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It’s the Christmas season, and if you grew up in an African household, you know that this is the season your mother warns you about taking food from random neighbours who look weird and move shady. As you may have already known, your neighbour’s Christmas rice slaps harder than the one you people cooked at home.
Before I give you tips on how to avoid eating poisoned food this Christmas, I’ll share a personal story.
My aunt, who I lived with at the time, was ill and had been hospitalised. She left at home a husband, kids, and the rest of us who were not exactly culinary professionals yet. So we had to settle for a concoction like broke university students.
Our neighbour, Mama Iyabo, out of the goodness of her heart, brought food in a large food flask for us. When my aunt got wind of this gesture, she called home and warned us seriously about eating that food since she was suspicious of Mama Iyabo’s gesture.
I perfectly understood my aunt. Mama Iyabo moved weird sometimes, and she had the ugliest cat you’d ever seen. There’s something about people who own ugly cats. So we agreed—even before opening the content of the food flask—that we were going to toss the food into the waste bin.
However, when we opened the food flask, we were astounded by the sheer magic of what we saw. Fried rice (fried to crisp, grains independently sorted as real fried rice should be).
Then, IF YOU SEE MEAT EEEEVVVEEERYWIAAA! HAY GOD!
Ordinary aroma that I perceived, son of Zion have salivated everywhere. We looked at the food, and the food looked back at us. I looked at my cousins, and they looked at me. We were silent for a minute, and then I heard someone say, “What if we pray?”
I agreed because if this was the food I would eat and die, let it be so. Then I sat them down and executed the most powerful prayer the world had ever seen. It took only 10 seconds.
Then we ate the food. See ehn, I don’t know if it was the suspicion of poison in the food that made the food taste that suspiciously great o, but Mama Iyabo could cook. Olorun!
We finished eating and did the dishes so we could pretend to our aunt that we tossed the food away. Everything went according to plan until one of us started to feel upset in the stomach. At first, it was a mild issue until he started to purge. That was when we knew we had messed up. We should have listened to our aunt, especially considering Mama Iyabo moved suspiciously.
We called our aunt to report ourselves and ask for final words of prayer before we crossed over to the other side. It was clear Mama Iyabo had won this round, but our spirits would return.
It eventually turned out that he was just reacting to the spicy food, and there was no poison in the food, but the damage had been done.
READ ALSO: Salads are not meant for Christmas alone
The moral of this story is that even though you hardly achieved anything of note this year to make your village people envious of you to the point of poisoning you, there are precautions you have to take during this festive period to enjoy Christmas rice without worrying about dying like Patience Ozokwor’s victims in Nollywood classics.
Precautions against eating poison this Christmas
Be a failure: Look, the exchange rate is crazy. Everything is now expensive, including poison. To be fair, no one would waste poison on someone who doesn’t look like he’s making it in life. Miss your Q4 KPIs, get fired from your job, and let everyone know. Whoever has plans of poisoning you out of envy would only feel pity for you. Prevention is better than cure.
Sign of the cross: Regardless of your faith, research has shown that a quick sign of the cross before eating any food will go a long way in reducing the impact of any poison in the food. You might purge a little, but won’t foam from the mouth (or anything dramatic from old Nollywood).
Steal the food: Instead of waiting to be offered food, you can get one step ahead by stealing the food in advance, leaving no chance for anyone to poison it at all.
Stay in your house: This is a bit hard and frankly unrealistic, but for some of you with spiritual powers, you can pull this off. Stay in your house and don’t visit anybody. Also, don’t eat anything brought to your house by your neighbours, especially if there’s a Chelsea fan in that family.
With these few safety guidelines of mine, I hope I have been able to prepare you well enough for Christmas. After all, na who escape food poisoning this Christmas go read our next newsletter issue. Thank you for sticking with us so far. See you this time next week!
