Food

I had a weird (in a completely awesome way) experience this weekend. I was staying at a hotel in Nagarkot with a fixed Nepali Set for dinner and when they brought out my daal bhaat with a fork, I sat there for a good five minutes wondering how one might eat daal bhaat with a fork! I’ve gotten so accustomed to eating with my hands that I could not fathom how you would properly mix the rice, lentils and veggies using a fork. Eventually I started mashing things around with my fork, but it took me another couple minutes to figure out that I was holding my fork like a shovel rather than silverware. Haha, I think it safe to say I am adjusted to Nepalese dinning. Granted, I still have to sit on my left hand during every meal so I don’t accidentally touch my food with the wrong hand but my eating is no longer dinnertime entertainment, which I consider a great success. And with that, I suppose it’s time to do some writing about food culture differences.

The food was one area (maybe the only one) where I thought I knew what I was getting myself into. I knew before I left the US that Nepalis eat daal bhaat (lentils and rice) two meals a day, silverware is scarce, meat is the exception rather than the rule, and leaving leftovers is considered rude. But boy was I not ready for the quantity of food consumed here. A day of eating here goes like this: I wake up with the roosters at about 5:30 am, we have black tea with two pieces of toast and a hard boiled egg between 6:30 and 7 (I fondly refer to this as pre-breakfast), then the morning daal bhaat between 9 and 10. I get hungry around 2 or 3 pm, so I have a snack if I am out and about or at work we have tea and biscuits at 3. Then the second I walk in the door at home, whether 4 or 5 or 6, my host mom immediately comes to get me for afternoon tea and snacks. When I am not hungry, I try to come in really quietly to buy myself some extra food-free time, a strategy that never works but has earned me the nickname of the family cat. Afternoon tea includes milk tea, fruit and a heavy snack (I fondly refer to this as pre-dinner, and it is sometimes a egg and beaten rice, or Ramen, or cornflakes). And then evening daal bhaat is between 7 and 8 pm.

Basically I feel like I am eating all the time. And portion sizes are insane. Pre-breakfast and pre-dinner is more food than I eat for breakfast and dinner in the US and those are not even really considered the meals! When I first got here, I tried to eat everything on my plate but at some point I just couldn’t and Manish said it was ok to leave it. (Because you eat with your hands, once the food is on your plate, either you eat it or the neighbor’s dog eats it out of the trash.) The next meal decreased to a reasonable size but then every meal it started to increase until I hit the break point again. This happens every few weeks: My portions increase until I leave a bunch of food on my plate, my portion decreases the next meal and the cycle starts over again. Oui.

A couple weeks into my stay, I was talking to a cousin here about the portions and he said that everyone still eats like food is scarce because just 10-15 years ago, folks could not be certain when their next meal would come. In the Terai and Mountain regions, this makes some sense because it’s still primarily manual labor and they do need to eat as much as they can. But in Kathmandu, it’s ridiculous. And there is no way to work any of the food off, because it’s too polluted and dangerous to walk/run around the city and anywhere we would put a public park, Nepalis put a temple. Being overweight is a source of pride here, as if telling the world that you are well off enough to overeat. (My first week here my host father announced to the family that his goal was for Elena to be “fat like me,” said while rubbing his belly and smiling from ear to ear.) Another side effect of the food not changing with the times is that men are universally heavier than women: women eat whatever is left over when the men are finished, because historically the men would be doing the more intense field work. (House guests are fed with the men, I am always offered seconds before my host mom has even started.)

Regardless of my portion size battles, I try to eat what’s put in front of me. Sometimes I have no idea what I am eating (there are still things I eat regularly that I don’t know the name for) but like my Door to Door Organics adventure, I have discovered some great new foods. Guava, for example, who knew! And some foods that I can’t stand, like this strange pickled thing. There are three things other things about the Nepalese food culture I really like:

1. The biggest meal of the day is at the beginning of the day and if meat is on the menu, it is eaten in the morning. Nepalis think it is hilarious and ridiculous that Westerners eat a big meal so close to bedtime. The eating schedule in Nepal is designed to “fuel the day,” which makes so much more sense to me. Plus I've never liked most Western breakfast foods, so maybe now I have a solid excuse to eat real food in the mornings.
2. Instead of vegetarians having to ask for meat-free food, vegetarian is the default here. At my house, we eat meat maybe two meals a week. And at all the guest houses I’ve stayed at, the meal choices are “Veg” or “Non-Veg.” It threw me off at first, but how cool that meat is called non-veg!
3. Milk tea is my favorite part of the day. It’s really sweet, which I didn’t expect, and I historically haven’t been the biggest fan of milk, but the combo works. I’m considering an Ilam (the Nepali Darjeeling) trip in a few weeks so I can get some tea from the source to bring home. I was looking forward to a ski season of cold beers after a long day, but how about some post-skiing milk tea instead? Any takers?