Richards, Audrey (1932) Hunger and work in a savage tribe. Routledge, London (pp.46-49)
For us it requires a real effort of imagination to visualize a state of society in which food matters so much and from so many points of view, but this effort is necessary if we are to understand the emotional background of Bemba ideas as to diet.
To the Bemba each meal, to be satisfactory, must be composed of two constituents: a thick porridge (ubwali) made of millet and the relish (umunani) of vegetables, meat or fish, which is eaten with it.... Ubwali is commonly translated by "porridge" but this is misleading. The hot water and meal are mixed in' proportion of 3 to 2 to make ubwali and this produces a solid mass of the consistency of plasticine and quite unlike what we know as porridge. Ubwali is eaten in hunks torn off in the hand, rolled into balls, dipped in relish, and bolted whole.
Millet has already been described as the main constituent of Bemba diet, but it is difficult for the European, accustomed as he is to a large variety of foodstuffs, to realize fully what a "staple crop" can mean to a primitive people. To the Bemba, millet porridge is not only necessary, but it is the only constituent of his diet which actually ranks as food.... I have watched natives eating the roasted grain off four or five maize cobs under my very eyes, only to hear them shouting to their fellows later, "Alas, we are dying of hunger. We have not had a bite to eat all day...."
The importance of millet porridge in native eyes is constantly reflected in traditional utterance and ritual. In proverb and folktale the ubwali stands for food itself. When discussing his kinship obligations, a native will say, "How can a man refuse to help his mother's brother who has given him ubwali all these years?" or, "Is he not her son? How should she refuse to make him ubwali?" .. .
But the native, while he declares he cannot live without ubwali, is equally emphatic that he cannot eat porridge without a relish (umunani), usually in the form of a liquid stew....
The term umunani is applied to stews—meat, fish, caterpillars, locusts, ants, vegetables (wild and cultivated), mushrooms , etc. prepared to eat with porridge. The functions of the relish are two: first to make the ubwali easier to swallow, and second to give it taste. A lump of porridge is glutinous and also gritty-the latter not, only owing to the flour of which it is made, but to the extraneous matter mixed in with it on the grindstone. It needs a coating of something slippery to make it slide down the throat. Dipping the porridge in a liquid stew makes it easier to swallow. Thus the use of umunani, which to European eyes adds valuable constituents to the diet, is defended by the native on the ground that it overcomes the purely mechanical difficulty of getting the food down the throat.... The Bemba himself explains that the sauce is not food....
It prevents the food "coming back." Meat and vegetable stews are cooked with salt whenever possible, and there is no doubt that an additional function of the relish in native eyes is to give the porridge taste and to lessen the monotony of the diet: Ground-nut sauce is also praised as bringing out the taste of a number of different relishes such as mushrooms, caterpillars, etc.
In general, only one relish is eaten at a meal. The Bemba do not like to mix their foods, and despise the European habit of eating a meal composed of two or three kinds of-dishes. He calls this habit ukusobelekanya and one said, "It is like a bird first to pick at this and then at that, or like a child who nibbles here and there through the day."