastrointestinal diseases and conditions like hemorrhoids.
In his lectures, Burkitt was fond of pointing out that the typical African stool specimen was large and soft, and that stool transit times were rapid compared to the puny hard fecal deposits and slow transit times of hapless Europeans. Burkitt’s writings on dietary fiber led to calls for increased amounts of whole grains in the American diet in order to prevent colon cancer and other diseases of the intestinal tract. “Dietary fiber” soon became a household buzzword, and America embraced the oat bran fad.‡
What Burkitt failed to consider was the fact that grains in the traditional African diet—“processed at the homestead”—are universally fermented, making them easy to digest and contributing to the health of intestinal flora; this is the most likely explanation for the easy, soft stools that Burkitt so admired in the Africans. In fact, after soaking and fermenting them in water, the Africans generally wet-mill the grains and pass them through a sieve. The hulls or leavings in the sieve are discarded—in other words, the Africans throw away the bran.*
Several researchers have noted that along with sugar, tea and white flour, vegetable oils made from peanuts, cottonseed or soy have made inroads into the African diet. What these oils replace is highly saturated palm oil, which has been a staple in Africa for millennia. This means that overall consumption of saturated fat in Africa has declined, not increased. Like vitamin D, saturated fats play a role in protecting the intestinal tract from cancer and other diseases, and in preventing osteoporosis.
Burkitt claimed that salt is new to the African diet; in the same volume, however, Gelfand asserted that salt has been in common use by Africans for a long period of time. Price and others, have noted that in parts of Africa where salt is scarce, the natives burn sodium-rich marsh grasses and add them to their food. Milk and blood are naturally salty, as are dried shrimp and fish products that find their way inland from coastal areas; the ubiquitous fermented shrimp pastes are extremely salty.
DR. WESTON A. PRICE encountered many Africans who wondered about the causes of the decline in health that accompanied modernization; but few made the connection with their consumption of refined and processed foods, often introduced by the missionaries.
Many traditional African foods are for sale at the Oyingbo African International Market in Hyattsville, Maryland—shrimp pastes, fermented millet flour, palm oil, dried shrimp and fish, peanuts, vegetables, liver and calves’ feet. But most of the shelf space is filled up with newfangled foods—Bisquick, Wesson oil, Cheerios, margarine, sugar, white bread, cookies, pasta and soft drinks. Only recent African immigrants—the ones with the fine physiques and beautiful straight teeth—buy the traditional items. Younger Africans, and those who were born here, have opted for the displacing foods of modern commerce… and it shows. Modern medicine may palliate the numerous health problems that accompany such physical degeneration, but only a return to traditional foods and preparation techniques can ensure optimal health for future generations of Africans, both in America and on their home continent. Even if they have lost their taste for the strange, stinky foods of their ancestors, they can still achieve good health with the right choices of nutrient-dense and fermented foods.