The desert area extending from southern Ethiopia to northern Kenya is home to the pastoralist Borana people. They are well knowledgeable about the surrounding area and their cattle. For the Borana, who employ a variety of age-old preservation methods to improve the quality and lengthen the shelf life of livestock products like milk and meat, these items are especially vital as they provide a supply of food in hard times. Fonntuma is a traditional food produced from goat or bull flesh that is crushed, dried, roasted, and fried.
Meat is chopped into strips and left to dry for many days in order to produce fonntuma. To lower their size and improve surface area for absorbing more oil during the frying step, the thin, dried strips are next roasted over charcoal and then crushed, breaking them up and giving them a filamentous structure. Depending on the size of the chunks of meat, pounding takes one to two hours. While the meat strips are cooking, women hold them with tongs made of dry sticks: The red charcoal is covered with three or four strips that are held between the sticks and rotated continually.
The meat is roasted and then deep-fried with cardamom, sugar, and salt till it turns golden brown. One of the most crucial parts of preparation, in terms of quality and shelf life, is the storing procedure. The ejito, a type of traditional wooden storage container, is utilized. Using specific sticks, the inside of the container is smoked to impart flavor and totally dry it out. Fonntuma is eaten with ghee and keeps for three to four months in storage.
Few skilled people, mostly old women, possess the knowledge (mostly oral) necessary to make fonntuma. After a home butchers a bull, the ladies in the community gather to make fonntuma. Members of the community can engage and share information through this activity. Famines are common in arid and semi-arid regions, and among the Borana people, fonntuma was the most effective diet for preventing starvation.
Due to the ease with which fresh meat can now be obtained in the area thanks to the growth of butcheries, traditional preservation methods and the expertise that goes along with them are becoming less common. There are less possibilities for information transfer because of the decline in animal slaughter and the shift to only doing so during rituals and special occasions brought about by changes in lifestyle.
Should the old ladies who possess the expertise to produce fonntuma be unable to pass it on, the preparation technique may eventually perish. It is imperative to make deliberate endeavors to bridge the knowledge gap between generations and raise youth consciousness in order to save ancient culinary and cultural customs.
