Introspection on the way we eat is just as interesting as what we eat, I’ve decided. For example, the home pack system is just a joy and makes me giggle every time I ask for it, as I am always amazed by the creative ways that tandoori or whatnot is delivered. For example, how the ketchup is somehow captured into a tiny tin foil envelope and then spurts all over the place when opened at home.
It’s these little oddities (like never really knowing what kind of home packing system one will get: Old newspaper, recycled beer bottles, etc.) that make life a bit more interesting for a kuire in Nepal. Mastering the “right-handed dual finger-spoon” is another.
I should have paid more attention back in the States on that one, where at Rass Kassas Ethiopian there was never a spoon nor fork in sight. Before moving to downtown Boulder Colorado, Rass Kassas Restaurant overlooked the Rocky Flats Nuclear Waste Dump just outside of town, and it was there I learned the joy of eating with one’s fingers. There, one was reminded that the world was wider then McDonalds, and also facing imminent disaster - simultaneously.
I felt this way the last time I stopped at Samir’s Dal Bhat Shack along the East-West highway just outside of Itahari, as silverware was also lacking, and the view afforded was one of a huge burnt-out and rusting bus, smashed back several meters from the front and left on its battered side along the road. The Dal there is disappointingly thin, but rice refills on the tin plate are ever forthcoming. The same tap out front is used for dishwashing, hand washing, and teeth washing, and made me realize this is something you can’t find in America anymore: The pure rawness of life, death, and the overall muck of it all.
That is unless you are in the Gulf of Mexico at the moment, where by the way, a good Cajun shrimp boil is also eaten with one’s fingers, but I doubt any Louisianan can find shrimp there to peel today. The muck in America is much different then the muck in Nepal...
The pure rawness of life, death, and the overall muck of it all is something you can’t find in America anymore.
The Bagmati is filled with filth, but much of the mess is contributed on an individual basis. The muck in the Gulf, and in other open waterways in the West, is contributed mostly by corporate donors and not single family polluters, and on a much grander scale than the small children openly (and it seems happily) defecating along the banks of the Bagmati.
Yet for Western individuals, everything is sanitized. Meals are wrapped neatly in Styrofoam or specially molded plastic containers for those “to go” orders – all printed nicely in full color – Tomato Ketchup, Spicy Mustard, Chicken Nuggets, Big Gulp, Handi-Wipe. Finger foods in America are not really messy at all: Hamburgers, pizza, hot dogs, French fries and sandwiches are about as messy as it gets. Small children are severely scolded when they play with their food, squishing it between tiny fingers, or if they spill milk on the floor. Yet Big Oil is barely slapped on the wrist after unleashing millions of gallons all over the coasts.
Sorry – I just can’t get the Gulf of Mexico out of my head – even as I consider how intimate eating with one’s hands is, where you can feel the grain and the heat of the stew, and touch the very substance that gives you life. I can’t help but to think how in my home culture, folks distance themselves from all that is good and sustaining, even if that substance is something as tiny as healthy bacteria.
Take my mother for example. She was the queen of home cleaning products when I was growing up, and to this day, I have to stop myself from reaching for a specialized household disinfectant whenever I see a smattering of sauce on a counter top. As a child, toilet tanks were scrubbed white and then dyed blue with something resembling aromatic acid designed to kill anything even remotely organic. Floors were mopped constantly with Spic and Span® cleaner – yet had to be – as no one took off their dirty shoes or muddy boots while indoors.
And outside, looming in the distance, we could see the piping from a Union Carbide plant, which must have supplied Mom in part with her cleaning essentials, indirectly via bottles and spray cans of whatever the hell she would dump on anything that looked like dirt. Would Mom have changed her cleaning habits back then if she had known that the same ingredients that she was using to kill germs in the kitchen had killed thousands in Bhopal?
I bet it’s these same distances: The distance between your fingers and your rice bowl, and the distance between your beefsteak and your fork, which are determining the course of humanity. On one hand the distance is zero, where some cultures have its proverbial fingers on the pulse of all that seeds life, and on the other hand, there is a gap as wide as the vast oceans currently filling with toxins from a rogue culture ignorant of others.
But you tell me, how do you eat these days?
(Writer is quirky-kinda expat happily living in the Kathmandu valley with Nepali family, friends, and a very large dog – who all enjoy a good Dal bhat regularly.)
herojig@gmail.com
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