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Tribal Diets-Maasai Palettes

Tribal Diets- Traditional Massi Food

Italians have pasta, Russians have borscht, and Americans have cheeseburgers and cherry pie; traditional foods can be found in every culture, and the 120+ ethnic and tribal groups living in Tanzania are no exception.To a westerner, though, traditional eating for the Maasai may seem distinctly unorthodox. That’s because a traditional Maasai diet not only includes, but primarily relies upon, both cow’s milk and cow’s blood.

In Maasai culture, cattle are highly valued. The size of your herd indicates your status in the community, and accumulating animals—rather than consuming them—is common practice. That means that milk plays a huge role in a traditional Maasai diet. Drunk raw (or soured), drunk in tea, or turned into butter (which is especially important as a food for infants), milk is a part of almost every meal for Maasai herders.

Blood is obtained by nicking the jugular artery of a cow precisely, allowing for blood-letting that doesn’t kill the animal. Mixed blood and milk is used as a ritual drink in special celebrations, or given to the sick. 

Of course blood and milk aren’t the only things Maasai eat; the diet has always been supplemented with tubers, honey, and foraged plants that are most often used in soups and stews. More recently, Maasai have supplemented their diet with grains and maize-meal (and of course many modern Maasai live an urban lifestyle, with the more varied diet that entails). They still play an important role in many Maasai meals, however; for example, ugali (a thick maize-based porridge that serves as a staple food throughout Tanzania) is generally served with milk in Maasai households.

Africa-A Brief History - 3  

The Phoenicians expanded their trade and colonized North Africa, They invaded northeast Tunisia and established the city of Utica at the mouth of the Majada River around 1100 B.C.  Incidentally, St. Augustine, the black Bishop studied in the African colonial city of Carthage. This city is where the priest/herbalist monastic system of medicine was established and this system expanded herb medicine knowledge all over the European world.The herb and drug knowledge was needed in Europe. European civilization's population was on a massive decline due to dis-eases from their cooked grain (pastry), animal flesh diet, poor hygiene and lack of cleanliness.

 Similarly, the introduction of European animals such as domiscated cattle, pigs. and the undomesticated rat caused ecological imbalances in Africa's wild animal population and plant population. Furthermore, the rape of Fertile Crescent (present day Iraq and Iran) for food crops and overgrazing by the flesh eaters animal crops caused damage which still has not been repaired. The massive European dom esticated animal flesh consumption and the methods used to insure the supply of animal flesh has reduced north and northeast Africa to vast wastelands. Alexander the Great invaded Africa and India and left the land treeless and barren.

An uncontrollable need for medicines to save a dying European culture caused the exploitation of plants and the enslavement of black people. It is estimated that the total land lost throughout the course of European history (predominantly in Africa) is greater than the total land now in cultivation in the entire world. (A Vegetarian Sourcebook by Keith Akers.).

Reference: African Holistic Health: Liaila o. Afrika          

PART ONE:DISEASE TREATMENT AND HEALTH-9-Hypoglycemia

Hypoglycemia is a dis-ease symptom reaction. It occurs because the body is low (hypo) in blood sugar (glycemia). When the body gets large amounts of sugar it receives a rush of energy, but also requires large amounts of energy to burn the large amounts of sugar. The body becomes exhausted from burning great quantities of sugar. The exhaustion occurs because the body is low in blood sugar. Further, all fats, proteins and starches are naturally changed to sugar within the body and thus create more blood sugar.

This blood sugar is used up burning up the large amounts of sugar intake.

A hypoglycemic person should avoid all white sugar (read labels), bleached white flour, and junk foods.

Vitamin A, B complex, B6, B12, C, E< Pantothenic acid, Zinc, Magnesium, Potassium, Kyolic, Magnesium chloride, , Potassium chloride, Chromiun.

Licorice, Kelp, Spirulina, Wild yam, Juniper berries, Horseradish, Kiwi, Dandelion.

Wholewheat, nuts, grains, seeds, promegranate, any fresh vegetables and fruits.

Liver, Brain, Adrenal, Pancreas

Glutamine, Cysteine.

