Potato Chips Cooked At Home

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Kids may love potato chips with the plantain flavor, BBQ or sour cream because they think it’s novel. It’s something unique, they can only get if parents drive to the supermarket to buy. They seldom realize that what is on the supermarket shelf is a replica of what was done in homes, before food was dried, salted and packaged into potato chip packages.

Every indigenous community in the world, has a way of preserving excess food. We had a good corn crop.  How do we preserve it for the winter? Hunters trapped a lot of animals. How do we dry the meat, after we’ve dried the skin for blankets, clothes and curtains? What is good about 2024, is practicality. Kids love potato chip flavours and guess what? They can make them at home. They visit the market with their parents, buy the plantain, slice it and cook it in butter. Kids will discover that it is more enjoyable that ‘plantain chips’ in a bag.

Before kids make their own plantain chips, they will ask questions about the family. Dad is plantain a banana, it looks like a banana? Parents tell kids what bananas are called in Alabama, Thailand, Uganda, Caribbean and Samoa. My friends from Uganda called it matoke. There might be religious and cultural rituals associated with what we know as banana.

What we have now is kids at home, frying the plantain and getting global geographical and cultural knowledge about plantain, they got at the store for 0.97 cents a pound. It’s more fulfilling that grabbing a large size of plantain potato chips and munching away ignorantly.

Nonqaba waka Msimang

Blogger without Borders

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