By Cynthia Nelson
Hi Everyone, All of us who cook, appreciate, understand and empathize when a fellow cook says, “I don’t know what to cook,” or “What am I going to cook today?”
We cooks go through a range of emotions and internal dialogues as we weigh the options, desires, likes and dislikes not just for ourselves but also for the people we cook for.
We may start out with excitement. “Oooo, you know what I could eat, some roast pork with mashed potatoes and some ripe juicy tomatoes.” or, “I haven’t had stewed chicken in a long time”; or “what about a hot fish curry with lots of pepper and green mangoes…” You get so excited that before you know it, you are dreaming up of a variety of dishes that you feel like having and then reality hits – “but I don’t have potatoes,” or “the chicken would take too long to defrost,” or “getting the fish would mean that I have to go to the market.” Before you know it, your plans are rapidly changing. Time becomes your enemy and then you realise that it is probably for the best because someone in your household does not eat pork, does not like curry or the only thing they would eat stewed is beef.
I truly admire and respect those people who meticulously plan their meals on a weekly basis and sometimes for even longer, but I can never decide that far in advance what I want to eat. Sure I can say that this week I want to eat cabbage and chicken, or bora and shrimp, but I can never tell which day I want to eat that meal and sometimes, the entire week goes by and I don’t make either of those dishes because my desire changed.
Are you like me and find yourself buying the same things every week when you go to the market? You promise yourself that you’ll find a different way of cooking karaila (bitter gourd) or the pumpkin or even the fish or shrimp or chicken that you pick up but you know what? You rarely do, the time just does not seem to be there to dwell on new flavours, techniques and methods and before you know it, you are back to making the same pumpkin and shrimp, roast chicken and potatoes and fried rice.
Just as I finished writing the preceding sentence I marvelled at how fortunate I am. Many of us are feeling the squeeze but we can still sit and talk about meal planning and our desires to eat certain things while millions all over the world are hungry. The rising cost of food is ravaging some societies and we don’t have to look too far to see, know, and feel it. I feel guilty writing about the pleasures of food in these times. I worry for the Caribbean.
Things in Haiti have reached crisis proportions. Here in Barbados, more than 80 percent of our food is imported. Last weekend, the Nation Newspaper reported that Barbados’ food import bill was a staggering Bds$. 5 billion! There are so many reasons for the present crisis: rich countries especially are eating more meat which raises the price of feed grains, climate change has negatively affected harvests, and growing crops for biofuel has reduced the amount of land available for food production. But perhaps the biggest problem is that no one has been paying attention to agriculture. Like many countries in the developing world, Caribbean countries have not invested in agriculture assuming that “progress” will come from the development of services. Our farmers have been sacrificed because we have been told to remove trade barriers whilst cheap, subsidized food products come from the rich countries.
I don’t want to sound overly nostalgic, I know that often the “good ole’ days” were also “hard ole’ days” But perhaps the time has come for us to think of meal planning in a different way because if we are not careful, the ability to feed ourselves will have nothing to do with wants and desires as our constraints will be money, health and availability.
Perhaps the time has come for us to return to the days when children appreciated and ate what is set before them. Perhaps the time has come for us to grow something in a large plant pot or two if you don’t have the yard space. Perhaps it’s time we appreciate what’s local and regional. Perhaps it’s time we return to those times when we’d eat weekday meals where we didn’t eat a lot of meat and reserve meat for our weekend meals. Perhaps it’s time to learn to cook certain basic things. Perhaps…
What are you going to do and what are you going to cook today?
Cynthia
tasteslikehome@gmail.com
www.tasteslikehome.org
