Paper short abstract:

This paper examines how the Maasai diet, traditionally based on the consumption of meat, milk and blood, has changed in a community living in the Northern Tanzania. It explores the historical roots of this change and explains why meat has become a food-medicine to be consumed in ritual contexts.

Paper long abstract:

This paper examines how the Maasai pastoral diet, traditionally based on the consumption of meat, milk and blood, has changed in a community living in the Northern Tanzania. Despite this ideal diet, the ugali – the Tanzanian dish obtained from corn flour – has become the staple food in the community. The younger members eat ugali daily even if they know that their tradition suggest ingesting other types of food. Older people, on the other hand, consider ugali as “non-food”. To them, it reminds how maize was introduced by colonialists during past famines as a food aid. In this context, meat is mainly consumed during collective rituals such as weddings and circumcisions, but also during healing processes.

Drawing upon fieldwork experience in Tanzania between 2017 and 2023, this paper argues that the difficulties faced by the Maasai, and their related food options are the result of politics of inequality and marginalization implemented since the colonial time. These politics have produced unequal forms of land and natural resources distribution and management, which have particularly favoured the intensive agriculture and international tourism to the detriment of pastoral lifeways. Thus, meat has increasingly become a food-medicine that is taken only in some ritual contexts, rituals that define more than ever the meaning of “being Maasai”.