Ethiopian Food and Health

Nutrition is the key to a healthy life and the cornerstone of any culture’s cooking. If our food lacks nutrition, we get sick and inevitably parish. This discussion will examine the food types indigenous to a very misunderstood country in Eastern Africa: Ethiopia. Boasting diverse landscapes filled with rolling hills, great rivers and majestic wild life, Ethiopia is the site of many of the most ancient and famed human fossils ever discovered, and as the world’s oldest surviving continuously-sovereign nation state, is rich in tradition and cuisine. Sadly however, most Americans today associate the country primarily with the devastating famine that ravaged its people in the mid-eighties. When I tell someone I am going to an Ethiopian restaurant, I often get a response like, “I thought they don’t have food”, as if for thousands of years the inhabitants of this bountiful country, who filled it with ancient, world-renown monuments, churches and cities, were bereft of sustenance. The idea is absurd, but most of the people who make such statements had their views shaped by media images of famine victims and so have given little thought to the customary dishes of their land. In the following passages I will endeavor to expose my audience to the cornucopia of creative culinary combinations comprising Ethiopian cuisine and to research providing evidence that the traditional Ethiopian diet meets nutritional requirements and ensures overall health. Ethiopia’s number-one agricultural resource is cereal grain. Teff, barley, wheat, maize, finger millet, oats, and rice make up 85% of Ethiopia’s crops. In order from greatest to least, the country’s remaining crop production includes pulses, like beans, lentils, and fenugreek; oilseeds such as linseed, sesame, flax and safflower; vegetables including a variety of cabbages, peppers, Swiss chard and tomato; root crops like beetroot, carrots, ginger, potato and garlic; fruits such as banana, papaya, guava, avocado,

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