In the olden days, according to Mrs. Patience Bortey a Nutritionist at Nungua, mothers taught their children how to cook indigenous food but “today’s mothers are nurturing their children on junk food”.
Mrs. Bortey who is also a caterer said children were introduced to the art of cooking at tender ages, you must learn the fundamentals of the preparation of various local dishes quickly.
As part of the practical training, children were not given money to buy food at school: “In the morning you cook and eat some, then in the afternoon after school, you cook lunch and later in the evening join your mother to prepare supper”.
“Sometimes the boys are not even left out of the domestic food preparation process,” Mrs. Bortey, told the Ghana News Agency in an interview at Nungua on Tuesday.
Mrs. Bortey explained that as part of the basics in food preparation, women were coached to prepare the food with some level of reasonable delays to whip-up the appetite of the household, “so that as soon as the food lands of the table, it is consumed with some degree of speed especially from the men and boys”.
She said, “It is not about more fish that give the traditional food aroma or flavor, but the use of local spices like dawadawa, mormoi, more onions, ginger, garlic among others not artificial spices”.
She said, ‘we were taught how to cook not using Maggi or foreign spices whilst children of today like using all sorts of foreign spices, we were taught how to preserve all perishable products like tomatoes, garden eggs, we space them out on the floor, as for the pepper, we cooked it and dried it in the sun.”
Mrs. Bortey said “we were also taught how to preserve cassava as well and not throw it away when not in use, converting it into cassava dough, gari among others.
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