My first time in a developing country (a “real” developing country, not Mexico) opened my eyes to how much of the world lives. Nepal pushed my comfort zone to the edge with the immense poverty and over population. From eating with my right hand and wiping with my left to getting fleas and bitten by bedbugs. Lets not forget the open cremations along the river and the dead animals in the streets. Comparing life in Canada to life in Nepal we are spoiled in many ways. With luxurious consumer goods on one hand but also with a tainted agricultural and livestock production system on the other that serves only to spoil our food in a different manner.
The Sun Koshi River is where my expedition took place and for two weeks I was in “raw” Nepal. Terraces lined the river, a rugged place to farm but with the river where it is the farmers have no choice. Fortunately I was able to hike through the jungle and see how these people lived and what they ate.
Many of the small farms grew tropical fruits like mangoes, coconuts, pineapples, and bananas. Ginger, baby tomatoes and beans grew in patches along side corn and wheat. Rice filled up the flat areas of the terraced hillside that were also occupied by the water buffalo, chickens, goats, and lambs.
Most of these naturally deformed fruits would not make the cut to be sold in Safeway or even in a lower class produce shop downtown. All of these crops grew as nature intended, without pesticides, and the chickens and lambs were raised without growth hormones and/or antibiotics.
When the option was presented, the group was excited and we quickly gathered our rupees and purchased a pig for dinner. After watching it be stabbed in the heart with a bamboo stick then dipped into hot water to remove the hair, we began the slaughter in the river. At the end of the five hour process, as our pork was roasting, we discovered the pig was contaminated with Trichinellosis. The meat was spoiled. We dumped the meat in the river as the villagers shook their heads.
When thinking of feedlots in North America and how the animals are pumped full of many antibiotics, I cannot help but think of the pig. Pigs are genetically engineered just to be fat they cannot walk because they are too fat. People have to wear space suits or the terrestrial equivalent when entering a feeding zone because the pigs have no immunities.
We can all agree that feedlots are disgusting (to say the least) but so is Trichinellosis, a disease caused by eating a larvae of a worm (cysts), which shortly after consumption the worm makes its way from your stomach to your lungs and into your bloodstream (1). After learning this, many people on the expedition decided not to eat anything with eyes while in Nepal. But not me, as I can tell you the Chicken we killed the next night (in exchange for medical supplies) was some of the best I have ever had.
Along the river there were kids on bamboo rafts with cell phones, clearly mobile phone technology has taken over many developing countries. However this is not the case with food. The farming and eating in Nepal has not changed much in the last 100 years…”[f]or countless generations eating was something that took place in the steadying context of a family and culture, where full consciousness of what was involved did not need to be rehearses at every meal because it was stored away […] in a set of rituals and habits, manners and recipes” (2), and this is still taking place today in Nepal and many other developing countries.
Leading to the question: do you think that the developed world has actually spoiled the foods that we eat in the quest to produce more? And, are the simple traditions seen in developing agriculture, the ways where while natural disease persists, actually healthier?
The Pig with Trich Look close and you can see the Trich
Cited:
1. http://www.cdc.gov/ncidod/dpd/parasites/trichinosis/factsht_trichinosis.htm
2.
Pollan, Michael. Omnivore’s Delemna.Pinguin books, New York.
[…] The second is about “spoiled meat” and tells the pig story in more detail. […]