What did Ibn Battuta eat in West Africa?
Ibn Battuta complained about being given millet porridge with a little honey and yogurt by a host. He mentions eating camel meat along the way, and trading glass beads and salt for millet, rice, milk, chickens, fish, melons and pumpkins, and other local foods. He got sick from eating yams (or a similar root). From the king, he received a welcoming gift of three loaves of bread and a piece of beef fried in shea butter, and a gourd containing yogurt. (He was insulted by this meager gift, too.) Ibn Battuta described the fruit of the baobab tree: “like a cucumber, when it ripens it bursts uncovering something like flour; they cook and eat it and it is sold in the markets.” (Actually, the women pound it into a flour.) He also told of a ground crop like beans that was fried which tastes like peas, or made into a flour and fried in ‘shea butter’ (which he said was harmful to white men). [Hamdun & King, Ibn Battuta in Black Africa, p. 40.] An anecdote told by Ibn Battuta concerned visitors to
