Food

It’s astonishing how conservative we can be, and food is probably the area in which we keep so-called traditions alive with the least flexibility. See the ‘traditional” Christmas dinner, and the vagrant British colonialist with, as you can see, his jar of Marmite.

Moving to a new country like the DRC one cannot help being astonished at the degree to which the food is totally Belgian/Dutch. I’m not talking about the restaurants, but about the supermarkets.

As you walk past shelves and shelves of jars of the Dutch favourite of peas and tiny carrots in brine, tins of cassoulet, apfel stroop (apple syrup), packets of goudse waffels (waffles with apple syrup in the middle) Dutch gingerbread and so on one could be forgiven for thinking you were in a very different country than the DRC. Few concessions to other nationalities here.

But the pain of living without Marmite can be dulled by looking at the cheese counter. There’s a huge range of cheeses at the same price, or even lower, than Europe. And the charcuterie – salamis, hams, pates: it’s all there, and not expensive at all. And for the real aficionados there are the Dutch herrings.

While we may be familiar with mortadella and camembert, making head or tail of the detergents is something else. None of the names we are used to are there. There are some really old-fashioned ones which we had forgotten about: Persil, Tide, etc. and many new ones which mean nothing. We are overcome by shame at our reliance on brand names in making decisions about stuff like detergent. And the prices!! We swallow hard and settle for a giant pack of Dreft which is about $50 – no exaggeration.

As we unload the car I see a little trail of white powder and before we know it the bottom has fallen out of our newly bought extravagance. Dreft all over the entrance hall to the block of flats. Luckily it was not outside and raining, and we can sweep up most of it. But it seems like a cruel irony that our most expensive purchase is the least reliable.