Food, glorious food!

The richness and variety of fresh, seasonal produce here is a pleasure! Almost everyone here has a "farm" - more an allotment size in towns - where they grow food for their family at least. A local told me you can't live in Cameroon if you don't have a farm!

Food is much tastier than in the UK - very little distance travelled, very little input of artificial fertilisers, much more free range and organic, and much fresher. Yes, food does go off quickly, but you buy food easily more often. Market and roadside vendors may only sell one type of fruit or vegetable at a time, but overall you can get a good varied diet if you cook for yourself.

Hey, I'm living in a country where they grow pineapple and coconut! This is so good, the pineapple juice runs down your chin, and I poured 2 full glasses of coconut milk out of one coconut (500 francs). Up in Santa just now I bought ripe avocado pears for 100 francs ( about 14p), loads of these in this area at the moment. Mangoes and pawpaws are just coming ripe. I had 3 mangoes here last week for 200, then I got about 8 big pawpaws (papaya) a bit further south for 100 yesterday, brilliant with fresh lemon (3 for 100 francs).

The market traders have different kinds of groundnuts, in shells, shelled or even ground for you ready to cook. Yams and cassava are not in season here yet, but you can buy them from other regions. Mushrooms have been coming in, strange types I've never seen before; I took a photo of the ones I bought just in case a doctor needed to know what we'd eaten. Great fried in olive oil with onions and garlic, as the lady advised me.

What I'm not buying is meat. Can you guess why? (hint - look at the photo of a typical butcher's.) They seem to sell a lot of tripe, tongue and basically every part of every animal. Fancy some chicken breast fillets? Forget it! Chicken is sold live, so unless you want to kill and pluck it yourself, (which I've done in the distant past but have no wish to do here), you pay someone to prepare it for you. Incidentally, women are not supposed to eat chicken gizzards, for some power reason these are kept for men only. Let them have gizzard if they want!

Takeaway food is not exactly Big Mac. You can get lots of stuff on the street. Some mornings I like to pick up a little sort of breadcrumbed fishy pasty (25 francs each), or maybe a scotch egg which is dough rather than sausage meat. They serve that with a dab of hot pepper sauce for 100. Puffball doughnuts are fried in hot oil over wood stoves, mostly in the afternoon, then people bring the leftovers around in the mornings in big plastic containers.

Barbecues are everywhere in the afternoon, grills over big logs with fish, mainly mackerel, delicious sold with pepper sauce for 700 francs. There is also meat and some massive cooked eels - I haven't been able to face these to try them. There are grills for whole plantain (long green banana type fruit) and corn cobs. Fried plantain is a great alternative to fried potatoes, and plantain crisps are a good snack food to help work meetings along!