random thoughts

The Food Post.

I've touched on food in my posts here in the past, but I my experiences of the past few days has made me decide to devote an entire post to the issue right now.

It's easy to find just about any food in the States. Flavors range depending on location, culture, and national origin. Case in point, every major city has a Chinatown, a couple of great Indian restaurants, excellent Italian, and a bunch of Irish Pubs.

In Asuncion you could PROBABLY track down most of those, if you tried hard enough. But out in the campo, food options start to get pretty homogeneous. A Paraguayan lunch - the main meal - generally consists of peeled and boiled mandio (cassava or manioc state-side), then a guiso (rice or noodles with pulverized vegetables and meat or beans), and a salad (lettuce and tomato bits with lemon and salt), IF the owner of the house has a vegetable garden.

Galletas - little loafs of bread - or coquitos - sort of like bland crackers - are usually in abundance, and you drink them with a milk drink of some kind in the mornings.

There's also mbeju, a sort of fried pancake made of almidon (flour made from mandio), cornmeal, and cheese. It's really yummy.

And on the list of food I DON'T like, there's tortilla (not like mexican tortillas, these are deepfried slabs of flour and cheese), mondongo (cow-stomach soup), and enrollado (diced and sliced pig head mixed with vegetables rolled up and fried in pig skin.

For other bread options, there are sopa - sort of a cheesy cornbread - and chipa (little bread loaves made with almidon, truly yummy).

Empanadas abound, but that's a whole separate entry. In general, one can expect to eat tortilla, galleta, and guiso on a daily basis. (Would you like some starch with your starch and oil? Yes please!)

Luckily for me, almost all of the houses I've stayed at have had great cooks. Sometimes we'll eat the same food over a few days, but it's almost always been tasty.

Also interesting about Paraguay are its food myths. I think I've touched on this before, but Paraguayans have very strict ideas about what combinations of food one can eat. For example, you can't mix spicy and sweet foods, spicy food makes you horny, eating mango or watermelon with anything will give you extreme diarrhea or potentially kill you, etc.)

On the other hand, I'll sometimes get asked "What's the most common American food?"

And I don't really have an answer. In the states, I'll explain, some people eat meat, some don't, a lot of people eat too much, we have two big meals instead of one, and in my family at least, we eat a lot of vegetables.)

Personally, I have decided that Jiffy or Skippy peanut butter and dark bars of solid chocolate are quintessentially American foods.

When I lived at home with my parents, my dad often (after much armtwisting by this sugarfiend) brought home chocolate, but usually just basic bars of dark chocolate. Actually, often it was Dark Milky Way Bars, but when I came to Paraguay, it was those simple, straight forward bars of dark chocolate that I missed most.

When I visited a volunteer during training, I discovered the other food that I came to crave - creamy processed peanut butter. (Who knew??)

You can put it on pancakes, in oat meal, you can eat it by the spoon full, mixed with nuts and raisins, even in hot milk for a little protein blast. And its filling, and (sort of) nutritious.

Here in the supermarkets in Paraguay, one can find mountains and mountains of intriciate, layered cookies. There are drink mixes, M&Ms, rich yogurts, and it's even possible to find solid bars of chocolate. (Though not the really dark kind.) And there's one store I've found that sells peanut butter, though they add a lot of sugar.

So there it is, people. Our new national foods - dark chocolate and mashed-up peanuts.