Food in Botswana

In some respects, food here is not too different from Namibia. The staple is the same pap – from maize or sorghum (more likely millet in Namibia) - eaten for dinner with meat, a sauce and some greens, or for breakfast with curdled milk (yogurt) and sugar. Seswaa, the shredded beef, seems to be a Botswana specialty. Otherwise, rice and noodles and coleslaw are popular here for meals as in Namibia. Butternut squash and pumpkin are very popular here and to be found everywhere. I have not really seen potato salad which is more popular in Namibia. Beef is very cheap, as you might expect in a country in which there are as many cattle as there are people, about two million of each. Dinners are easy as they have great sauces at the grocery store, for example from Nandos, one of the local chain restaurants. So one can simply make rice or pasta, beef or chicken and add some sauce. They also have frozen somosas and frozen spring rolls which the kids like. All the same vegetables are here; we have had baby zucchinis which are quite nice, yellow and red peppers, green beans. One can make nice salads. The fruit (and juice) selections are much nicer here than at home: lots of mangos, apples, oranges, papayas, litchis, granadilla, pomegranate, bananas, you name it. For snacks all kinds of chips and not such a wide range of really sweet and decadent cookies. Dried fruit is big and we have been eating a lot of that, especially dried mango, peach and apricot. Bread is baked fresh daily even at the grocery store as are rolls and all kinds of other baked goods. In most stores they sell the loaves whole and you run them through the slicing machine as you leave the store.

For breakfast Kuno eats the same thing as at home: peanut butter and nutella sandwich, nutella being something that we had discovered on our 2002 sabbatical in Namibia. Mave will have a muffin with yogurt, or some cereal or toast with salami. I like to have a rusk, another southern African treat, with my second cup of coffee. The kids both pack a snack for the 10:30 break at school: juice boxes, apples, chips, dried fruit, yogurt, something along those lines. Three days a week when they have activities they buy lunch at school. On Thursday they like to buy a sausage or ‘wurst’ from a woman who has a stand (and gas heated grill) in the Choppies parking lot. It is on a roll with whatever sauces they choose, for all of a dollar (7.5 pula) each. On Saturday Kuno bought a mango, also from the parking lot. Mangos, watermelons, corn, tomatoes and more are all sold from large piles (on tables) on the side of the road. The mangos did look very inviting. And the vendor had a large (coke) bottle full of water with a small hole in the top which she used to wash individual mangos as people bought them so that they could be eaten in typical fashion – and as Kuno did. That is, biting into the whole mango, and eating the flesh straight from the mango, pulling off bits of skin as needed. Kuno declared it the best mango he had ever had. It is a bit messy, but I think with practice, one can overcome that.

Cakes are also big here, as in Namibia. The kids like to end the week at a place like Equatorial Coffee at Riverwalk where we get a pot of tea and some cake: orange, carrot, chocolate, whatever. There are many little coffee shops and tea houses to try. As for restaurants, there is also a range. We like Chatters since it serves seswaa; early on while Moses was still here we went with a group to a great Indian restaurant called Moghul. There are many Chinese restaurants, just as there are Chinese shops. There is lots of fast food – Bimbo's, Wimpy’s. There is Nandos for great chicken and chips which we know from Namibia as well as. Pizza places abound with Debonairs being quite popular. I have heard of some other good places, we just have not tried them yet. Our biggest challenge has been finding low fat milk. The only place to find fresh low fat milk is at Woolworths (clearly this is not the Woolworths of the USA), but Kuno did not like it. In the end we are drinking the low fat longlife milk which is just fine so long as it is pretty cold. We are very lucky to be able to drink the tap water in Gaborone; it is very tasty, again especially when cold. They are very closely monitoring it for any signs of cholera creeping over from Zimbabwe.