kenneth harrow
professor emeritus
dept of english
michigan state university
517 803-8839
harrow@msu.edu
Sent: Tuesday, January 17, 2023 1:17 PM
To: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Subject: RE: USA Africa Dialogue Series - On the Indecisive Man and Menus
You are not alone, Moses. I still struggle with choosing what to eat at a North American restaurant despite the length of time I have lived here. I rarely go to restaurants, because of that "phobia", and whenever I do, I prefer to bravely enter that intimidating culinary space with my American-born daughter who is a mistress of the menu chart. I don't have that trepidation with beer---easy choice.
My tale of discomfort with the menu chart began at graduate school in Canada (1989) where I had a terrible experience trying to appear daring and cosmopolitan in my handling of the discourse of the North American restaurant. I had gone to Toronto with a couple of graduate students and the professor of one of our graduate seminars at Wilfrid Laurier University. I was a few months old in Ontario, Canada, and that was my first experience in Canada choosing something to eat at a restaurant.
I had heard about the menu discomforts in comic sketches on Osofo Dadzie, a popular soap opera on Ghana TV, in the early 1980s. I assumed they were humorous exaggerations for television. But on that fateful day in Toronto I confronted the reality. My fellow Canadian students had quickly made their food choices; the professor (the late George Urbaniak) too had made his. Here I was, an African child with a decision to make, and one that out of intellectual and racial pride I thought I needed to make quickly to justify to my fellow graduate (Canadian) students, and a European professor, that the university had not admitted a nincompoop incapable of deciding what to eat at a restaurant.
With some courage rooted in uncertainty, and misplaced self-confidence, I blurted out one menu on the chart as my preference. I had no clue the constituents of my choice but I thought I had to make one, and quickly too in order not to feel out of place. The waitress was even shocked, and so were the students and the professor from their facial expressions. They had ordered simple meals, but I had actually ordered a huge duck with a bunch of misbegotten carrots and strange beans. And the cost? Huge!
I also realized very quickly that in North America no one invites you to a restaurant and pays for you; you pay for your own meals. I was lucky that I had cashed my student stipend and had some Canadian dollars on me. I paid a huge price for the food and an unforgettable price for self-confidence and racial pride at a restaurant in my early months in Canada.
Edward Kissi
From: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com> On Behalf Of Moses Ebe Ochonu
Sent: Tuesday, January 17, 2023 9:52 AM
To: USAAfricaDialogue <USAAfricaDialogue@googlegroups.com>
Subject: USA Africa Dialogue Series - On the Indecisive Man and Menus
Getting away from the depressingly serious terrain of politics and political economy, here, on a lighthearted note, is my Facebook update from last night. It's a random, scattered, almost stream-of-consciousness reflection on menus, cuisines, and people of indecisive culinary disposition.
On the Indecisive Man and Menus
By Moses E. Ochonu
Some of us struggle with decision making, especially when it comes to what we eat.
When I first came to America, l loved going out to eat but I hated the first few minutes at a restaurant when the waiter would hand you the culinary encyclopedia they call the menu.
The worst is when the waiter returns to ask you if you've made your choice when you're still on the first page of a multi-page menu trying to make sense of what you're seeing. That's a lot of pressure.
I would be paralyzed with indecision. If American menus do not shock and intimidate you as a newly arrived immigrant in America, nothing in this country will.
No, you can't just ask them what they have and order something from a handful of meals they announce to you as we do in Nigeria. If you ask them what's available, you'd get referred back to the menu.
You can ask the waiter about things that catch your eye or words that are alien to your foreign ears, but you'd still make the decision by yourself.
You can ask the waiter if they'd recommend their favorite but expect him/her to out-Naija you and turn your request/question into a question: "what do you like" or "what do you typically eat"?
In my third decade in America, I can't say I've completely overcome my phobia for American menus. I've only shortened and simplified my decision making by narrowing the choice, regardless of the restaurant type, to a few staples. I just build out from or upon those staples.
Even when I visit Nigeria nowadays, the menus at some of the fancy places can be a bit overwhelming.
The only mitigating factor in Nigeria is that even in the most gentrified eateries, the menu is usually more of an artifact for show, a crude, annoying mimicry of the Western restaurant menu, than it is a functional guide to what's on offer. Usually, half of the items are unavailable. To some people, this is disappointing. To indecisive people like us it is a blessing, for it makes our decision making easier.
My indecision extends to the culinary experience itself and is not not just the typical inability to decide between choices on offer. Most times it is because I hate either-or propositions that require a clear, unequivocal choice between two or more options. Why can't I have them both? Why do I have to choose?
Thankfully, both here and in Nigeria, restaurants now have creative ways of accommodating our indecision. They're increasingly open to the mixing and matching that us indecisive people like to make.
When I go to a Thai, Indian, or Chinese restaurant, I ask them to add chicken to the seafood option and they usually oblige partly because the chicken costs extra and makes them more money. I like seafood but I also like chicken and often hate to choose one or the other.
I've been known to commit the sacrilege of asking if it would be possible to add meat to attractive vegetarian items on a menu.
Sometimes, sensing my indecision, a waiter might ask if I want both options or samples of multiple options, to which I would enthusiastically answer yes and secretly thank her/him for saving me from my misery of indecision.
I feel like Nigerian cuisine is more flexible and receptive to the plural tastes of indecisive people. If you can't decide between Okro soup and Ogbono, you can have Okro/Ogbono soup.
Many Nigerian restaurants offer "mix" soup options. There is a recipe for Ogbono-egusi soup—one of my personal favorites, especially if it is enriched with bitter leaf.
Can't decide between rice and beans? Well, why do you have to choose when you can have both rice and beans, a Nigerian staple, together?
Having trouble deciding between different animal proteins? Nigerian cuisine has you covered with "assorted."
In Nigerian cuisine, there's nothing wrong with mixing carbs or proteins. If you want yam and rice in one meal, they'll accommodate your request. Even when it comes to "swallow," you can request both semo and garri. No problem. As long as you're paying.
Nigeria is the indecisive eater's habitat. American culinary culture puts too much pressure on you to be decisive and shames you if you're not.
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