On our travels we have met several (admittedly, slightly crazy) people overlanding by motorbike or bicycle, for whom eating well takes real planning, effort and imagination.  But provided you have space in your vehicle for a reliable fridge, which most overlanders now have (for our thoughts on choosing a fridge, see Kitchen Kit – Refrigeration), eating well on the road in Africa is no longer a major challenge. It can be a bit of a challenge in some places if you want to maintain a ‘western style’ diet (and this is always expensive), but with a bit of imagination you don’t need to miss out on all the ‘luxuries’ of a western diet if you don’t want to. The ‘culinary supply chain’ just needs a bit of forethought and stocking-up on stuff when you see it for overland food Africa.

Meat

For carnivores, the quality of meat and the standard of butchers deteriorates rapidly the further north you go beyond Zimbabwe.  Beef steaks can be often found in various guises and prices, but even the ‘best’ is usually better used as replacement shoe-soles than eaten.  Pork is not eaten much or widely available. Chicken is widely available provided that either: (a) a stew of chicken necks and feet is to your taste; or (b) you aren’t bothered by having to kill, pluck, gut and butcher the bird yourself.

We found that the safest bet for meat is minced beef. ‘Think creative’ is the mission here.  And remember the ‘shrimp scene’ from the movie Forrest Gump:  “You can barbecue it, boil it, broil it, bake it, saute it, shrimp-kabobs, shrimp creole, shrimp gumbo. Pan fried, deep fried, stir-fried. There’s pineapple shrimp, lemon shrimp, coconut shrimp, pepper shrimp, shrimp soup, shrimp stew, shrimp salad, shrimp and potatoes, shrimp burger, shrimp sandwich. That’s about it. …” 🙂

Dairy

We like lots of dairy in our diet, which is difficult to maintain on the road in Africa.  I don’t mind a bit of easy food-prep, but I’m no home-grown organic cheese-maker.  Here’s what I found with dairy foods in practice:

• Milk – no problem. Provided you don’t mind the long-life stuff, cartons are available in most medium size towns. Stock-up when you can (but at a price).
• Cheese – I couldn’t find a reasonable solution to this one. It is very rarely available, and where it is available, it is usually some hideous processed concoction bearing little or no resemblance to anything that a European shopper would recognise as ‘cheese’. Despite scouring books and the internet I found no feasible solution to making cheese on the road. We therefore resorted to buying it whenever we found it (north of Zim, only in capital cities) and freezing it where possible.
• Yoghurt – difficult to find any ‘proper’ unsweetened, natural yoghurt, but I found an incredibly easy solution to make my own with no more effort than making a cup of tea or coffee (see Yoghurt).
• Eggs – (are these technically ‘dairy’? I’m never sure) fairly widely available in small shops and market stalls. But the sellers tend to keep the eggs outside in the glare of full sun and you don’t know how long they have been there. They are expensive and bought only as a special treat by local people, so turn-over of the stall-holders is low. Many that we bought were obviously bad when cracked open, so don’t rely on them too much. And always crack them individually to check they are good before adding them into anything.

Bread

We like brown/granary/wholemeal bread where possible. But any bread is hard to find, and when found it usually has a texture of slightly sweetened cotton wool.  We bought lots of crackers as a (poor) emergency substitute and baked some bread occasionally.  Flour is widely available, so if you are really keen (and have brought a stock of yeast with you) you can make your own ‘proper’ bread.  Unfortunately I can’t really be bothered with all that kneading, proving waiting, kneading, proving (how many times???) stuff.  I prefer the cheating, super-speedy no-yeast varieties (see Flat-breads). They don’t keep too well, but good if fresh out of the pan.

Update 2022: much later in our travels when we had moved on to Mexico, we discovered how easy it is to travel with sourdough. This makes great bread, but even better is the super-easy, super-quick, super-fluffy sourdough flatbreads and flour tortillas – click here for sourdough discard recipes.

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