Injera, sorghum, carrots and other musings on nutrition…..

Photo by Philippa Ribbink

Injera is for Ethiopians, what rice is for the Malagasy.   They eat it with every meal.   They fry up leftover injera with chickpeas and onions and spices and eat it with more injera.    Most of the time injera is made with teff, a tiny little grain that grows all over the central highlands.   The stalks are fed to lifestock and the grain is ground into flour.  The flour is mixed with water and the mixture is allowed to ferment a couple days.  The mixture is the poured into a flat pan over a charcoal fire and comes out looking and tasting like a spongy crepe.  Whatever you eat, lentils, peas, chickpeas, lamb it is served on injera and you pick it up with pieces of injera.

Teff is a very nutritious grain full of protein and iron, but it does not grow well in the Western Highlands around Gimbie.    So instead of teff people use sorghum, a very hardy crop, to make injera.  The injera comes out tasting like soggy sourdough bread; not my favorite.  More problematic than the taste, however is a cyanide metabolite that is contained in sorghum.  If sorghum is your only source of caloric intake this metabolite can accumulate in your brain and can irreversible neurological damage.

The people in this village close to Gimbie shouldn’t have any problems since they also grow corn and have chicken and cows.  This is, of course, if they eat they corn and don’t just grow it to sell.   I remember being amazed that vitamin A deficiency is the number one cause of infant mortality in Madagascar, when every little town seems to sell carrots.   Carrots are a money making crop.  So, rather than feed them to their children, poor farmers sell carrots.

So it’s not just lack of food in general that leads to malnutrition.  It’s the balance of foods and what foods get combined.

Variety is not just the spice of life it is essential for proper nutrition.  The potato famine in Ireland was the result of relying to much on one source of carbohydrates: potatoes.  When the potato blight ruined the crops a quarter of the population of Ireland either moved to the US or died.

We saw a huge number of goiters in the women around Gimbie.  Iodine deficiency leads to hypothyroidism and an overgrowth of the thyroid gland.  This in turns leads mental retardation and stunted growth in their children, continuing to cycle of poverty, poor productivity and poverty.    The Ethiopian government does not require iodine to be added to salt.  People in the highlands do not eat shellfish or ocean fish and instead eat a lot of iodine leeching vegetables such as cabbage.

WHO and large Aid Organizations are starting to look more at vitamin and mineral supplementation rather than just food aid.   Supplementing with vitamin A would greatly reduce infant mortality worldwide.    Pressuring Governments to require all salt to be iodized would save millions of children from mental retardation.

More carrots, less cabbage, more teff based injera and less sorghum based injera would solve a lot of problems.