Building a balanced plate from food that grows nearby
A balanced plate has three jobs to do: a staple for energy, something that builds the body such as beans, groundnut, silverfish, egg or milk, and something that protects it such as dark green leaves or an orange vegetable or fruit. Almost every household in Uganda already grows or can reach all three, and the usual problem is not availability but proportion, because the staple fills the plate and the other two turn up as a spoonful of sauce. Nothing in this guide asks you to buy an unfamiliar food.
- Three jobs on every plate: energy, building, protecting. A plate of staple alone does one of the three.
- Pounded dried silverfish is the cheapest way to add body-building food to a pot anywhere near a lake or a river.
- Groundnut or simsim paste stirred in adds energy and protein and makes cheap food taste better.
- Orange foods matter: orange sweet potato, pumpkin, ripe mango, pawpaw. Choose them over the white varieties where you have a choice.
- The youngest child needs their own bowl, and needs to eat before the pot goes round.
General information, not medical advice. If you are worried about a mother or a child, go to your nearest health facility or speak to your village health team.
The three jobs a plate has to do
The first job is energy, and this is the one every household already covers: matoke, cassava, sweet potato, posho, millet, sorghum, rice. It is what fills a person up and it is what a plate is mostly made of.
The second job is building. A growing child is making muscle, blood and bone every day and needs the materials for it: beans, cowpeas, groundnut, simsim, silverfish, other fish, eggs, milk, meat when there is any. This is the job most often half done.
The third job is protecting. Dark green leaves, orange and yellow vegetables, and fruit carry the things that keep a child's eyes, skin and defences working. They are the cheapest of the three, they grow beside most houses, and they are the first thing to disappear from a plate when the household is busy.
A fourth thing helps all three along: a little fat. A spoon of oil, some groundnut paste, or a piece of avocado makes the meal more energy-dense, which matters when the person eating has a very small stomach.
Why the staple alone is the usual problem
Very few of the households our teams visit are eating nothing. Most are eating one thing. The garden produces a staple reliably, the staple stores, the staple feeds everybody, and so the plate becomes cassava with a little sauce, or matoke with a little sauce.
For an adult doing heavy work that gets you through the day. For a child under five it does not, because their stomach is small and everything they eat has to carry more per mouthful than an adult's does. A child eating the same plate as their father, in proportion, is undernourished on it.
The correction is not a different meal. It is more of the sauce and less of the staple in the child's own bowl, and something stirred into the pot rather than served beside it.
What that looks like where you live
The three jobs are the same everywhere. What changes district to district is which food is nearest to hand, and what the household usually has to be persuaded of. One thing is worth doing wherever you are: take the child's portion out first, mash it together rather than serving it in neat piles, and stir the sauce through the staple, because a child served a spoon of sauce on the side will eat around it.
- Wakiso. Markets are close and well supplied, so here the obstacle is price and not availability. Dried silverfish from the lake is sold in almost every trading centre and is far cheaper than any other fish, and avocado in season is close to free and is exactly the sort of fat a small child needs.
- Kamuli. Groundnut grows well and millet is everywhere, so the local win is a millet porridge thickened properly with groundnut paste stirred through it. Where a household has a choice of planting material, take the orange-fleshed sweet potato over the white: it grows and stores the same way and does a job for a child's eyes and defences that the white variety does not.
- Koboko. The most useful food here is one the household is already growing and mostly leaving in the garden. Cowpeas are planted for the grain and the leaves get ignored, and cowpea leaves cooked soft into a simsim or groundnut sauce cost nothing at all. Mango season is short and generous and is the easiest stretch of the year to get fruit into a small child.
- Napak. The hardest of the four, and the advice has to be honest about that. A plate built on sorghum alone is common for a large part of the year. Where the household has animals near the house, milk is the most valuable thing a small child can be given and should reach the youngest before it goes into tea for the adults.
The four cheapest things to add to almost any pot
If you change nothing else, change these. They are ordinary, they are local, and none of them requires a new recipe.
- Dried silverfish, pounded to a powder in a mortar and stirred into porridge or sauce. Children who refuse whole fish never notice the powder.
