The cabbage in its full glory on Eat Your Vegetable Day

“A cabbage is a vegetable just about as big and as intelligent as a human head.” That, I think, is a definition from The Devil’s Dictionary by Ambrose Bierce. I do not know if it is a compliment to the cabbage or to the human head. But then, Bierce and his uproariously satirical and hugely popular Dictionary are not known to be particularly complimentary or even respectful to anything or anybody. I believe it is The Devil’s Dictionary that also defines death as “a terrible waste of time”, and love as “a temporary insanity curable by marriage”.

Speaking of death, I was seriously considering avoiding mention of the subject for at least a month. This is because I am losing so many dear and significant friends and colleagues that our column risked becoming an obituary page. But then, Dr Luka Wasambo Were departed for “Pagak” last week. You will certainly have noticed from the many tributes to him that Wasambo Were was a giant influence in developing a post-independence language, literary and theatre culture in this country.

To me, however, Wasambo was an intimately close friend and colleague, with whom I traversed the length and width of Kenya, doing what he and I loved most, working with our fellow teachers to improve drama and language and literature teaching. Some of the then-young teachers with whom we worked have been sharing their memories of those long-gone days when Wasambo and I shared our insights with them.

One, for example, remembered the fun we shared improvising verse pieces with our colleagues in Busia. Another recalled my casting Wasambo Were as the “thief” in that other thief poem, “The Crucified Thief” by John S. Mbithi. This was at Bethany House in Sagana, and we were illustrating how to direct a poem for the Drama Festival.

The tales are endless. I suppose this is why we old people are said to be in our dotage. We dote on anecdotes. I cherish, for example, the “Makabeti” (Macbeth) production in which Wasambo directed me and several of my friends, including Dr Wanjiku Mwotia and the late Lee Kanyare, at the famous Donovan Maule Theatre in its twilight days. In all my work with Wasambo Were, what particularly struck me was his solicitous care and concern for all those with whom he worked. You can imagine my satisfaction when, shortly after he had joined Kenyatta University, he was chosen to take over from me as Director of the Performing and Creative Arts Centre there, as I began to eye my relocation to Makerere

Pocket-friendly

Back to the cabbage, however, it is on my mind because I discovered that some people observe today, June 17, as National Eat Your Vegetable Day. I thought that the mighty cabbage (“chou” in French, “kohl” in German) would be a fair representation of the whole species. Unpretentious in stature, shape, colour, smell or even taste, the cabbage surprises with its indisputable persistence in our cuisines. It must, thus, have captured the attention of us, eaters, for some reason, maybe its plentiful availability and consequent friendliness on our pockets, or its easy adaptability to all sorts of preparation for consumption.

Most cabbage varieties can be eaten raw in salads, boiled or stewed, fried or pickled in vinegar and eaten over several weeks or even months. But, without turning this into a hymn or ode to the cabbage, which would be parodic, we can see how simple plants and their relatives find their way into our lives and, presumably, affect them significantly. I am neither a medic nor a nutritionist, but I like cooking and I am an enthusiast for good, sensible eating. Indeed, if I were to give one practical tip for longevity, about which I can now claim to be an authority, it would probably be, “Eat healthy and exercise.”

Sadly, however, what many people, including reasonably educated ones, call “good food” is neither sensible nor healthy eating. In Kenya, for example, our cherished “nyamachoma/ugali/beer” outing binges would leave a serious nutritionist close to tears, just as would the ubiquitous frying and deep-frying craze all over the continent. The warnings and good advice are all over our information-saturated media, but few of us pay serious attention to them.

The problem is compounded among us English speakers by the long-established Anglophone belief that it is in bad taste to speak about food. Even now, I can anticipate a certain sense of apprehension or puzzlement among some of my readers that I should be talking about food. Am I indulging in trivialities? Far from it, and if justification be needed, I will cite two reasons why I think it is important to talk about food, especially today. The first one is that food is a core ingredient of our culture, and anyone seriously interested in the way we live cannot afford to minimise or trivialise the role it plays in our cultural fabric.

Secondly, and more relevant to our conversation today, is our two-pronged awareness. On the negative side, we are beset with a host of health problems, like obesity, metabolic disorders and cardiovascular complications, many of them directly traceable to our eating habits. The positive side is that we have researched, tested and proven evidence that vegetables and related plant world nutrients have huge health and even medicinal benefits for us, many of them countering the very complications we mentioned above. You have certainly heard of phytonutrients, have you not?

The bottom line, therefore, is that we should discard the backward and mistaken assumption that greens and other vegetables are only for the poor, to “push the week” (sukumawiki) to its penniless end. Instead, we should embrace our mammas’ and grandmas’ gentle advice to eat our vegetables, and in significant quantities, if we want to grow.

Incidentally, sukumawiki (kale) is invariably on the list of vegetables with the highest phytonutrient content. Cabbages also often make the list.

Prof Bukenya is a leading East African scholar of English and [email protected]