Climate change is also changing the eating habits of millions of people, especially where food is not also pleasure, but almost exclusively sustenance to avoid starvation.
In those situations, as was also the case in the more civilised world in the past, food is the result of one's own work, habits, the cultivation of one's own land and the subjugation of animals living in the same areas.
What is happening even to a people universally known for their ancestral ways of life is emblematic. Years of droughts, floods and disease due to extreme weather phenomena are leading the Maasai of Kenya to feed themselves, for the first time in their millennial history, with food other than milk, blood and beef.
The warriors who came down from Nubia more than two hundred years ago and became herders are now facing a severe food crisis, due to the loss of millions of cattle.
An Associated Press report explains that while the elders of the Maasai communities hope that the problems are temporary and that they will soon be able to resume their traditional life as shepherds, some are adapting to a type of food they never learned to enjoy.
Do not, for example, ask an elderly man in a village at the foot of Kilimanjaro to eat fish: fish have long been considered water snakes, hence creatures of the devil, and consequently inedible. Not to mention their unpleasant smell, which does not belong in their semi-arid areas.
‘We have never lived near lakes and oceans, so fish has always been very foreign to us,’ Kelena ole Nchoi, head of the Maasai council of elders, told her interviewers. ‘We grew up seeing our elders eat only cows and goats.
Everything among the most iconic tribe in Kenya and Tanzania has always revolved around cows. Whoever owns the most cattle is the most powerful person, so for trade and to take the desired woman in marriage.
In 2023, however, Kenya's National Drought Management Authority declared that 2.6 million cattle had died, worth an estimated 1.5 billion.
In parallel, urbanisation has increasingly limited the available grazing areas, forcing Maasai pastoralists to adopt new methods to try to survive.
The report shows how in Kajiado County, the local government is supporting fish farming projects for the herders, even encouraging them to eat fish.
It is particularly women who take care of this, leaving handicrafts and the manufacture of beaded objects. Of course, many of them would much prefer to breed them to sell them and with the proceeds buy themselves some meat, but bartering is not always convenient, so tilapia appears in their diet today, and increasingly vegetables.
But there is a way of salvation for many Maasai communities, that of continuing to be able to eat meat and drink milk (albeit with a different flavour), by starting to breed camels. Camels are more expensive (around 800 euros each) than cows (around 350), but they are easier to breed because they feed mainly on shrubs and can survive in harsher conditions, so they last longer and are used to enduring months of drought. The shift from cattle to camelids is a noticeable fact especially in the land of the Samburu ‘cousins’, in the Laikipia region and beyond Isiolo.