Food Rainbow!

The Canadian Food Guide: follow the rainbow and at the end you'll find good health. Coming to Ghana, now, it's striking how great a metaphor this is for good nutrition. You have to be lucky enough to be born in a western country to find this pot of gold with any ease.

For all of us Canadians, it's been engrained in our minds. I never consciously thought about it while making my food choices in Canada, but if I look back I can see that for most of my life I've been meandering down the rainbow road.

Perhaps it's that thoughts of the four food groups still camp out in the backcountry of my consciousness, silently guiding my choices. Maybe I just like diversity and so it all get s represented in my daily regiment. It's also possible that it was my body, not my mind, planting those cravings for yogurt and greek salad after the "occaasional" poutine bendesr.

In any case, the only reason I was even able to do this was because of all the food available in Canada. A simple trip to the grocery store gets me everything from sushi to mini-pizzas, with endless choices in every food group. If I so choose, I can even ditch the decent diet idea and still stay healthy. There are protein supplements,fibre supplements multivitamins, enzymes and bioactives. All this on top of the fact that most of our food products are already enriched with some key vitamin or mineral.

In contrast, the food products people rely on in my district often come directly from the producers or local processers. This means that a person's diet is completely restricted by what is grown in the region and what is in season. Iodized salt (to prevent goiters) is the only widely-used enriched food product I've seen, and it is even relatively new in northern Ghana.

I'm not saying that there's no healthy food here. While mango trees are absolutely everwhere, bananas and plantains have to be transported from the more fertile south. The dry-season farmers produce cabbage, lettuce, tomatoes and watermelon. Many women process peanuts and soybeans, creating opportunity for people to access protein rich foods.

What I am saying is that you have to be far more proactive about your diet in Ghana, and there are challenges to this. Some farming families don't like to buy food from others when they can feed themselves on their own crops. Also, fruits and vegetables seem to be regarded as a treat rather than as a necessity.

The things about a healthy diet in Bunkpurugu is that you have to be proactive. You actually have to seek out the dietary diversity we tend to stumble upon at home. It seems so simple, but the markets are crowded and some people have to walk for miles to get there. When they do they need to barter for nearly everything they buy - including the fruits and vegetables which are expensive than the mystery leaf which seems to have a standard price. Besides this the leafy thing is absolutely everywhere while if you want a banana you have to go early and hunt it down.

I go banana hunting, but that's because I'm trying desperately to stay on my fading rainbow. If I lived in rural Ghana, with and didn't go to school to learn about rainbows ... why would I look for a pot of gold?