Food Issues

Well, this has been a topic in my back-pocket for a while, and after my dinner last night I think it's about time I finally write about it. While you expect to hear things about food that involve beans, tortillas, eggs, and maybe illnesses, there is an aspect of food in Guatemala that I never anticipated before I got here: how to eat it. While the answer to this question may seem obvious to some of you, ("try putting it in your mouth, idiot...") it turns out that we take for granted a few basic things about eating food in the US.

Really this post is all about utensils. Apparently, until recently there were no utensils in Guatemala; people either used their hands, tortillas, or drank straight from the bowl. Their conversion to utensil use has been a bit of a struggle, and they still seem to dislike the idea of using more than one utensil for a meal. This creates problems for me... Imagine that a nice Guatemalan woman puts in front of you a hot bowl of soup. The first thing you think is, "Why are they serving soup at 1pm when it's 90 degrees outside and 90% humidity?" The second thing is, "How in the world am I going to eat that piece of meat?" The problem is, you've looked into the soup and seen a piece of chicken half the size of your fist with a giant bone, and it's just hanging out in the broth. You have been given a spoon, but there is no way you are going to be able to cut the chicken with that, especially because of the bony protrusions that are protecting large portions of the meat. The soup is hot enough that you have to blow on each spoonful of broth before putting it in your mouth, so you can guess that the chicken is also quite hot. Which leads us to my complaint: the correct thing to do is put down your spoon, reach into the soup, pull out the chicken with your fingers and eat it with your hands, trying to avoid having any of soup that has come up with the chicken fall on your clothes. Technically there are also giant vegetable chunks in the soup, but I always just spend a while cutting them with my spoon and trying not to slosh soup out of the bowl while I do so.

So that's the soup issue. The other issue is carne asada. In case you don't know (because I didn't before I got here) carne asada is a thin, wide piece of beef that is grilled (usually until it's really tough, at least in Guatemala). It is often served for parties or special occasions, the downside of which is that it is often accompanied by a plastic fork, and nothing else. For those of you who want to try to be optimistic and are thinking about those really sturdy plastic forks that you find sometimes, that is not what we're dealing with, we're talking about the cheapest, flimsiest plastic forks that exist. So you have a plastic fork, and a very large, very tough piece of meat, and your job is to find a way to eat it without, a: choking to death, b: making a huge mess, c:looking like an idiot. As it turns out, you're supposed to ignore parts b and c of that, and just try to avoid choking to death. I have seen several strategies that Guatemalans use to deal with this problem, but none of them are great. One is that you put the entire piece of carne asada in a tortilla (please note that the carne is larger than the tortilla) and then proceed to try to tear chunks off of it with your teeth. Another is that you grab one side with a folded tortilla, and stick your fork in the other side and try to tear chunks off (this is more likely to break the fork than the carne). The ultimate strategy that I have now adopted is to just abandon the fork, and just like with the soup, pick up the carne with both hands and try to tear it into pieces. If you can't tear it, you bite it and try to tear it that way. It's usually dripping in sauce and has often been bathing in beans, so you're guaranteed to get food all over your hands and mouth, but as far as I can tell that is completely acceptable. Guatemalans think it's amusing that every time I finish eating carne asada I immediately get up and wash my hands, but I just can't stand that feeling of being coated with food...

Let's be clear, though. Guatemalan food is delicious. Fresh corn tortillas are like nothing in the US, as are frijoles volteados, which are black beans that are liquified with fried onions and spices, and then fried. I really need to get someone to teach me to make them from scratch before I leave, because otherwise I'm going to have a craving that the US can't satisfy...