Thoughts on Food

(the bounty from a recent market visit)
One of the things that I love about Guatemala is the abundance of fresh food. Every Sunday and Wednesday my town comes alive with the sounds and smells of the street market. Vendors come from all of the villages of my municipality and some of the surrounding towns to sell things that they have grown or raised. On market day I am able to buy most of my food for the week (excepting things like flour, olive oil, and specialty ingredients like curry) and know who grew, where it came from, and when it was cut. It’s amazing! I have developed a friendship with Doña Glendy, the woman from whom I purchase my veggies in the market. If I see her when I’m walking around town on a non-market day, she’ll often give me a bag of cherries or an orange- just because.

It’s an amazing thing, knowing from whom and where your food comes from, and something we’ve all but lost in the United States. In the 9 months or so that I’ve lived in my town I’ve been watching my neighbors and friends value what the earth gives them and have learned a lot from the experience. There’s a word in Spanish- “criollo” that is used almost interchangeably with the word “rico” or delicious- it means basically homegrown. Guatemalans use it to describe all sorts of food products that come from the community- chicken, garlic, vegetables; the word is used with pride to tell a guest that what they are eating is from here- in other words, it is the best there is.

One of the women I work with, who lives in a village that is 2 hours from the town center once took me for a walk out in the woods and pointed out various medicinal plants that I never would have recognized as edible. She also cut me some green leafy things and gave me instructions to bring them home and cook them like spinach and eat them with salt and lime. It was delicious and clearly full of iron and other vitamins. It’s this kind of creativity and simplicity in food that we’ve lost in the US that thrills me about Guatemala.

On the downside, any Peace Corps Volunteer will tell you about the multitude of Guatemalan children seen sucking down sugary sodas and chewing on prepackaged snacks. Sadly, a bag of processed Tortrix, the Guatemalan national junkfood, costs less than a mango or a carrot. Hopefully Guatemalan food culture is strong enough to hang onto their respect for the local and diverse. If not, they might soon find themselves in the junk food crisis that the US is in.