- Groundnut or simsim paste, a spoon stirred into porridge, greens or beans. It adds fat, protein and taste at once.
- Dark green leaves, chopped fine and cooked soft into the sauce rather than served beside it. Dodo, nakati, cowpea leaves, pumpkin leaves.
- An egg, mashed into whatever the child is already eating. One egg is a whole job on the plate done for a small child.
How to buy those four things well, and what to throw away
Those four only help if what goes into the pot is sound. Most of it is bought dry in a trading centre, carried home, and kept for weeks in a house with no cold store, and every one of those steps is somewhere the food can turn. Food that has gone off does more harm to a small child than to the adults eating from the same pot.
Dried silverfish should be properly dry and should smell clean rather than sour. Buy from a covered basin rather than one standing open in the sun, and keep it at home in a tin or a tied bag off the floor. Fish that has gone soft or damp in storage has taken up water from the air and is not worth pounding into a child's food.
Groundnuts are the ones to be careful with. Nuts that are shrivelled, discoloured or carrying any mould should be thrown out rather than sorted through and pounded, and paste that tastes bitter or smells musty should not be given to a child at all. Mould on stored groundnuts is a real hazard to small children and cooking does not take it away. Buy paste from somebody whose stock moves quickly, or pound your own from nuts you have spread out and looked at.
Eggs keep better than most households expect if they are out of the sun, but crack each one into a cup on its own before it goes near the child's bowl, so a bad one does not take the whole pot with it. Greens are the opposite of all of this. They are best picked the day they are eaten, which is the strongest argument there is for a bed beside the kitchen rather than a bunch bought on market day and kept until Thursday.
What to do in the months before harvest
Every district has a stretch where the store is low and the garden is not ready, and that is where most of the yellow readings appear. The plan for it has to be made in the months when there is plenty, not in the week it bites.
Dry greens in the shade rather than full sun and store them somewhere dry. Dry and store cowpeas, beans and groundnuts properly so weevils do not take the reserve. A small kitchen garden close to the house, watered with the water the household has already used for washing, produces greens through months when the main garden gives nothing.
When the food is genuinely short, protect the youngest first. Children under five and pregnant mothers should eat before the pot goes round, and the child's portion should come out before the meal is served. It is not a comfortable rule in a household where everybody is hungry, but it is the one that decides which child ends up on a therapeutic feeding course in three months.
This guide describes what generally happens, not what will happen at your facility or your school. Costs, timetables and rules differ between districts and they change. Check anything that matters with your health worker, the head teacher, or your district office. If something here is wrong or out of date, tell us and we will correct it.
Questions people ask
- Meat is far too expensive. What do we use instead?
- Beans, cowpeas, groundnut, simsim, silverfish and eggs all do the same job on a plate, and all of them cost a fraction of meat. Dried silverfish pounded into a powder is usually the cheapest of the lot, and it is available in most trading centres near the lake or the river.
- My child will not eat greens at all. What can I do?
- Stop serving them as greens. Chop them very fine, cook them soft and mix them through the sauce or the mash so they are not a separate thing on the plate to be pushed aside. Adding groundnut paste to the same pot helps a great deal, because most children object to the taste rather than the leaf.
- Is posho and beans every day good enough?
- It is a genuinely reasonable base, energy and a body-building food together, and better than most. What it lacks is the protecting part, so add greens or an orange vegetable to it, and add a little fat, because a small child needs the meal to be more energy-dense than an adult does.
- We have very little land. Can we still grow any of this?
- Yes. Greens are the crop that works in the smallest space, in sacks, old basins or a bed beside the house, and they can be watered with the water left over from washing. A few square metres of dodo or cowpea leaves near the kitchen changes a family's plate more than the same space under a staple would.
- Should a small child eat the same meal as the rest of us?
- The same food, yes, and that is better than cooking twice. But take their portion out before the chilli and heavy salt, chop or mash it small, keep the sauce-to-staple ratio higher than the adults have, and give it to them in their own bowl so you can see what they actually ate.