Communities in Kenya have adopted one another’s food preferences and recipes. With the exception of the Coast and Indian communities for whom food preparation is an elaborate process, nearly all other communities garnish their food by frying it. They also boil, bake in hot ashes and roast. Common foods include:
Ugali:
It is a sticky mixture of flour and water and is accompanied by vegetables, meat, milk or milk mixed with blood especially for pastoralist communities. Traditionally, it is made from millet or cassava. But maize flour has increasingly taken pride of place.
Meat:
lt is used to prepare sauces and stews. Communities have different ways of preparing meat, but roast meat is widely eaten as a delicacy especially in urban areas. Animals slaughtered for meat depend on the location, with beef and mutton the most common. Camel and game are the preserve of communities with access to the animals.
Maize:
In the last quarter ofthe 20th century, maize replaced sorghum as the most important cereal in Kenya. lt is roasted and eaten as a snack and sold on the streets and in markets.
Green boiled maize, often garnished with salt, is also common. Among the Somali, fresh maize (galeey) is
fried in oil and eaten as a snack. Dry maize is also fried to make popcorn, popular with children.
Githeri:
A mixture of green or dry maize and beans, cowpeas, pigeon peas or even groundnuts is also popular. lt is eaten as a main course or snack. Sometimes, it is pounded with Irish or sweet potatoes, bananas and green vegetables.
Fruits
A wide range of traditional and exotic fruits are consumed in Kenya, usually as snacks. Mango, citrus fruits, banana, jackfruit, papaya, melons, guava, passion fruit, custard apple and avocado pear are common. Many traditional fruits such as baobab, wild custard apple, carissa, dialium, flacourtia (Indian plum), marula, vangueria, tamarind, vitex and ‘jujube’ are picked in the wild.
Vegetables
They are used as accompaniments for starchy food such as ugali. Common traditional vegetables include
baobab, cowpeas, amaranth, vine spinach, Ethiopian kale, pumpkin leaves, spider plant and hibiscus.
Kale (sukuma wiki) is now the most common vegetable in Kenya.