What’s in a Wrap? Let's Rethink Portion Sizes in African Meals
Food tracking only works if it reflects reality. Most nutrition apps assume precision tools: scales, barcodes, factory labels. That breaks down in African kitchens, where measuring sticks are wraps, ladles, nylon bags, and your palm.
So what is a wrap of eba in grams? What’s the fat content of two ladles of egusi? These aren’t just culinary questions — they’re problems of definition, quantification, and cultural translation.
At NuWell, we don’t treat these questions as edge cases. We treat them as the core of African nutrition tracking.
Start From First Principles: What Is a Portion?
A portion isn’t a guess. It’s a fixed sum of nutrients derived from ingredients, cooked forms, and local context.
At NuWell, a portion is calculated as:
The total gram weight of all ingredients in a typical serving of a specific meal.
For example, a standard “wrap” of pounded yam weighs ~280g, not because someone said so, but because that's the measured average from household prep across 10+ cooking sessions.
Example: What’s In One Serving of Egusi Soup?
Ingredients (per person):
- 80g ground egusi
- 10g red palm oil
- 1 piece goat meat (~90g cooked)
- 1 ladle spinach (~70g cooked)
- Pepper mix, stock, seasoning (~50g)
Total weight: ~300g
Calorie estimate: ~600–650 kcal
