Why Is Garri ‘Poor Student’ Food? – By Samuel Okeke
For Nigerians or even the whole west Africa, this combination has saved more lives than doctors, stopped mass starvation and revered as much as Jesus of Nazareth.
As a student, immediately my cash hits a particular low, the remaining funds is used to buy these and stash for the coming times of famine. This is manna of west Africa.
Garri, relatively cheap, sold in small buckets called Congo in Nigeria. As a poor student, I always buy a bucket of garri and store, cos I know lean times will always creep in.
Gari is made from Cassava but it is the opposite of tapioca. That is, tapioca is the starch squeezed from Cassava, and garri is the left-over fibre. It is only fibre and has little or no starch.

Sugar.Mixed with the garri

End product with water added, groundnut is optional. This contains mainly carbohydrates and fibre and little potassium. This gives enough energy to live and work.

Note that there are variatives of this, fried groundnut, powdered milk, coconut, dried fish can be added for taste. The simple combination of sugar and garri is for the poor but when groundnut, milk, fish and coconut is added then it defeats the purpose of “poor man’s food” and becomes a leisure food.
Both the rich and poor drink this, while the poor might just drink garri and sugar. The wealthy add a lot of condiments.
Garri is quite delicious, it is the fiber left after removing the starch from grounded cassava tubers. This fiber is then dried in a special locally made oven.
Funny story, when I was a young boy, we were banned from drinking garri, my parents believed we wasted sugar drinking garri. Drinking garri with milk was a prerogative of only adults.
Powdered milk then for the lower middle class Nigerian was a luxury. The powdered milk was locked in my father’s room and each morning while making our traditional communal tea (tea made in a large bowl for the whole family) my mother would take out the milk, put enough for the tea to change into a murky whitish color and take the milk back to be locked. As a kid I had always wanted the unrestricted rights to drink garri with milk. It is delicious.

