It’s official. I have an eating disorder. No matter where I am in the
world, whether a street cart in Thailand or a 5-star restaurant in New York
City...I drop food in my lap or down the front of my shirt. I am like a 2 year
old child learning to eat with a fork apparently. It drives me bonkers. I need
to start packing a bib or some overalls in my suitcase. The super annoying
thing is that doing laundry in the field can often be a pain. Sometimes my
schedule is such that if I’m moving around a lot and if I don’t time it just
right, I can miss the window of opportunity to do laundry and find myself
without clean clothes for a few days. Most things can usually be worn again but
not when there is a big blob of grease or dried spinach down the front. Today a
piece of lettuce covered in sauce fell from my sandwich and cascaded down the
front of my shirt before elegantly plopping in my lap. Lovely.
Last year at this time I was also in Liberia. I spent two months out in
the countryside near the Cote D’Ivoire border and I remember pretty clearly
what the local shops had to offer…biscuits, spaghetti, canned tomatoes, canned
beans and, weirdly, lots of jars of mayonnaise. Typically all the shops have
the same random things that come off the same supply trucks. When we stay in
shared housing at field sites, my organization usually provides a cook, though
we all chip in for the food. Normally for breakfast you get some sort of omelet
and/or bread or these pretty awesome crepe-like things. Then for lunch you get
rice and beans, cassava or potato greens and sometimes fish or chicken. There
is also typically plenty of fresh (and amazing) pineapple and avocado. For
dinner you usually have left over lunch. I remember last year I really enjoyed
the food the cook made. I never really felt deprived of anything and I like to
use field assignments as an opportunity to try and drop a few pounds (or 10 or
15). The only problem was the weekend. That’s when we had to fend for ourselves
which meant that I ate spaghetti or rice with tomatoes and kidney beans every
single weekend for every single meal. Once we found some nice eggplant at the
Saturday market and threw those into the mix. There is generally nowhere to eat
out in the villages either. I tried it twice last year and both times wound up
with water soup, which was rancid bush meat in pond scum. Okay, okay, that is
probably not the actual ingredient list…I’m sure there was some salt and oil in
there too.
Last year in Liberia the cook put Maggie cubes (crawfish bullion) in
just about every single dish. I could tell I was eating a lot of salt so my
first R&R I bought some low-sodium, all natural, organic, vegan,
gluten-free, cholesterol-free, MSG-free, nut-free, what-ever else free Whole
Foods vegetable cubes. I carried about 30 of those suckers around with me
for like 6 months and to like 5 different countries. But not once did I find
myself in a situation where I had a cook that was using stock cubes. After
awhile they started getting kinda gross and once I even had ants in my bag so I
wound up leaving them behind in Haiti. This time around I brought a couple bags
of freeze dried fruit and a couple bags of granola.
Since I’m heading to the field early tomorrow morning for a couple months, I just made a
trip to the supermarket with the hope of buying some items to break up the
weekend monotony. I have a rather strong aversion to the prepackaged,
Frankenstein, soy/corn science experiments that we Americans like to call food.
The problem is that I also don’t have much imagination in the kitchen. This
means that I really dislike going to the grocery store. I’m not exaggerating
when I say that I had a minor panic attack the first time I went into a grocery
store in the US on my last leave in April. I wandered around, almost in tears,
totally overwhelmed by the variety of choices while knowing at the same time
that everything was really just made of the same 2 ingredients anyway. So,
let’s just say that grocery shopping in developing countries is also not one of my favorite
activities. In some places, like Lubumbashi in the Democratic Republic of Congo,
the supermarket shelves are pretty bare. In Haiti they are just like American
supermarkets but with a bit more stuff from South America. In Liberia the
supermarkets have tons of American products at 3 times the American prices. What
I wound up getting today is pretty ridiculous. Here is what I managed to buy
for $41 USD.
Box of Earl Grey tea
Box of green tea
Tin of pistachio nuts
Box of apple & cinnamon instant oatmeal
Small tub of dried banana chips
Container of Mott’s applesauce
3 Velveeta cheese and broccoli cup-a-soup-like Frankenstein, everything I hate about processed foods mac n’
cheese pots (but damnit I'm sure they taste good)
2 cans of sauerkraut
Don’t even ask me what the sauerkraut is about. I haven’t got a clue.
My hands just reached up and grabbed them all by themselves. After that I gave up and decided
that I’ll just go hungry on the weekends. And at least I know if worse comes to
worse I won’t starve…I can always eat off my laundry :) ewww :(
No comments:
Post a Comment