In my house leftovers entered the stage with me. The kids pretend they like them and my husband makes tremendous efforts to eat them because, sometimes, I don’t offer an alternative.
Leftover food is still kind of a tabou in this country. It’s mostly for the poor, especially for the boomers and Gen X. Many families do not have a fridge, it’s often simply a matter of habits and not means: meals are prepared for a generic amount of people, what is not eaten has two possible developments: it is kept for those in the family who come home later or it is donated to the poor or to the mosque.
We all agree that wasting food is no good, but it still upsets me to offer someone what remains of my meal, no matter how rich that is.
What I understood after years in Senegal though is that the receiver is pretty much always happy, eating from someone else’s plate is no big deal. That explains why, when eating from the communal bowl, when you are done you scrape even the tiniest bit of rice towards the center of the plate with your spoon. If someone gets hungry later, they will eat the mountain of food at the center, covered just by a kitchen rag.
Sometimes at home we bring the lunch leftovers to the construction workers at the end of the street and they always seem genuinely happy and not one bit embarrassed.
In my old neighborhood there were a couple of families that really struggled to put food on the table so sometimes we would cook more and pretend we had a ton of leftovers. I am not sure they ever believed the leftovers story but they certainly seemed happy to see my step son, who was then twelve year-old, coming through the door.
On Sundays we often spend the day at the beach, the one we usually go to is a hang out spot for Senegalese families where you can eat grilled fish with rice (and onion sauce, ça va sans dire…). At the end of the meal leftovers are always plentiful and my husband calls the kids playing on the beach and hands the plate out to them.
After all these years in Senegal I am still not over the emotional turmoil of seeing someone eat out of what I just left, especially when it’s hungry teenagers, but my husband always tells me that what I wrongly see as poverty hunger is actually teenage hunger. Those kids seem genuinely happy to snack on leftovers between a football match and a swim.
So I have learnt that uneaten food that is kept in the fridge in an airtight tupperware container is hardly edible but some rice that has been sitting on a plate at room temperature, covered with a piece of cloth is pretty yummy.