Food!!!

The food at COTT was similar in many ways to our food. We often ate rice and stew, but when I say often I mean we regularly ate rice for every lunch+dinner,+the portions of stew were incredibly small. Unsurprisingly I lost a few pounds while out there. As well as this we often ate all sorts of different kinds of squashes (which they boiled to death!), their version of ‘porridge’ for breakfast which looked like yogurt but tasted like porridge and cold baked beans mixed with runner beans!! Bread was also offered with every meal. Interestingly, bread in S.A. is something of a status symbol as those without money apparently eat porridge but those with more money eat both porridge and bread. So I think it was for this reason, as well as to fill people up, that people ate much bread, and I mean much, most had between 3-6 slices a meal! Another reason its important to S.Ans to fill up with food if they can, is because HIV/Aids is a debilitating illness+so they don’t want to look thin as they worry people would think they had it. Also, many made peanut butter sandwiches which they had with their meal! Finally, loads of salt and tomato ketchup was had with literally everything. They put loads of salt on everything and there salt wasn’t white like ours, but a browny colour and tasted like curry power! The ketchup, they mixed it with rice, curry, anything!! It looked disgusting!

Other food they all loved is pap, braiis, ‘cooldrinks’ (i.e. fizzy drinks), samp (a kind of milky ricey thing, see pic!) and fat cookies which were like sweet bread rolls and were really nice but we only had them twice!!

Much S.An food was made from ‘mielie-meal’ which is sweet-corn but not as we know it! Its a white variety of sweet-corn and was made into a coarse flour which was then made into all sorts of things, including pap, samp, +porridge.

Other common or interesting foods eaten in S.A. were Twizza (a fizzy drink), pineapple fanta, Symba’s crisps and nuts, and different Cadburys chocolate including Whispers which are Cadbury’s maltersers! Spurs and Steers were 2 places I loved to eat at, Steers as it had the delicious (and cheap!) ice-cream (see below pic!) and Spur as it did excellent (and also quite cheap) burgers and ribs, yum yum!!

Pics: 1) Me with samp! 2) Steers ice-cream! 3) Steers logo!