Why Can't We Get This in America?

One of the fun things about living in a new place is finding familiar foods, or experimenting with new ones, and just seeing the amazing, interesting, and sometimes just different foodstuffs in the food shops and “supermarkets” (although they are all small street shops).

We started with Cadbury Drinking Chocolate, which was straightforward enough. When we were on safari, Rama put out a canister of a malted chocolate “health drink” powder called Milo – slogan: “the energy food drink of future champions.” It’s quite delicious when mixed with powdered milk (“Nido,” a Nestle product) and hot water. I’m not a fan of malted milk at all, but I do like Milo, so we have added that to the breakfast routine. Milo is a product of Kenya, while Nido comes from the Netherlands.



In most shops you can buy all kinds of pre-made Indian sauces and spices, like Masala seasonings, curries, etc. I have also bought a container of Mchuzi Mix which the picture suggests makes a kind of just-add-meat-and-vegetables stew (ingredient list: cornstarch, salt, sugar, coriander, cinnamon, fennel seeds, turmeric, ginger, garlic, cumin, methee seeds). Mhmm! Will have to try, and let you know. I plan to serve it over couscous and/or rice.

Besides the usual orange, you can get a few different common flavors for fruit drinks here, including

--pineapple everything – pineapple Fanta, pineapple Tang (!), pineapple cream cookies



--and blackcurrant, which is kind of utibiquitous in the same way that grape flavor is at home. One of our favorite drinks comes as a liquid concentrate called Fruto. You mix it approximately 3:1 water with fruto, respectively. We like the blackcurrant flavor, but mostly we like the description on the bottle: “Fruto is a little challenging for most active people to drink. It is the most preferred and the most researched drink in the market. Fruto has the right amount of sweetness and electrolytes to help quench the deep down body thirst and keep it well hydrated.” As we all know, the deep down body thirst is indeed hard to quench. Also, some people have claimed that there is in fact a black currant Fanta, but it remains elusive, and is unconfirmed at this time.



Also fun shapes, like these triangular juice boxes.



Sodas are Coca Cola, Sprite, and several flavors of Fanta, including orange (boringly common), the elusive blackcurrant, pineapple, bitter lemon, and also quinine tonic water. We see Pepsi very seldom, we are told (with contempt) that it is more popular in Dar Es Salaam. All of these are only in tall 350 ml glass bottles, so they pop the bottlecap off for you, then you drink them on site and give back the bottle. Cans are rare, and expensive. Diet Coke is called “Light Coke” here and costs quite a bit more. Also, Coke has a definite edge on advertising, as every sign for a shop here also has a huge Coke™ sign attached to it.

We don’t eat a lot of food bought from street vendors, but it is very common to see a charcoal-fired wok full of frying oil cooking up a batch of potato fries, or vendors selling little rolled newspaper cones with roasted peanuts, or big ears of corn roasting over charcoal barbecues (it’s hard corn, though, I think, not soft like American corn on the cob) which people snack on and then toss the cobs into the gutters, which also houses yesteryears wrappers and bottles.

Candies are another whole category of interesting foods – there is cardamom gum and banana gum, and a brand of bubble gum called Obama with the American president’s picture on it. There are yogurt lollipops and other strange things we haven’t tried yet.



The last picture is to represent a brand called “American Classic” or “American Garden,” of things like ketchup, canned vegetables and pasta sauce, soup, and so on. This is salt, made in America but packaged for Dubai. We just got a kick out of the bright-colored labeling. On the subject of ketchup, for the most part we avoid the local varieties. The ketchup connoisseurs of the family believe the ratio of vinegar and chili to be slightly above acceptable, and you never know what you are going to get, as a strawberry jam is commonly kept in the same container.