Food Poisoning 1

The other day we noticed the chicken we just cooked was going bad.  It must have been at the store too long.  Do you throw something like that away?  Not us.   We sliced it thin and fried it.  My logic is that if you kill all the microbes, you won’t get sick .

We had no ill affects, and it reminded me of our old Congo river trip days.  We started out with a big pot of pondu to feed the crew.  Pondu is pulverized manioc leaves, dried fish and unrefined palm oil. It is eaten with the local manioc loaves called kwanga.  On the first travel day after a long boat trip it is in its prime.  At the village where you are camped you heat it up in the big pot you stored it in and scoop out what is needed for the day.  At the end of the second day you heat it up again, killing all the microbes.  I remember eating it for 3 days without ill affects, but it starts to get sour after that.

When someone tells us about getting sick on the potato salad at a picnic, I have to warn them about the subject they are introducing.  People in our line of work in general and me in particular can go on for an hour telling food poisoning story’s. 

Bad eggs made me as sick as I have ever been.  During one incident at Yaloke, I thought I was going to die.  I was running to the bathroom every 10 minutes for most of a day.  

Once in Cameroon I took the train from Ngoundere to Yaounde.  Because of misadventure (I never taken that trip without misadventure) we made the 10 hour trip in 22 hours, arriving in Yaounde at 8:30 pm.  I was hungry so I went to where the street vendors sold grilled fish and chicken.  The only vender still there had 3 mackerel on the grill.   Who knows how long they had been there, but I purchased them and brought them to the room where I was staying.  After the meal I went to bed.  A short time later I woke up, shaking violently.  My body decided that there was something bad in those fish.  They came back up and I directed them into the toilet.  After that I was fine.   

Dried bush meat looks like it would do you in, but I can’t remember ever having a problem with it.  When you see it at the market there is always a few beetle larva hanging on.

 I once brought a big basket full of dried wild pork home with me from a ministry trip into the forest.  The next morning we learned about the life cycle of the local species of maggot.  They all migrated out of the meat and we found them crawling across the living room floor.  That kind of meat you keep in the cook house high above the fire where it gets smoke and heat all day.  It wasn’t getting that during the 2 travel days home.  We put it where it would get smoke and heat.  When we prepared it for a meal, it was delicious, but we gave a lot of it to friends.

At Adventures in Suburbia we have high standards so I left out some details that might be considered crude.  I have plenty of stories left so someday there might be a post entitled “Food Poisoning 2”.