A Daily Crust...
Trip Start
Feb 06, 2008
1
16
22
Trip End
Ongoing
Bogia,
Papua New Guinea
Thursday, October 23, 2008
So food has predictably been part of our learning curve.
You must first be made aware that virtually anything grows in this country. We have met strawberries delicious and wholesome , flown into market from an isolated compound high in the mountains which can only be accessed by air. We have seen bananas of green, banana of red, bananas petite and bananas enormous
The Mumu.
. There are potatoes and sweet potatoes, taro and tomatoes, sweet pineapple and sour pineapple, orange oranges and green oranges. To survive takes nothing more than a slow walk through the groves of banana trees, or perhaps you prefer coconut, delicious cool and fresh, a freshly killed pig or the freshest of chickens.Like all diets there are surprises. If you don't eat protein in any amount recognisable, and you don't eat dairy produce, and your diet is virtually all unprocessed foods, you loose weight! The locals are trim and lean, and it really is unusual to see a fat PNG person. They are a fit and strong looking lot with a very healthy set of muscles.
However....for some strange historical marketing reason the PNG average person eats rice and tinned fish. This can at best be described as a culinary eccentricity. At worst sheer bloody mindedness. Rice does grow, but caring for it is harder work than the average adult male PNG farmer wishes to engage in, so there is no rice of any quantity grown in the country and it is all imported at some cost (a fact which causes great moaning amongst the shoppers of PNG). Fish of course there is in abundance.
The seas around are famous for their nurseries of fish stock, there are fish, fish, fish...or even bigger FISH
Rice baskets.
. A lavish diet indeed and so healthy. But to fish every day is really too much hard work is it not. The sun, the blueness of the sea, the soft breezes, the slow rocking of the canoe. Yes, certainly a tin would be easier. It will have the same fish in it, and we will buy it from the factory down the road which is owned by a...Phillipino....or a Chinese! Sadly the Phillipino or the Chinese do not tin the best of the fish for domestic consumption, so the PNG eater has to suffer those portions of the fish which are not acceptable in the Phillipino or Chinese home market. So something called fish comes in a tin, with imported rice. The most common meal in town.Here I have to offer words of praise to Pam. She has taken all the vagaries of food supply and cooking equipment and produced an enormous variety of superb dishes, with an equally great variety of ingredients. There are times when she concocts a something which is so special that I innocently ask 'How?' but the shake of the head and wondering eye leads to the assumption that there is no way that dish will be repeated. However there is always another creation to explore.
