Food:
I feel that food is a pretty important part of my daily routine and thus I figured that I should explain the typical diet here in Honduras. While many people in America might assume, using understandable deductive reasoning that, based on the proximity to Mexico, people in Honduras eat what we think of as Mexican food. This assumption is however quite incorrect. The food here in fact only vaguely resembles Mexican food, and even in comparison with American food is not spicy like you might expect.
I’ll start by giving you a basic run down of the staples here. The first of which is most definitely tortillas. These are made of corn meal and while they resemble their flower based, highly processed cousins we buy in the US, taste almost nothing like them. They instead are much heavier and starchier, thus even at my hungriest of times I can only manage about 3 without feeling like I’m going to explode. Shockingly however, the average Honduran (who is about ½ my body mass) will polish off a half dozen with ease. This still baffles me after a month here; because to me consuming that many tortillas is like the Central American equivalent of the saltine challenge. Though, from my conversations with host families and PC staff, I have come to realize that this penchant for demolishing stacks of tortillas makes logical sense. This is because tortillas are made from just corn flour and water, thus making them the cheapest thing around. For this reason, in a country where food and money have traditionally been scarce, people tended to eat a lot of the cheapest/ most filling thing available. Unfortunately for this over fed pampered PC volunteer the insistence on serving guests a mountain of heavy, carbohydrate filled tortillas with every meal has continued in families where food is plentiful. Thus my college beer gut will soon be replaced with a tortilla panza.
Some other basic staples here are beans (a great source of inopportune flatulence to be sure), plantains, rice, queso, and mantequilla. I feel that I should explain the last two, as they can easily be misinterpreted by people who understand Spanish but have not been to Honduras. Queso here is not anything like the nacho cheese often referred to by the same name in popular Mexican themed restaurants in the US. Instead here it refers to a hard crumbly white cheese, which is loaded with salt, and can taste like anything from salty cheese to a salty foot (depending on quality of course). Mantequilla can also be confusing, because in Spain it refers to butter, but here it refers to a substance much like sour cream, but inexplicably slightly different. I would say that across the board these are the two foods (or condiments depending on your definition) that new PC volunteers have the most trouble adjusting to. Though I will acknowledge that both can be very good if used in moderation, especially in Baleadas. These delicious cousins of the quesadilla are a flour tortilla folded over a warm melty layer of queso, refried beans, and mantequilla. In their most basic from they are quite good, but there are oh so many variations. Some of my favorites include carne asada and for breakfast, a combo of scrambled eggs and fresh avocado slices.
I also feel that I should make mention of the spices of choice here in Honduras. For the most part these spices fall under the twin headings of sugar, and salt. They fricken love both of these down here, I mean they cannot get enough. I have personally watched people eat both of these by the finger-full on their own. Salt finds its home in or on almost all foods you can think of here, from basically all cooked dishes to salads (which mostly just consist of cucumbers and iceberg lettuce, and are pretty scarce). Despite this I would venture to assert that sugar is even more prevalent, especially with the popularity of coffee down here. People will sugar any drink that is not soda, as it is conveniently laden with its own cane sugar(that’s right no corn syrup at least, thank god!). But the sugaring of juice and milk (yes milk!) is kids play compared to what they do to their coffee. While I personally don’t drink coffee, or any caffeinated beverages for the matter, this is a major point of conversation among PC volunteers. Apparently the common practice is to add sugar to the coffee grinds or instant crystals while making the coffee, to pre-sweeten it, then sugar is added to the completed coffee, and finally the sugar bowl is always presented with the coffee cup in case the recipient desires a touch less coffee with their sugar.
The other sad irony of this equation is that the coffee its self is generally bad, and invariably comes from the US (my current host parents use Folgier’s grounds from a big plastic container). This is troubling in a country that is one of the largest coffee producers in the Hemisphere. This sad fact is result of the fact that Honduras, as the result of chronic government mismanagement and corruption, coupled with abuse by predatory US companies, has never developed the mechanisms for sorting and processing coffee. Thus they ship the beans to the US, where this value adding is done, and afterwards the lowest quality, and cheapest beans are turned around and sold back to Honduras at marked up prices. Thus as you sit here not an hours drive from coffee plantations, you are more than likely drinking the same cheap coffee being served in office lobbies in the US.
I would like to conclude this installment on a high note however. Thus I will briefly mention mangos and avocados. Both of these fruits are super abundant and super delicious here. The avocados are always the highlight of any meal here, often served as an accompaniment to many typical plates here. And the mangos are just awesome: ripe, juicy, and easy to be had off of trees in my parts. So ill leave you with the mental image of me polishing off a tree’s worth of mangos.
