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Food and Drink

Horn of plenty vs. horn of Africa

We crossed the line, some say at the millennial year, others say shortly thereafter. We crossed several lines then, but the one I'm thinking of bears a dark irony about equality, and inequality.

Around the year 2000, the number of obese, over-nourished people on Earth equaled the number of those who are starving and malnourished: about 1 billion each. Or, roughly, one out of six people were on one side of the scales or the other.

Today, the number of obese, over-nourished people on Earth exceeds the number of hungry.

The current famine in Somalia set against this backdrop made me think of two horns of a dilemma - the horn of plenty vs. the Horn of Africa.

The Horn of Africa is that extreme northeastern part of the African continent that sticks out into the Indian Ocean like a rhinoceros horn. It contains Somalia, Ethiopia, Djibouti and Eritrea, but it's Somalia that's most prominent - the part of the "horn" that juts out most into the ocean, and into our consciousness.

Who hasn't seen headlines about Somalia? Poor Somalia, arid and barren for the most part, with a harsh, hot, dry climate seeing changing monsoon patterns and ever little rainfall with climate change, and ever more unrest.

The Somali drought in 2010, when no rainfall for two years on the eastern edge of the Horn meant 80 per cent of local cattle died, a disaster in a herding, pastoral culture.

Somali civil war. Turmoil, factional fighting and anarchy have been part of daily life since the early 1990s when the despotic regime of Mohamed Siad Barre collapsed. After Afghanistan, the most dangerous place on earth, sings that brilliant and wise Somali-Canadian rapper/poet, K'naan.

Somali pirates terrorizing some ship or other off the coast of the Horn.

And now millions of Somalis on the verge of starving to death.

No surprise. Aid agencies saw it coming, and yet the world's been slow to respond, especially those of us who lap up life from the horn of plenty.

Ah, yes, the horn of plenty. Cornucopia. That horn-shaped basket, most familiar to Canadians as a symbol of Thanksgiving, from which delightful bounty harvested from the fair earth tumbles. A gala food and wine festival at Whistler named for same.

The horn of plenty, writes Edith Hamilton in her classic book, Mythology: Timeless Tales of Gods and Heroes , is based on the Greek myth of Amalthea. By one myth, Amalthea was a goat on whose milk Zeus was fed as an infant boy; by another tale she was a nymph who owned the goat. Regardless, she had a horn that was "always full of whatever food or drink anyone wanted."

In Latin, it was a Cornu copiae , the horn that Hercules broke off from the river-god, Achelous, who had taken on the form of a bull to fight him. It, too, was always magically full of fruits and flowers, but whether in Greek mythology or Latin, it sounds like your average Canadian grocery store to me.

Given the recent images from the Somali famine, of rows of white aid tents set up in refugee camps, one camp so huge it can be seen from space; of lethargic babies with discoloured hair and distended bellies, symptoms of starvation, and mothers too weak to brush flies from their faces; of desiccated cattle, collapsed on the desert floor, it's really difficult for those of us lucky to be surrounded by such peace and plenty to imagine how people in this beleaguered part of the Horn might live when circumstances allow for normal lives.

I was curious, for one, about what Somalis eat when not gathering bowls of powdered rations from the aid stations slowly being set up.

Most sources on food in Africa's Horn focus on Ethiopia, but I was able to glean this from Thelma Barer-Stein's excellent book, You Eat What You Are .

Somali foods are based on dairy products, sheep, goat and grains such as rice, sorghum, barley and maize. Some vegetables such as squash, sweet potatoes, and varieties of beans round out meals, as do groundnuts (the African word for peanuts), sesame seeds, bananas and sugar cane when available. You can also find injera in Somalia, that big, round spongy bread common in Ethiopia.

More food for thought: In 1999, the world crossed the threshold of 6 billion people. It took just 12 years to add the most recent billion people - the shortest time in world history for a billion more people to be added to Planet Earth. World population did not reach 1 billion until 1804. It took 123 years to reach 2 billion in 1927, and only 33 years to reach 3 billion in 1960.

We are currently hovering at the 7-billion mark, and UN projections are for 40 per cent more people on Earth within the next 30 to 40 years.

I'm the eternal optimist who's glass is always half full, but given humanity is currently pumping out some 90 million tons of climate-changing carbon every day into our already fragile atmosphere - that's before another 40 per cent more people, before ever more growth in middle classes in developing countries who want ever more fossil-fuel burning cars and electrical gadgets - it doesn't take much to imagine what kinds of future human disasters, unrest and upheaval we will soon be facing as imbalances totter blindly towards the ever less equal.

Aside from more political engagement on the part of every person with common sense, the best we can do for now is reach into our collective horns of plenty and redistribute some local wealth.

In Canada, five major aid organizations have joined together to help out in the Horn: Care, Oxfam Canada, Oxfam Quebec, Plan and Save the Children (call 1-800-464-9154 to donate).

One of my personal favourites for distributing aid quickly and effectively is the International Development and Relief Foundation (contact 1-866-497-IDRF [4373]; text "AFRICA" to 20222 to donate $5 to IDRF's East Africa Drought Relief Fund).

Finally, I can't sign off this week without a word, however small, about the tragic death of Jack Layton.

Jack was a tremendous humanist and egalitarian who clearly saw "The Big Picture" and showed much-needed leadership regarding areas of concern to anyone with a conscience, including climate change (his Climate Change Accountability Act, for one).

No matter what your political stripes, you need no further inspiration to be accountable for starving Somalis, or anyone in time of need, than to ponder what Jack would have done.

 

 

Glenda Bartosh is an award-winning freelance writer who urges you to get involved.