There are images that speak louder than a thousand words.
Sun-dried crayfish, sold at the market in a semi-rusty jar. Without any health checks, without the local health authority, without anti-adulteration units.
A tin can, already well-used, perhaps created to hold tomatoes on another continent and in another life, then diverted in the name of the development of who knows what, is now filled with survival.
Dried shrimp, watched over by sleepy vendors and fearless flies.
Packaged in sheets of newspaper by hands that are cleaner in sentiment than in hygiene.
Children eat them and do not die.
The elderly eat them and smile.
Even pregnant women eat them, shell and all, which “is good for you, strengthens you,” they say.
All around, more shrimp, in piles, like the protein-rich sand of a sea that does not exist.
No reassuring labels, no expiration dates, no blue ministerial stamps. Just the sun, the air, the hands that gathered them and those who will sell them for a few shillings, smiling.
And that's where the average European, raised on lactic ferments and illustrative package inserts, feels a slight buckling at the knees. Because no, with all the love I have for this country and its traditions, I've never been able to do it. Not out of snobbery, but out of survival.
You need to have antibodies as trained as those of an acrobat on Watamu beach, or a Mijikenda shaman dancer who has made peace with the earth, its bacteria, and its spirits.
Herein lies the point that no Western manual likes to admit: the bacterial world is much, much more dissimilar from person to person than the chromosomal one.
Forget DNA.
Forget genetic testing.
There are those who are born and raised in an ecosystem where the body quickly learns to negotiate with the invisible: a silent pact between the gut and the environment, between immunity and necessity. And then there are those who come from outside, convinced that boiling everything, disinfecting everything, sterilizing everything is enough to feel safe. Only to discover that safety is a matter of habit, not superiority.
Those shrimp are not just food. They are memory.
They are a minimal economy.
They are a parallel healthcare system that says, “Eat, because tomorrow is unknown.” In a country where modern medicine is often distant, expensive, and intermittent, even the market becomes a pharmacy. Not because it wants to, but because it has to.
And then you understand the greatest paradox: the same body that resists sun-dried shrimp in a rusty jar can trust without batting an eyelid a healer, a prophet, a herbal concoction.
Not out of ignorance, but out of consistency. It is the same logic: trust what has always worked, or at least never killed anyone in front of the community.
The problem arises when this logic encounters modernity disguised as a miracle.
When someone takes faith, mixes it with a white coat, and sells it as a universal cure. Then we are no longer in the market, but in organized deception. Because it is one thing to eat a shrimp and feel good, but it is another to stop life-saving therapy because someone said, “You are cured.”
Yet, looking at this photo, one is led to think that the line is not as clear-cut as the ministries would like. There is no recklessness here. There is adaptation.
There is a biology that has learned to live with risk because it has no alternative. There is a body that does not ask for certifications, but results.
I continue to look at that jar with respect and a certain distance. I know it's not for me, at least not yet. I know that my intestines, poorly educated and overly protected, would not stand the test. But I also know that those shrimp tell more truth than many conferences on food safety.
They tell us that health is not the same everywhere.
That immunity is a personal story.
And that, sometimes, the real difference between those who eat and those who get sick is not what ends up on the plate, but everything that came before.