From nduma (arrowroots) and sweet potatoes on the breakfast table to white bread and margarine with milk tea, something has changed.
Today’s youth, especially Gen Z comrades in campus, have swapped the foods that fueled our grandparents energy for a quick fix diet of fries, instant noodles, the famous smocha and KFC.
Nutritious meals have been pushed aside by whatever is cheap, fast and trending on TikTok.
It’s not hard to see why. Hostel kitchens are either nonexistent, making food for the sake of or too cramped for real cooking. Pocket money rarely stretches far enough to stock vegetables and fruits.
And honestly, who has the patience to soak beans or boil maize when you can get chips in five minutes? Add peer pressure and the glamor of fast food joints on social media, and the result is a generation surviving on grease.
The problem is that what feels like survival food now might be planting seeds for bigger problems later.
Nutritionists are already warning that lifestyle diseases once called “diseases of the rich” diabetes, hypertension and obesity are creeping into the youth. We joke about adding “two more smokies” to our breakfast, but what we’re really adding could be cholesterol levels that would make a doctor raise eyebrows.
The irony is thick. Gen Z loves fitness aesthetics, gym selfies, flat tummy challenges, TikTok dance trends but often forget that abs aren’t built on fries alone. You can’t out-squat a bad diet. The body doesn’t care about filters, it processes exactly what you feed it, whether that’s kale and beans or a pile of oil drenched chips.
Still, it’s not all doom and grease. The solutions aren’t complicated. Balanced meals can be affordable if we return to basics githeri, sukuma wiki, fruits from the market. Schools can invest in nutrition education, and influencers can make “ugali and kunde” just as cool as “burger and fries.” A little planning, a little discipline, and suddenly the future doesn’t look like a hospital waiting room.
Because the truth is, a smocha once in a while won’t kill you. But living on smocha like it’s a food group? That’s an inheritance nobody wants, a future where what we ate at 20 comes back to haunt us at 40.
