Meat Matters (vegetarian readers may wish to look away now)

When I am overseas I tend to eat much less meat then when I am in the UK as finding a good source of meat can be a challenge. As far as I am concerned in this context ‘good’ means that, prior to purchase, two important criteria need to have been met:

1) The meat must not have been kept in a freezer that is powered by an erratic electricity supply and therefore has most likely defrosted and re-frozen numerous times, and

2) The meat must not have been kept uncovered and surrounded by flies for hours on end in soaring temperatures.

Often when you do find someone who sells meat that reaches these not unreasonable standards you find that the animal that sacrificed its life for my dinner has had a long, hard life and the end result is tough, stringy and fairly tasteless.

In Dodoma, Tanzania the ‘best’ place to buy chicken was, not surprisingly, the chicken market. This is an area of the market where hundreds of live chickens are kept in cages awaiting their fate. As the customer you get to choose your chicken and it is then unceremoniously pulled from the cage and taken out of sight, but not out of hearing. After a few seconds of squawking and a long 15 minute wait in the hot sun the stall holder reappears and presents you with a small plastic bag containing your chicken pieces. Unfortunately, the fact that the bird is probably only for sale because it has stopped producing eggs and is therefore no longer of any value to its owner also means that it is past its best as far as the quality of its meat is concerned. In the three months I was in Dodoma it is an experience I felt I only needed to go through once!

In complete contrast in Kampala, Uganda I was spoiled by the existence of a butcher who had discovered the gap in the market, specifically amongst the large ex-pat community, for good quality meat. The selection and standard of the meat on sale was comparable to anything you would find in the UK.

In South Sudan there is goat… It would arrive on the compound on four legs; spend a few days tethered under a tree and end up as dinner.

Here in N’Djamena, Chad there seem to be two options.

·         There is the supermarket (think corner shop, rather than Tesco or Sainsbury) that has a freezer which always seems to be full of enormous packs of chicken pieces. Apart from being far too much meat for me on my own I am not sure it meets criteria 1) above, or

·         There is the man who comes to the compound once a week on his bicycle and sells huge cuts of beef that look like this:

I have no idea where he gets the meat from and somehow I doubt it meets criteria 2) above but as this seems to be the way that all the international MAF staff buy their meat then I guess it’s OK.

It is also one of the few things I have bought so far in Chad that I think represents value for money. Having chopped it up into cubes and separated it into bags for freezing I reckon I have enough meat for about 8 meals and all for little more than £4.00 GBP.

Of course, I have no idea yet what it tastes like so I may still end up having to find more ways to cook rice, tomatoes, onions and peppers…