La comida

At my current rate of intake, after two years in Guatemala my consumption of beans and tortillas would most appropriately be measured in tons and thousands respectively. Beans and tortillas are a staple of breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and there is, of course, the occasional bean sandwich as a snack.

There is actually a whole life cycle of the bean (frijole) of which I was completely unaware before I came. When the beans are first cooked in water, they are served whole as frijoles purados and are soupy. The left over beans later get served as frijoles colados, which have been purified in water. Last, but not least, our remaining bean friends are fried with lots of oil and become frijoles fritos. The essential gas cutting ingredient in the preparation any form of beans is garlic, but sometimes I doubt its effectiveness. So although I know I will be eating beans, the surprise is discovering which kind.

The monotony of the frijoles, however, is more than made up for by the amazing variety of fruits and vegetables grown and available here. Güicoy, a gourd type vegetable similar to zucchini (which I have eaten a lot of here too), is quickly becoming one of my favorite vegetables. My host mom makes an assortment of delicious salads with different mixtures (not all together) of lettuce, carrots, cucumbers, broccoli, mango, pineapple, green beans, peas, onions, and peppers. Some kind of fresh fruit is usually worked into the meal also: watermelon, bananas, oranges, apples, papaya, plantains, peaches and the aforementioned mango and pineapple.

After a couple of weeks here, I have adopted the personal slogan of ‘More greens less beans’ and have recently successfully cut down my bean ingestion to only dinner time without offending my host mom (I think). Now my breakfasts consist of fruit, usually a banana, and lunches are typically chicken, boiled not fried, with a salad or rice, some fruit, and tortillas. Accompanying the beans and tortillas for dinner can be a number of things like veggie or cheese omelets, tamales, rice and/or vegetables. Dinner is frequently followed by a fruit served as desert like peaches (from the tree in the yard) cooked with sugar or fried plantains. Guatemaltecans believe eating meat at dinner is bad for digestion and, therefore only do so for parties or other special occasions.

Just because I have been eating traditional Guatemaltecan fare on a daily basis is not to say that there aren’t other foods available. There is actually an astonishing (well, I am astonished at least) amount of familiar brands in large supermarkets in Guate (nickname for the capital) and other bigger cities like Antigua, but these items require a bit of traveling to obtain and are out of the price range of the vast majority of the people living in the small villages. With its heavy foreign influence, Antigua also has an impressive range of specialty foods in stores, cafes, and restaurants owned by gringos.

All the big names in American fast food are also present in Guatemala: McDonalds, Wendy’s, Taco Bell, Pizza Hut, Subway, Sbarros, Burger King, and Dominos. Today, on the way to Guate, I even saw a Casa del Wafle (the Waffle House). I have yet to try it, but Dominos will actually deliver to my village, and being a Peace Corps volunteer I get the deal of buy one pizza get one free every day of the week. A group of us living in near-by towns are already planning a pizza party.

With a whole post on food, I think it is fitting to mention Guatemaltecans tendency to nickname people based on their physical characteristics—the most popular being, ‘el gordito’ or ‘la gordita’, meaning ‘the fat one’. ‘Ito/a’ in Spanish is usually added to the end of a word to convey either smallness or affection, so even though in the States it would be completely offensive to call someone fat, here it is perfectly normal and there is no maliciousness in the label. After constantly hearing my family refer to a male volunteer in the next town over as ‘el gordito’, out of curiosity I asked my host sister what my nickname is here…and sure enough, I am ‘la gordita’. Damn beans and tortillas.