The agony of a banana eater-turned-food taster

I am a typical villager born and brought up in Katerero on the shores of Lake Victoria. I eat and drink everything banana – the beer is brewed from banana (lubisi), the food is bananas (bitoke). Five-star lifestyle is reserved for the famous, the rich and the schooled like my drinking chum Dr Winchinslauss Rwegoshora (PhD, MA, BA, UDSM) – the man who is known to be a mobile library.

Mouthing names of things and food that sound complicated reminds me of someone choking on a piece of kitimoto (pork) at Mzee Shirima’s beer drinking joint after imbibing more than his woozy head can accommodate.

I will tell you why. All knowledge (I mean all) hinges on vanity. In order for anyone to sound “learned”, uncalled use of hard language to buttress on us their importance anything becomes necessary. Why in God’s name would a chemistry teacher need to spend a whole lesson teaching students some hard-to-pronounce lousy mouthfuls like tetrahydrochrorodiflouromethane (my tongue already hurts) when they cannot even write their own names? It is worse when it comes to naming food.

Anyway, as I have always hinted to you, besides hammering at the keyboard to produce the third-rate column you are now reading, I scrape up some juggling behind my boss’ back, something that can easily cost me this job. Last week, after reading a write-up I had presented somewhere, someone thought that it was a good idea to hand me a task as a “gastronome.” In this, I was supposed to sample morsels in a certain Bongo five-star hotel and scribble something about it even though I had never written on food before.

The catch here was good because my wallet that had taken an abode in its usual financial ICU was promised of a reprieve. Who would refuse a deal whereby all one needed to do is to stuff his stomach with real food and just write about it.

However, it later dawned that being a gastronome is more than stuffing oneself with food and writing a secondary school composition about the experience. It would have been easier to write Arabic than writing about food. A fellow like me, born and brought up on the shores of Lake Victoria whose diet from day one to death comprised bananas, this was baptism by fire. From such a background, how would you write the tastes, aromas, ambiance and romantic aspects of funky menus like I sampled at that hotel?

How would you, for example write the taste of Salad of Quail, Rocket and Artichokes served with shavings of parmesan and drizzled with aged balsamic and Cretan extra virgin olive oil?

Or how the hell would one write Pecorino, Gorgonzola and Gryuere custard served with roast tomato and rosemary veloure and grissini?