Ants trump Maggi

En route to work today, I finally counted how many times I saw the phrase "Avec Maggi, CHAQUE Femme est une Etoile"/"With Maggi, EVERY Woman's a Star." Seven times I saw this catchy line: on small billboards, on the sides of buildings, stamped on canopies at corner shops, even on the back of motorized carts.

photo cred to camettoineduboutdumonde.toinegraphiste.fr

Now I don't normally consider myself a feminist, but this particular message really irks me. Maggi is, for all intents and purposes, a bouillon cube.

More than that, it's a bouillon cube owned by the Nestle Company! They have some serious experience in advertisment (I would know, Homer Simpson got me every time with those old Butterfinger commercials), and are more than aware of the rigid gender roles they are helping to reinforce in Mali: women staying at home to cook...and clean, and make babies. This would be fine by me if other professional options were equally available to women of all classes here -- but they're not.

To pour chicken flavored salt into the open wound, at a recent national nutrition forum held here in Bamako, there were many complaints from NGO representatives that the cube's sodium content was too high. Research was suggesting that these Maggi cubes were contributing to the hypertension and obesity issues developing in West Africa.

When then asked to describe the ingredients, the Nestle rep said she was not at liberty to give away their "trade" secrets. Isn't that illegal in the states?

Maybe I'm a jaded Westerner viewing this Western company's continued abuse of a fragile developing country, but maybe not. My feelings haven't stopped me from ingesting the stuff -- and liking it! At most restaurants where I've eaten, I've seen that now all too familiar sexist phrase along the walls, and yet still managed to enjoy a Maggi-spiced "sauce de feuilles"/"leaf sauce" or "sauce d'arrachides"/"peanut sauce" (OK, OK so I'm not the best vegetarian, eating chicken-based spices and all). It's like MSG at your favorite Chinese restaurants; you know what you're getting into without knowing what you're getting...which really can be said for a lot I've eaten around here.

At the tailor's house, getting yet another Malian outfit made, I was offered "une chenille frite," a deep-fried caterpillar. Without giving myself too much time to think about it, I popped it into my mouth in a gesture to savor every cultural experience I could. This woman had a huge pan filled with the black creatures, so I figured they had to be somewhat tasty. I was wrong; not much to savor there.

photo cred to blog.hotelclub.com

I also eat a lot of "fourmis" daily: ants. Not by any fault of Claudia (my boss whose house I'm living in), her family, or her cooking or cleaning staff, but merely as a function of the rain and the house structure, her kitchen is an ant party. They march in lines along the walls, climb down the sides of the refrigerator, and swarm at any morsels or tiniest drops of juice splattered on the countertop. They sneak in through the cracks of the door and windows, and no amount of cleaning or antspray seems to keep them out.

One day I didn't close the bag within the cereal box tightly enough. The next day I saw a trail of my friends the ants filing into a corner of the cardboard. I'm sure I've been eating the results of that invasion regularly for breakfast.

Another time, I left my CLOSED homemade "beurre d'arachide"/peanut butter jar on the counter. The tiny things were able to squeeze through the edges, and their poor, trapped bodies were found on the surface of this precious commodity that had been given to me by a friend. No use in letting it go to waste -- I just mixed the ants in and consumed.

I've grown accustomed to a daily bug intake, even without knowing what kind of nutritional component they add or detract from my life. Similarly, no one really knows the nutritional makeup of Maggi.

However, I'd rather not get as complacent with my Maggi cube consumption. Ants don't know what they're doing to women like me; Nestle does.