Bitterjug’s blog

Last week I visited the secondary school near college and the headmistress told me, amongst many other things, that one of the factors that contributes to the current famine here in Ukambani is the fact that its hard to store grain because of the weevils. She said that foreign weevils from West Africa have come and they will eat anything: maize, green maize still growing in the fields, maize in store houses, the wood that store houses are built of… anything! Consequently the locals who do manage to grow some grains sell them to the cerials board for storage and then have to buy them back after a month or two at inflated prices: a surcharge for safe storage.

Then yesterday, as I was about to cook pumpkin risotto, I wondered why so many of the husks in my tub of brown rice had sprouted little legs and were walking about over the rice. Ugh!

If there hadn’t been so many I **might** have cooked and eaten them anyway. I poured water on to see if they would float and allow me to separate them. Some floated, some sank. When I drained the rice again
and left it to stand, they dried out and started walking about again. It was too much: I balked and chucked out the rice!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 12th, 2004 at 11:02 am and is filed under Uncategorised. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.