Nat. Phos.

  v

The Serpent and the RainBow-The Jaguar

A map of the world covered most of one wall of the cafe, and as i huddled over a cup of coffe I noticed David staring at it intently. He glanced at me, then back at the map, then again at me, only this time with a grin that splayed his beard from ear to ear. Lifting his arm towars the map, he dropped his finger on a piece of land that cut into Hudson's Bay well beyond the Artic Circle. I looked over at him and felt my own arm rise until it landed me in the middle of the upper Amazon.

David left Cambridge later that week and within a month had moved into an Eskimo settlement on the shore of Rankin Inlet. It would be many months before I saw him again. For myself, I have decided to go to the Amazon, there was only one man to see. Professor Richard Evans Schultes was an almost mythic figure on the campus at that time, and like many other students both within and ouside the department of Antropology I had respect for him that bordered on veneration. The last of the great plant explores in the Victorian tradition, he was for us a hero in a time of few heroes,a man who, having taken a single semester's leave to collect medicinal plants in the northwest Amazon, had disappeared into the rain forest for twelve years.

Later that same afternoon, I slipped quitely onto the fourth floor of Harvard's Botanical Museum. On first sight the Spartan furnishings were disappointing, the herbarium cases too ordered and neat, the secretaries matronly. Then I discovered the laboratory. Most biological labs are sterile places, forests of tubes and flashing lights with preserved specimens issuing smells that could make a fresh flower wilt.

This palce was extraordinary. Against one wall beside a panoply of Amazonian dance masks was a rack of blowguns and spears. In glass-covered oak cabinets were laid out elegant displays of the world's most common narcotic plants. Bark cloth covered another wall. Scattered about the large room were plant products of every conceivable shape and formvials of essential oils, specimens of Para rubber, narcotic lianas and fish poisons, mahogany carvings, fibre mats and ropes and dozens of hand blown glass jars with pickled fruits from the Pacific, fruits that looked like stars.

Then I noticed the photgraphs. In one Schultes stood in a long line of Indian men, his chest decorated with intricate motifs and his gaunt frame wrapped in a grass skirt and draped in bark cloth. In another he was alone, perched like a raptor on the edge of a sandstone massif, peering into a sea of forest. A third captured him against the backdrop of a raging cataract in soiled khakis with a pistol strapped to his waist as he knelt to scrutinize a petroglyph. They were like images out of dreams, difficult to reconcile with the scholarly figure who quitely walked into the laboratory in front of me.

"Yes" he inquired a resonant Bostonian accent. Face to fact with a legend, I stumbled. Nervously  and in a single breath I told him my name, that I came from British Columbia, that I had saved some money working in a logging camp, and that I wanted to go to the Amazon to collect plants. At that time I knew little about the Amazon and less about plants. I expected him to quiz me. Instead, after gazing for a long time across the room, he peered back at me through his antiquated bifocals, across the stacks and stacks of plant specimens that littered the table between us, and said very simply, " So you want to to go to South America and collect plants. When would you like to leave?"

I returned two weeks later for a final meeting, at which time professor Schultes drew out a series of maps and outlined a number of possible expiditions. Aside from that he offered only two pieces of advice. Ther was no point buying a heavy pair of boots, he said, because what few snakes  I was apt to find generally bite at the neck; a pith helmet, however was indispensable. Then he suggested enthusiasstically that I not return from the Amazon without experimenting with ayahuasca, the vision vine, one of the most potent of hallucinogenic plants.

Three months to the day after leaving Boston, I sat in a dismal cantina in northern Colombia facing an eccentric geographer, an old friend of Professor Schulte's. A week before he had asked me to join him and a British journalist on a walk across "a few miles" of swamp in the northwestern corner of the country. The journalist was Sebastian Snow, an English aristocrat who, having just walked from Tierra del Fuego at the tip of South America, now intended to walk to Alaska.

My hair was blond, she said, my skin golden, and my eyes the color of the sea. Before I had a chance to savor the compliment she added that it was too bad that all these features would be yellow by the time I reached Panama. That same night, to make matters worse, the geographer, who knew the region far better than I, somewhat mysteriously dropped out of the expedition.