What a pain for simply graded coconut
Zanzibari chefs and housewives prepare most delicious meals with coconut – vegetables or prawns in a smooth coco nut sauce, or simply rice with a soft coconut flavor, to only mention the most popular ones. What we consider the milk inside the coconut, they drain down the drain when they hit one nut against another to break them. Then the flesh gets graded and soaked in water and finally pressed out for the real coco nut milk.
Grading is a huge job – Zanzibari women use a blade fixed to a wooden, carved construction that can be opened to sit on it, to fix it while grading. Early in the morning in every yard of a Zanzibari house, you would meet at least one women grading the days coconut demand.
However, we learned about an even harder job in order to get coco nut milk. In the Uluguru Mountains, more than 1000m above the town of Morogoro and more than 400km away from Zanzibar, along incredibly steep and narrow paths we encountered boys and young men in completely ragged clothes, carrying huge and heavy packages of these wooden constructions to fix the blade on their shoulders. No need to say that they were a lot faster than we were, despite their load and bare feet. And even higher up in the tropical forest well hidden away we found the craftsmen camp, only equipped with some hand sores and sharp carving knives. They were happy to see us, but under conditions that no photos were taken. What they do in the strictly protected forest, the catchment’s area of Dar es Salaams drinking water supply, is highly illegal.
A package of about half a dozen of these instruments with a liana string around it, is less than three dollars worth to the middlemen that buy them from the locals, and transport them to Zanzibar.
Adding the pain the craftsmen go through to fell the trees by hand and carve the instruments equally be hand, the young man carrying the heavy load on their shoulders down to Morogoro, only to re climb another 1000m in altitude to get more of them, and finally the grading Zanzibari ladies, spending their mornings with this monotonous work, we realized what a precious thing a coconut flavored dish actually is, never reflected in its real price, as food, at least for us, remains extremely cheap!
Zanzibari chefs and housewives prepare most delicious meals with coconut – vegetables or prawns in a smooth coco nut sauce, or simply rice with a soft coconut flavor, to only mention the most popular ones. What we consider the milk inside the coconut, they drain down the drain when they hit one nut against another to break them. Then the flesh gets graded and soaked in water and finally pressed out for the real coco nut milk.
Grading is a huge job – Zanzibari women use a blade fixed to a wooden, carved construction that can be opened to sit on it, to fix it while grading. Early in the morning in every yard of a Zanzibari house, you would meet at least one women grading the days coconut demand.
However, we learned about an even harder job in order to get coco nut milk. In the Uluguru Mountains, more than 1000m above the town of Morogoro and more than 400km away from Zanzibar, along incredibly steep and narrow paths we encountered boys and young men in completely ragged clothes, carrying huge and heavy packages of these wooden constructions to fix the blade on their shoulders. No need to say that they were a lot faster than we were, despite their load and bare feet. And even higher up in the tropical forest well hidden away we found the craftsmen camp, only equipped with some hand sores and sharp carving knives. They were happy to see us, but under conditions that no photos were taken. What they do in the strictly protected forest, the catchment’s area of Dar es Salaams drinking water supply, is highly illegal.
A package of about half a dozen of these instruments with a liana string around it, is less than three dollars worth to the middlemen that buy them from the locals, and transport them to Zanzibar.
Adding the pain the craftsmen go through to fell the trees by hand and carve the instruments equally be hand, the young man carrying the heavy load on their shoulders down to Morogoro, only to re climb another 1000m in altitude to get more of them, and finally the grading Zanzibari ladies, spending their mornings with this monotonous work, we realized what a precious thing a coconut flavored dish actually is, never reflected in its real price, as food, at least for us, remains extremely cheap!
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