I ran out of cooking in the village yesterday, so wandered down to the local 'golosale' (grocery) and brought myself a 10c bag of oil- like everyone elses.
That evening I pulled it out to cook with and it had changed from a golden oil consistency to a pale butter-yellow textured consistency.
Now it also happened that I had two young men visiting me at the time- one from Zimbabwe who doesn't speak Ciyawo and one who wants to learn English- both of whom were eating into my precious Ciyawo learning/speaking opportunities with frivolousness about my MP3 player that they were covoutesly making playlists on ... Anyways- I held up the oil and asked what the heck was going on and one of them said 'oh- that's transmission oil' as if it was the most normal thing in the world and continued to flip through Alicia Keys songs which reminded me that I really needed to cleanse my player of her music at the nearest opportunity. A discussion ensued about whether it might be sunflower or peanut oil- but they both agreed that vegetable oil doesn't change colour like that so 'yeah- it's transmission oil- they buy it cheap from Mozambique'. Back to Alicia Keys. Granted she probably does hold more appeal to red blooded males than my cooking oil.
Needless to say I didn't find this explantion very satisfactory. I've heard that the power problems are often due to people draining the oil form transmission boxes for cooking but I didn't think it happened on a massive scale- i mean- this cooking oil is sold EVERYWHERE.
Having to choose between dinner cooked without oil or with oil (even if it was transmission oil) I chose the transmission oil and decided to ask my language helper about it the next day.
'Do they sell transmission oil for cooking?' I asked - ever so tactfully. 'yeah' she replied. 'Isn't that petroleum based - like- really bad for you to eat? Isn't it like cooking with vaseline?' she thought about it for a while 'they sell that one cheap for the poor people- I think you should buy your oil from the supermarket'.
'ok'
Does someone out there in blog land know what kind of oil is used in electical transmission boxes? Surely it would taste bed?! Is there a correlation, by any chance, between this and malawi's horrifically low life expectancy? I'd love to know what's going on.
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2 comments:
This problem is sooo 'cool' that I can't even find any similiar one in Google. As in, I tried to find out the health effect for this.
In term of oil in electrical boxes, they are a 'super clean oil', but still not sure the effect for health :(
The idea is that crazy that no one (in the web) thought about it 'yet'. Hmmm.... interisting.
But hey, may be not that bad since everyone is doing it???
Hey- thanks for looking! maybe it's not that bad...or maybe that's part of the reason there are so many sick and dying people here. I asked another local friend about it this morning and she said 'you eat that one- then you get TB- then you die'. they're certainly got an explanantion for the health effects! the problem is- you can't tell the difference between the transformer oil and vegetable oil- so unless you have enough money to buy a sealed bottle with a label (starting from $3)you're at the mercy of your oil seller. sucks huh?!
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