Many thanks for this. Interesting on the difference between the sexes as well as on bitterness. On general grounds I am sure that he is right that cuisines in Africa have changed mightily. The more I read, the more I become convinced that most of the cuisines around today are of very recent invention, the last couple of hundred years, say. Often they incorporate dishes that are much older, of course, but the complex itself is new.

Second, I’ve just finished reading a fascinating article on African cuisine written by one of Africa’s little-known but key french scholars of the mid-20th.C, Jean-Pierre Chretien. In it, there are some relevant remarks on local beer, and I quote them here: [the work was translated from French and published in 1988 in Diogenes. It deserves to be more widely known, because Dr. Chretien broadly debunks a great deal of what was - and continues to be - thought to be 'traditional' [unchanging] aspects of cuisine in Africa - including ‘beers’. Thearticle is available through SAGE on the web.

I especially appreciate his contextualizing of foods and drinks vis-a-vis social contexts, gender, etc.

Side note: Chretien’s remarks on ‘bitter tastes’ might be of interest to some of you; in another place, he points out that the word for ‘bitter’ and for ’sweet’ is the same in the language here of kirundi. He suggests this is because sugar was quite recently introduced and was categorized as a ‘bitter’ taste [i.e., something that adds piquant - as does salt/bitter taste].
==========>
The Historical Dimension of Alimentary Practices in Africa
Jean-Pierre Chretien

… Previously (and this can also no doubt be found in the history of European cuisines) good flavoring seems to have been based on bitterness, on combinations of bitter
vegetables, slightly rancid butter or dried meats, for example. This is the case in Burundi where one of the dishes enjoyed at family festivities, birunge, combined butter and vegetable such as colocasia leaves or a bitter spinach called isogi (Gynandropsis pentaphylla).

Today it is often said that there was no cuisine in this region of Africa, only boiled food. Tastes have simply changed and new recipes have come from the Indian Ocean coast, from Zaire or from Europe. The comparison with the manner in which beers were appreciated, especially sorghum beer, is also enlightening. To pay respect to a dignitary, a quality beer called umubaya was offered, marked by this bitter taste. The old man who told us this in northern Burundi in August 1981 compared it to the salt water enjoyed by cows, the very picture of happiness!

… “Relationship” is expressed at least as much in this common consumption [of sorghum beer] as in genealogies that only partially account for relationships that go beyond genealogy. In this respect it is useful to distinguish between food strictly speaking and drink. The latter is generally linked to expanded sociability, to groups of young people, to political receptions, to religious ceremonies, to the leisure time of hunters or village laborers. Elsewhere we have analyzed the duality of the ‘pitcher of beer’and the ‘pot of beans’ in ancient Burundi. On the one hand is a group of men, including an entire hillside neighborhood, sitting aroung pitchers set in the forecourt of the enclosure or at the entrance to the house, and drinking which facilitates speaking and decision making; on the other is the sociability controlled by women at the family level, around the hearth, in the most intimate room away from curious eyes. Even at the level of production (essentially sorghum and bananas for one sex, beans, sweet potatoes and corm for the other), a parallel duality can be found in the distribution of tasks and in taboos. It is not possible to describe the nutritional and gustatory qualities of these different products apart from the context that defines ‘good living’.

… Some foods (bread) and drinks (industrial beer or wine, in addition to other alcoholic beverages) are more ‘prestigious’than others, stamped with the mark of modernity, just as formerly a grain or a tuber could symbolize the solidarity of a community, with the
difference that these social inequalities are today creating a greater degree of separation in diets. A comparison of the nutritional qualities of older beers made of millet or sorghum with modem brewery beers would also be helpful for appreciating the distortions that have developed between ‘progress’and improvement…

Source: The Historical Dimension of Alimentary Practices in Africa, by Jean-Pierre Chretien

You might find them interesting Adam. And another stunning resource that compares Middle Eastern and Asian methods of fermentation is Huang’s volume in the Joseph Needham series on Science and Civilization in China. http://www.amazon.com/Science-Civilisation-China-Biological-Fermentations/dp/0521652707/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1212523847&sr=8-1Huang was a biochemist/food scientist and this is a tour de force. It costs an arm and a leg so you may want to look at it in a library.

And that may be linked to what you point out as the current tendancy to always compare ‘ancient’ beers with modern - rather than also with a variety of fermented drinks found in Africa and elsewhere. I.e., interpreting all beers as ‘real beers’ [if that makes sense]….

In any case, I was thinking abut this, while reading an article that was written about 50 years ago on pre-colonial and the [then] current features of Burundi and Rwandan societies. The article contained some very interesting observations on the role of sorghum beer in political and cultural contexts - and these sorghum beers are often a meal as well as a drink.

I have collected a series of pictures of [mainly] beer-drinking that is of these kinds of drinks; they are - traditionally - very social and much more nutritious than today’ beers.

Forgot to say the chewy drink in Nepal and Tibet is called chang but the Himalayan chang is not at all like the “chang” you find in Thailand, which is recognizable as beer