MILLIONS of us NIGERIANS are a wasteful lot. I said this much, though with my tongue in the cheek, in the column of October 6, 2022 titled: NO FOOD WASTE DAY: EAT PLANTAIN, BANANA PEELS!
This was in reference to plantain peel and banana peel which I said were more nutritious than the fruits they cover but which we throw away and animals gratefully eat. How much food waste we cause with this behaviour we may never know. I also mentioned in that column that if a few millions of us would not waste, for example, the seeds in a pawpaw fruit, and we could continually plant them, we would have billions of pawpaw fruits every year that, literally speaking, it may cost two fruits for a Kobo and we would never go hungry. That is why today’s column salutes MRS EVELYN OBIKU, of Cross River State, who does not throw away ideas she picks up in this column. I have been suggesting that we were not created to be ill or to be hungry or to be poor, and that we can grow some food in the flower beds of our homes and in our backyard gardens. Even when we think the grounds have been cemented, I have suggested we can grow all sorts of food crops in cement bags or empty rice sack. The idea is not mine. I picked it up from other people and only passed it on, as I have likewise done with the idea of growing medicinal herbs and fruits such as pawpaw (papaya), banana, plantain, water melon, pineapple, nettles, chanka piedra, marigold etc.
Mrs. Obiku sent the following message and photographs of her backyard garden to me in gratitude for the idea she picked from this column, and to motivate other readers to try it out.
Mrs. Obiku said: Good afternoon Mr. Kusa. For the new method of planting crops in bags I’m presently practising it. Let me show you…
ANOTHER WASTAGE…
Madam Esther Nmaegbunne Amaku (97 years)
Another area in which we waste ideas is this…when we hear that someone aged over 100 has passed, we only exclaim…WAOH!
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We do not try to find out much or anything about their dietary and other lifestyles. Last week, Mr. Mike Amaku, my brother in-law from Awka, announced from his offshore shell location the passing of his mother aged 97 years.
He said: “It’s with gratitude to God Almighty for a life well spent in health, I announce the passing unto glory of my beloved mother, Madam Esther Nmaegbunne Amaku (Okpuo) on October 6, 2022, at the age of 97. Until her demise, Mama was the oldest woman in my place Umuzocha Village, Awka.
Engr Mike Amaku”.
When I read it, I remembered my two uncles, Mr. Alphaeus Taiwo Olunaike (a.k.a Baba Alajo Shomolu), who respectively passed at 95 and 97. Udeme Edet James tells me of her paternal grandmother who died at 103. About 10 years ago, a woman in the housing estate where I lived made history when, at 51, she had her first baby. In the news this week, the record was beaten by a 57-year-old woman who has just contributed triplets to our planet of more than eight billion human inhabitants. What bothers me is that we hardly investigate their lifestyles to learn some lessons from them. Something I am sensing is common to many of them is that they eat fermented foods. Besides, they do not touch white sugar and do not “drag” anything with anyone. Before he passed, Mr. Olubanjo left word with his church that he wanted no funeral oration or eulogies at his funeral rites, that he wanted only his Creator to decide how he spent his gift of an earth life. His wife and his eldest child, a woman, joined him later. Two of his other children had gone before him before they were 25.
One of the young persons I mentor shocked me when he said his mother had 10 children, the second one when she was in the university. This woman became a school principal and carried herself with such candour you would never suspect 10 babies had come out of her. I was not surprised when this young man who told me his mother grew in their Ikoyi home garden in Lagos such things as pawpaw, banana, plantain, coconut etc and even had a fish pond to round it all up.
The upcoming generations are far from the outgoing generations, and they are the losers for it. They hate fermented food and love sugar. Yet, one of the latest nutrition facts now is that fermented cod liver oil is one of the healthiest food supplements for all sorts of diseases.
Once again, I wish to thank Mrs. Evelyn Obiku and Mr. Mike Amaku for inspiring the foregoing thoughts.