An Army Marches On Its Stomach

As I write this, it is one in the afternoon and we are just coming back from our lunch break after having recorded 2 more shows this morning.

In years past, the quality of the food has been one of the biggest complaints of the American staff working here in Uganda. It's not just that the food has been different from that to which we are accustomed (which it has,) but that sometimes the food has made us physically ill.

In the most memorable example from the first year, the caterers prepared finger sandwiches for afternoon tea, which the crew descended upon with gusto. Unfortuately, the warm mayonnaise dressing did not fare well in the 95 degree heat there and we ended up losing almost 20 percent of our crew the next few days to food poisoning, some of them even needing hospitalization.

Last year in season 2 every meal was a buffet of indistinguishable hunks of meat simmered in some saucy stew served with rice, usually chicken or goat. While goat is a delicacy here in east Africa, usually reserved for feasts, it did not appeal to our American crew day after day, especially as it appeared to have been butchered by a blind man with a meat cleaver; Bones hacked in half, weird joints in the middle of a hunk of meat, gristle and sinew in every bite, it became the joke of the event, "Try the goat!"

In this, our third season, we would be spending a week longer here to tape double the number of shows as previous seasons and Mary and her staff realized that morale would be an issue, so they devoted considerable effort to the menus that the hotel would be serving. Mary already works 27 hours a day on this project, and indeed, moved from California to Kenya this year to make even better use of her limited time, so for her to spend hours on the crew menu shows that it had some importance to her.

She and her staff came with cookbooks and their own recipes from home and together taught the Ugandan kitchen Chef to make chili, tacos, jerk chicken and Philly cheese-steak. They have arranged a nice variety of themed meals to break up the monotony, and provided comfort foods to help us better manage the incredible stress that comes with this production. Yesterday at lunch we even had some honest-to-goodness chocolate ice cream.

It has definitely made a difference this year for most of us, and had made this sometimes hellish experience less unpleasant. Having said this, I've just this moment been informed that tonight's menu includes goat. Seriously. Oh, well.