if you eat it, they will like you

in the summer of 2000 i spent three weeks in sao paulo, brazil on a short-term missions trip. i stayed with a host family along with one other guy in our group. maybe four or five days into your trip my roommate tom said to me about our hosts, "i think they like your more than they like me." not really believing him i responded, "why do you think that?"

"because you eat everything they put in front of you".

i teach geography and i tell my students repeatedly, "just because its different doesn't mean its deficient." this goes for food as well, except the kicker is food is tied to who we are as a people. have you ever heard someone from wisconsin talk about sausages, someone from maryland talk about crab cakes, someone from phili talk about cheese steaks, chicago talk about deep dish, colorado talk about beer, cali talk about sprouts, the south talk about...anything that will clog your arteries?

the same is true about those in different countries...truer, because there is a longer history of food, there is a deeper community surrounding food and frankly more likely a chance that food wasn't alway readily available like it typically is here in the states. in a lot of countries people eat all parts of animals because they didn't have the luxury of throwing excess away.

my last experience in korea was no different, i sat cross-legged, with achy knees at 18" tables with a million tiny dishes in front of me. "whats this?" i ask my mother-in-law. most of the time she would tell me, sometimes she would say, "just try it" and then she would tell me.

i would eat using chop-sticks, because thats what people use and it would take me longer to eat and i would continue eating long after everyone else was done and watch them clear dishes out of the way to move more food in front of me.

christe would look at me adoringly, "they like you".

"why?"

"because most americans don't eat this stuff."

food politics

this article is pretty old, but here is just another reason to love chipotle (if their delicious burritos were not enough..which they are)

“Chipotle has been a leader in driving change in the nation's food supply,” said Batiste Madonia, sales manager with East Coast, in a press release. “When their representatives came to us to negotiate this agreement, we agreed that it was the right thing to do. With this framework in place, we hope to work with other companies that are looking to make similar improvements to wages and working conditions for Florida farm workers.”

i love tomatoes, which makes it even harder to read about how some of the workers are mistreated.

What happened at Navarrete’s home would have been horrific enough if it were an isolated case. Unfortunately, involuntary servitude—slavery—is alive and well in Florida. Since 1997, law-enforcement officials have freed more than 1,000 men and women in seven different cases. And those are only the instances that resulted in convictions. Frightened, undocumented, mistrustful of the police, and speaking little or no English, most slaves refuse to testify, which means their captors cannot be tried. “Unlike victims of other crimes, slaves don’t report themselves,” said Molloy, who was one of the prosecutors on the Navarrete case. “They hide from us in plain sight.”