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Comensality
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Men tend to eat with other men, while
women usually eat with each other and children.
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Women often eat with each other and
with children
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Men tend to eat with men
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Duolocal Residence
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When a husband and wife live in separate
households (duolocally) in the same town (which is common when they go
to their home town for funerals, or when a man has more than one wife),
then you can see the pattern of children going from Mom's house to Dad's
house, carrying supper. This is discussed in the paper, Covert
Gynocracy. Husbands and wives may live together when away from
the home town, but each go to their separate matrilineage homes to sleep
when in the home town. This brings about the classical picture of
children going from mama's house to papa's house each evening carrying
a meal. If it is the wife's turn to stay with the husband (perhaps
he has more than one wife), then she will prepare food at her house and
take it over to him for the evening.
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Carrying Food
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To Husband's House for the Night
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Raw and Cooked
The Akan prefer their meals to be cooked.
The idea of eating a salad with a meal is considered to be deviant behaviour.
Only animals, not humans, would eat raw meals. Desserts to end meals
are unknown. During the day, apart from meal times, raw fresh fruit
is eaten, most popularly oranges
and bananas which are often sold where travellers change vehicles, ie lorry
parks. Pineapple, "apple" (sour sap), "pear" (avocado), and various
tropical fruits and berries are also eaten other than at meal times.
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In lorry parks, other between meal
travelling snacks are often sold, these include boiled
eggs, tea bread or sugar bread. Different European influences
meant different vernacular names for bread, which is not an indigenous
food. At Cape Coast, bread is "pannu" while in Kwawu, because
the German Swiss influence, it is called "bodo."
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When someone leaves the village for
a trek of several days, a common form of the good bye greeting is, "To
bodo bre me," (Buy me bread). To say "good bye" is to "kra"
someone, the same word as "kra" the destiny soul given to each person
on the day s/he is born, when God will give the new born its "kra"
gift of a destiny along with its first breath. See Three
Souls.
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In the morning, a common meal is a
porridge made from one of several alternatives, rice, roasted cassava,
sorghum and various flours and meals. A favourite breakfast, but
a bit more costly, is dokonu (kenkey),
made from steamed fermented corn meal, along with an uncooked sauce made
of grinding tomatoes, chilli peppers and onions in an mpayewa.
It is eaten with smoked or fried fish or with tinned sardines. I
asked why the sauce was made of raw vegetables instead of being cooked
and was told that the preparing of the the sauce in an mpayewa
substituted for cooking and the hot sauce was not considered to be raw
(hot picante or spicy, not hot caliente or by temperature).
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Gari is made by grinding then roasting
cassava. Often it is boiled and squeezed before roasting to remove
the cyanide poison that is in the centre string of some varieties of cassava.
It is jokingly called "bachelor food," because to prepare it one simply
pours a bit of boiled water over it. It can be eaten like that or a bit
of stew, most popularly beans and oil, may be added.
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