Saturday, April 9

I'll show you ethical food

Westerners savour 'homemade' bread even if it's just pouring ingredients from store-bought packages into a bread-maker with water from the tap. A month here has taught me to live with very little, which means the only garbage I regretfully discard in shrubs are 20-20 wrappers. Toilet paper, hot water, baby diapers, eggs, meat, and beds all seem like frivolous luxuries to me now. My meal arrives as a sheath of flour and bundle of vegetables.

Today a 10 year old showed me how to remove oil based paints from my hand. The trick is to get your hands wet and rub them in sand. I'm not sure how exportable this knowledge is, given the absence of sand in my front lawn, but it has given me a new way of looking at things.

I have lost access to global news. Instead I heard about the Japanese tsunami from my Indian dad who used very complicated gestures punctuated with the word Japan. I insisted my country was Canada, not Japan, thinking he was confused. It wasn't until he tied 'Japan' to one of his few other English words, 'finished,' that I clued in. When realization hit, Jen and many locals joined me in trying to decipher from the TV the magnitude of the situation. A challenging translation that was only accomplished with the cumulative English fragments of a dozen concerned neighbourhood men.

No comments:

Post a Comment