вЂњThe effect of food on your body is enormous, it is your energy for the day, your state of mind, your concentration, mental clarity.вЂќ Food health is in crisis, and food is in the category of overexploited,вЂќ Shantal explained.

вЂњTe Quiero Verde was born from a deep reflection and awareness regarding the way we feed ourselves. Originally from Mexico City, they tell us that Te Quiero Verde is a family business where everyone is involved вЂ“ including their parents and uncles вЂ“ who help them prepare the food and promote the taqueria. Shantal Melo, owner and creator of this vegan lifestyle, started the restaurant with her brother Arturo. Madero 340, Zona Romantica, you will find the famous pastor, wire, milanesa and campechano tacos with their unique sauces, all set in a pleasant atmosphere and is pet friendly. Granted, the peculiar depths of oil-rich Angola's corruption and inequity do offer a fitting backdrop for a 'doomsday vision'.Te Quiero Verde, a traditional Mexican taqueria that is 100 percent vegan, brings the flavors of Mexican dishes like tacos, quesadillas, tortas and pozole вЂ“ all made naturally without preservatives or meat. Then the book falls off an emotional cliff. The opening chapters, on a township tour in Cape Town or a luxury elephant-back safari in Namibia, offer excellent, barbed reportage Г la Theroux: ironic, sceptical but still avid for news. Later, he converts his journey - more in detested Angola than 'brighter and better' South Africa or Namibia - into a dark night of the ageing soul.

Yet, among the tourist-packaged Ju'/hoansi ('Real People'), he can't let go of that hunger for purity. Travellers in Africa always see the continent through the 'distorting mirror' of their dreams and fears. Indeed, a fine chapter sets the 'charade' and 'travesty' of life among the heritage-industry San people today against the fantasies of pristine innocence spun by 'posturing fantasists' such as Laurens van der Post. He knows the idea of Africa as a 'violated Eden' is an outsider's myth. Feeling ancient (a septuagenarian backpacker), vulnerable, world-weary, he makes of Africa's shift from the 'mutual respect and fairness' of rural tradition to 'stupefying disorder' in the cities a corollary of his own sense of doom. Theroux's 'valedictory trip', his farewell to a genre of rough travel that once promised 'bliss', treats the urban Africa he loathes as the outward sign of an inner disillusion. They may dismiss its more justifiable outbursts of indignation as merely a bitter old man's pain. However, The Last Train to Zona Verde - a 'symmetrical' west-coast journey to match his east-coast Dark Star Safari (2002) - ends up by doing a huge favour to the uniformed local embezzlers, the besuited foreign plunderers and the 'parachuting pop stars' (Bono and Madonna take a merited pasting). Theroux himself argues that 'Colonialism oppressed and subverted Africans and remade them as scavengers, pleaders, and servants' - the literary pioneers of nГ©gritude said as much almost a century ago - and that 'colonial-mimicry', post-independence, has just repeated that pattern.

Michel, Mabanckou's sweet-natured and forever curious 10-year-old narrator, accepts almost as a fact of nature that 'the finance minister is someone who steals the country's money'. Shameless kleptocrats in power the hypocrisy of foreign aid (Theroux's scorned 'virtue industry') the grotesque theft of resources by tiny elites in cahoots with Western - and now Chinese - corporations the flight from village life into (Theroux again) 'the blight of incomplete and misdirected modernity': these realities deserve no evasions or euphemisms. Still, in the former French colony we could do what remains quite inconceivable across the vast river in the war-ravaged Democratic Republic of Congo - first Belgium's abused treasure-chest, and now a mineral-hungry planet's. Congo-Brazzaville, the gods know, faces problems enough. Africa's future matters too much for propaganda and special pleading.

Zona verde