A Gourmet's Guide to the Congo

As I've written before, The Democratic Republic of the Congo is a country essentially without an infrastructure. The Medecins Sans Frontieres teams I visited have for the most part built the infrastructure that supports them, including building kitchens, hiring cooks, and to some extent training (with mixed success, from what I could see) those cooks to prepare dishes that the organization's international workers would like to eat (in addition to the Congolese dishes the cooks already know how to prepare).

In these photographs you can see the kitchen in the MSF residential compound in Nyanzale, a goat that made lunch and dinner (and more, probably, but I had to leave) one day in Gety, and the talented salad maker Gaspard, slicing fresh avocado for his lunch in Kabizo. The logisticians buy what fresh vegetables and meat (chicken, goat, fish) they can locally, and some things are imported, mostly by the workers themselves.

Best things I ate: fresh avocados, roasted potatoes, spicy little meatballs and ratatouille in Bunia, Jose's homegrown lettuce in Nyanzale.

To wash it down there's purified water (when it's been purified; otherwise, it's best to go thirsty), Coke (wherever you go on this earth, no matter how little there is of anything else, there's always Coke), local beer of varying qualities (Primus the worst, but most widely available), and box South African wine (stay away from the white, is my recommendation; the red is passable).