Somewhere amid my thoughts about the uncertainty of tomorrow, someone’s daughter called me and asked me about what I had eaten.
She always asks about these things and I know it’s a sign of love. She’s always worried about my eating habits because honestly, they’re bad. I survive on a bachelor’s diet and it’s bad.
I want to stop but the truth is food has never been a priority. As I write this I am in the middle of cooking fries and the day before that I had a three days takeout after a saleswoman convinced me to not only get chicken and fries but also add two pizzas since there was a BOGOF offer. I’ll cook better tomorrow, I hope.
This reminds me of an interesting conversation I had with a friend of mine, Alex Ikawah, about gender and diet.
I got lost somewhere midway when he started talking about feminism, food, and diet. I looked it up last week and it had interesting reads if you looked past the 10,000 academic papers.
Are academic papers made as digital paper to light fires when the internet is out? I don’t understand how you can work that hard to make your writing unreadable.
MASCULINITY
The research made a lot of sense about how we men chose to nourish ourselves. Small things like the fact that we men, myself included, would scoff at the idea of a vegetarian diet.
If you want to kill me just shoot me, but don’t force me to live like a rabbit. Or the fact that meat has been tied to masculinity.
That’s why you chose some nyama choma and cold tusker and not milk and cookies or cabbage and a smoothie. See how odd that sounded even though you were just reading it?
Meat has been made to seem like a manly thing even though it causes increased risks of cancer, weight gain, kidney problems, and cardiovascular diseases. But it’s not a battle against meat but so many more other things.
When a man starts looking healthier and gaining weight we all remark that there is a woman behind him doing a good job.
We know so because he’s stopped eating an alternate diet of noodles and mutura from Njuguna’s as a meal.
HEALTH HAZARDS
I’m now finishing this article drinking a beer and munching on eggs. So ironical! What sort of life is this that we live as men?
This is the reason why we’re asking women ‘utanipikia lini (when will you cook for me)?’ We’re living like we’re auditioning to be walking adverts for malnutrition.
It also does explain why women constantly complain about the taste of our protein. That’s how you end up tasting like battery acid and expired milk at the same time.
It also explains why men end up admitted to the hospital more than women and why the flu makes us feel like we’re dying and need to write our wills.
There’s nothing unmanly about eating well and I need to remind myself that a lot. My well-refined minimalist spice rack of salt and black pepper needs to do a bit better.