Gari constitutes a daily meal to more than 150 million people world wide. It is a popular West African food. It could be compared to what potato flour is to the Westerners. It can be eaten as a snack in cold water on a very hot day, or cooked in hot water to make a dough-like meal called eba or gari to eat any of the African vegetable soups. It is a popular Ghanaian, Sierra Leonian and Nigerian food item.
Gari is a fine to coarse granular flour of varying texture made from cassava tubers (also called cassava roots) which are cleaned after harvesting, grated, water and starch squeezed out of it, left to ferment and then fried either in palm oil or without palm oil and serves as a major staple food in West Africa. It is also called garri or gali in some parts of sub-Saharan Africa. It is also popular in South America, where it is called manioc Flour (Farinha de Mandioca)