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| These fish come from both the Indian Ocean and the rivers around Fort Dauphin. |
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By Eric H. Campbell
Over the past decade or so, Americans have become increasingly aware of just how their food is made. Huge, unseen amounts of effort and technology go into just about whatever food you care to name. But in Madagascar, where farming has yet to be put on a conveyor belt, the story is very different.
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| These green balls are formed from mashed cassava greens. |
The food market in Fort Dauphin’s Tanambao neighborhood is an excellent place to discover the paths food takes through southern Madagascar. The word “Tanambao” means roughly, “the entrance to the town.” Many towns in Madagascar have a neighborhood called Tanambao, located on the main road where traffic first arrives.
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| A woman picks through onions while minding her daughter. |
In the tin-roofed pavilions facing the road women sell vegetables: cucumbers, peppers, tomatoes, onions, garlic. April is the season for fresh chickpeas, which can be found alongside many other types of beans. Some of this produce comes from the villages around Fort Dauphin, but it also arrives by the truckload from Ambovombe.
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| These eggs usually sell for 500 Ar (25¢ US) each. That sum borders on the extravagant for many Malagasy buyers. |
A little deeper into the market, the food becomes more varied. Ninaka, a man of about 35, sells Bourbonnais eggs. These eggs are larger and more costly than normal hen eggs in Madagascar. I asked him if he and his family ever eat the eggs.
“What kind of egg-seller would I be if I wasted them on myself?” he chuckled. “No, no, they’re too expensive for me to eat.”
Instead of being a chicken farmer, Ninaka is a middleman. The eggs come from Antananarivo, three days’ travel by road. As the area around the capital is significantly more developed, it is possible that a relatively modern facility supplies the eggs.
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| Saban helps a doctor from Fort Dauphin's CHD hospital choose a cut of mutton. |
Saban, 40, cuts apart pieces of sheep and goat meat from Amboasary. He wears a distinctive cap and beard, showing that he is Muslim. Naturally, his meat is halal.
Other butchers ply their trade in a large concrete shell of a building. It’s dim; there are fluorescent lights on the ceiling, but there might as well not be. The butchers work at long counters, each with a balance and a set of iron weights. They cleave pieces of meat apart on much-used wooden chopping blocks, slice the fat from it, and arrange the chunks for the customer’s selection.
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| A butcher sorts chunks of beef by size. |
“The beef all comes from Tsiombe,” one of them told me. “The pork comes from Ambovombe, but Tsiombe has the best beef.” Tsiombe is on the far side of Androy from Fort Dauphin, at least a day and a half by road.
There’s also an area for fruit-sellers. They arrange their bananas in rows, their oranges and coconuts in pyramids.
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| An old lady sells oranges in the fruit market. |
“These lemons are from Manambaro,” a girl offered.
“What?” I asked. “I live in Manambaro, we don’t have any lemons.”
“No, not the town of Manambaro, the little villages around there,” she replied.
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| Senjy, 29, oversees her stocks of rice, beans, and chickpeas. |
It turns out that although the market’s food is free of hormones and preservatives, it’s not as local as it might appear. Rice, the supreme Malagasy staple, may be the best example of this trend. Every year Madagascar buys large amounts of rice from Pakistan. Just another way in which life on this island is rarely as simple as it appears.
