Abidjan, Where Food Still Nourishes

Travel teaches you what real food is.

I was in Abidjan and realized something. Nobody was obese. This wasn’t because Ivory Coast had fitness culture. It was because food was food. Not refined. Not aged. Not past. Food that was cut that morning.

The markets in Abidjan are overwhelming if you come from the Netherlands. Everywhere women selling vegetables they’d taken from the land. No packaging. No barcodes. No transport costs from thousands of kilometres away. Just food, directly from source to mouth.

This made something clear. All the health problems we have, everything with nutrition and weight, this is not an Ivorian problem. This is a supermarket problem. This is industrialization. This is what we’ve created ourselves.

In Abidjan people ate what was available. Local vegetables, local grains, local fish. Not because it was healthy. But because it was cheap. It’s what grew nearby. But food that’s local is usually food that’s seasonal. And food that’s seasonal is usually food your body needs in that season.

The Hausa in Abidjan eats rice with onion and tomato sauce. Not because it’s fancy. But because rice grows, onions grow, tomatoes grow. This is what food is available. This is what you eat. No choice, no diet, just eating.

This against the Netherlands, where you can buy strawberries in January. This sounds good, but it’s aged food. It’s transported. It’s grown in greenhouses with artificial light. It tastes like water. Your body doesn’t understand it.

My father wrote about this. About seasonal nutrition. About what your body needs in each season. This wasn’t spiritual, this was biology. In fall grows food your body needs to prepare for winter. In spring grows food your body needs to emerge from winter dormancy. This is not magic. This is evolution.

This is also why local food matters. Not because local is necessarily better. But because local means seasonal. And seasonal means food that is genuinely food.

In Abidjan you could still see this. This knowledge is buried in cities with supermarkets. But it’s not gone. It’s just forgotten. This is why food revolution begins with going back to markets. Back to farmers. Back to food that grows where you live.

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Sources: Food anthropology, seasonal nutrition