"This is not food."

So I heard the following story direct from my friend Ousman, about lecciri and kosam (couscous and milk) that they eat A LOT here:

“Back when I was studying in the Ukraine, a group of us decided to go to Moscow for a vacation. It was a long trip so we brought some lacciri with us to eat along the way. When we got to Moscow and were going through customs, the officials confiscated it thinking it was a drug. We insisted that it was food but they didn’t believe us. At the time, Russia was still the U.S.S.R. and they sat us down between two attack dogs, who would growl every time we moved, for five hours while they did a chemical analysis. Finally they came out and said, ‘My brothers, we don’t know what this is but it is not food.’ We again insisted that it was, we ate it all the time in Africa, and it was culturally very important to us. They said, ‘That may be, but it is very cold here in Moscow and if you eat this you won’t survive, you need real food.’ Then they handed us the results of the chemical analysis: Vitamin A – 0.0000000001% Vitamin C – 0.000000000001% Protein – 0.00000000000001% etc. We asked if we could have it back and they said, ‘No we can’t give this back to you, it is not real food. There is plenty of good food here in Moscow, go out and buy some new food.’”

Aaaaand that is why people are malnourished here.