When we cook our favorite meals, what happens to the carbo-hydrates, proteins and fats? I confess I am a less-than-average cook, but God loves a trier. I remember being about 23 years old and trying to cook a chicken from scratch—and I mean really from scratch, in that the chicken was alive at the start of the process. Most people in London are unlikely to have killed a chicken and so it is not a skill I came equipped with.Article continues after advertisement
I was in our bright windowed kitchen in Owerri, south-east Nigeria. It had just stopped raining and the air was still humming with moisture, the mud outside our single-story house was thick with the watering. I had just started work as a research fellow in pharmacy in Lagos and I was enjoying the shiny laboratories of the university, full of coveted equipment. As well as teaching students how to measure and measure again the components of medicines, I was also working as a research assistant on a project that was looking at what happens to a painkiller called naproxen when it was taken and documenting how it was broken down by the body’s enzymes.
However, on this day, I was home for the holidays, visiting the family, and had offered to make dinner.
