What's Eating Me

I've been thinking about food lately. I know. What's new, right? I was so excited to go back to the US for a short while to see my family to be sure but, to be honest my list of things to do was mostly comprised of food. I wanted to eat bagels, gorditas and tacos, mixed field greens salad, all things with ranch dressing, salsa and tortilla chips and pizza... remember pizza? I also wanted to drink good beer and wine. Then I got there and the holidays were upon us, so there was tons of food everywhere and really I couldn't go anywhere without eating tons. I'm excited that food is a social event in life. I like it. I like sharing food with new people. I love eating new foods in new places, even when it is mondongito which is cow intestines and I officially HATE the taste of cow intestines and the truth that they are in fact intestines. (You know what gathers in intestines, right?) But, when the firefighters from Piura came out to Rinconada yesterday and they wanted to eat mondongito and drink chicha and I wanted to hang out and make friends, guess what I had for lunch. That is to say, I am not a fan of the food world view that food is body fuel; people are machines; people need fuel and therefore they should only eat the things that give them good fuel. Give me a break. Humans: cultural, social creatures. We like to make friends too.

On the other hand, in the US I was barraged with lots of junk food, food that wasn't particularly good, food that my mom and grandma did not make, food that I didn't really want to eat but, that I ate anyway to be social and because it was around and when my family gets together we eat. It was odd. I found myself thinking, “Isn’t it elegant that in Rinconada we eat all things with a spoon and for dinner most nights I have steamed fish soup, caught in the nearby ocean by my neighbor? I felt healthier when I was eating the food in Rinconada. This is weird. Half of the kids in Rinconada are malnourished. What in the hell is going on there?”

I was thinking about all of this and then on Sunday my friend Cynthia gave me this article that appeared in the NYT Magazine early last year by Michael Pollan. This is the guy who wrote "The Omnivore’s Dilemma." I have not read it but, it has come highly recommended and I hear it might be floating around in the permeable and liquid Peace Corps book exchange. In Michael's article I really appreciated the starting point that eaters are the important center in food discussions, not nutrients. In order to study food scientists break food down into nutrients. Then they try to figure out what each does in the body, what other nutrients they interact with to do this, how they do it, how they arrive, how they leave, why they work that way in some people but not in others, blah, blah, blah. The questions get harder and harder to answer, and we don’t know if we’re asking the right questions, or only some of the right questions, and we don’t know what we don’t know about food. None the less people have been eating for a long time wihout knowing very much about nutrients and many seem to have done okay while the ones that didn’t do so well died off. The processed foods that I was chomping back in the US sort of trick the senses that humans have evolved to decide what and how much to eat. It’s stuff that tastes like strawberries but is not. It’s tomatoes in December. It’s fats that come in forms that do not appear in nature. It’s big bottles of fiber or fish oil or Vitamin B. It’s Oreos, Snackwell’s or Chips O’Hoy. And I love all that stuff, epecially Chips O'Hoy. So, why did I feel healthier back in Peru where my kids have parasites and anemia, and weigh way too little?

For me I think it’s the social component of food here in Peru as much as it's my getting to eat more whole and fewer processed foods. I was thinking about this back in October too… And it’s still true. I’m way healthier here for eating with family and eating the stuff that they eat plus some (okay, a lot of) extra fruits and vegetables.