My Kids Won't Eat Ugali, I Cook It Every Sunday Anyway

Stop cooking ugali to feed your family. If they wanted it, you would know by now. Cook it for the house, not for the plates. A pot of ugali on a Sunday stove keeps a door open in a way no speech about culture ever will. The day you cook it hoping to be thanked is the day you start resenting your kitchen, and then your children, in that order.

I have cooked ugali almost every Sunday since Minneapolis became home. My son, sixteen, has standing business with instant ramen. My daughter, thirteen, announced last year that mac and cheese is her culture, and honestly, she argued her case. My husband is Kikuyu, born a short walk from where ugali is a food group, but his doctor read him his A1C and now he mourns it from across the table. So it is me and the sufuria. Two slices, sukuma wiki on the side. Some Sundays I come off a twelve-hour shift and my wrist still knows exactly what to do.

Rule one: cook small. Two cups of water, one and a half cups of unga — that feeds me twice. The biggest mistake we make is cooking the family sufuria for a family that is not eating. Nothing will sour you faster than scraping moldy ugali into the trash on Tuesday night. I have written here before about the guilt of the months the money doesn't reach Nyeri. Throwing away food nobody touched is that guilt's quiet cousin. Do not hand yourself the knife.

Rule two: never serve it with an apology. The moment you say “I know you people don't like this,” you have confirmed their review and downgraded your own dish. Put the ugali on the table beside the mac and cheese and say nothing. Food you apologize for becomes apology food forever.

Rule three: take it where it is wanted. At home, my daughter looks at ugali like a court summons. At a Kenyan church potluck, she eats two helpings and fights her brother for the crust at the bottom of the sufuria, because her friends are eating it, and a teenager would rather do almost anything than be the only one. Borrow those mouths. Culture is caught sideways, from other people's children, not from your lectures.

Rule four: ask for company, not appetite. “Sit with me while I eat” — ten minutes, no phones. A forced bite teaches resistance. A shared table teaches memory. Offer a taste once, never twice, and let it go.

Rule five: tell the story once a year, not once a week. The jiko in my mother's kitchen in Nyeri, the house she built stone by stone with the money we sent home, the wrist-turn I learned before I was ten — told every Sunday, that story becomes a lecture. Told rarely, it becomes a seed. My children carry it the way they carry our landline number from home: it is in there somewhere, they just won't recite it on demand.

Mama calls every Sunday. Four minutes — she does not waste words. The first question is always “Mmekula?” When I tell her I made ugali, she says nothing at all. From her, silence is applause. Then she asks to speak to the children, who know her as Cucu, and they give their weekly report, and she changes the subject the moment she hears the word “ramen.”

So decide, this week, what the ugali is for. If it is for gratitude, stop cooking it — you will be wounded every Sunday, and you will deserve better. If it is a door left unlocked for the child who, at twenty-three, will smell maize flour in some American grocery aisle and stand there like they have been ambushed by home, then cook small, cook weekly, and do not ask to be thanked.

If I could, I would mail this column to myself at thirty-two, crying over a pot nobody touched. Nobody is crying now. This Sunday the phone will ring, Mama will ask if I have cooked, and I will tell her the truth. Yes, Mama. For one. It still counts.