Food, culture and livelihood in Malinzanga village, Tanzania

Abstract

This study is a part of the PANTIL nutrition project, which is a collaboration project between the Sokoine University of Agriculture in Tanzania and the Norwegian University of Life Sciences. The main objective of this study was to look at the socio-cultural dynamics of food in Malinzanga village. I wanted to do this by investigating the importance of ethnicity and culture in relation to people’s preferences on production, diet, the composition of meals and cultural classification of food. One of the findings is that the different ethnic groups have different modes of production, which affects livelihood and diet. The pastoralist groups lives in the ‘forest’ and have manly livestock, while the agriculturalists living in the ‘village’ are mostly farmers. The changing seasons, with one dry season and one wet season, affects production and labour tasks for all the groups.