The Jungle Diet

Something I’ve been thinking about randomly is my attitude toward food. I think I’ve mentioned before that I’m way more lax about what I would normally be considered “bad” food, but I don’t think I’ve elaborated on that. I’ve noticed that I’m a bit more willing to eat questionable food items during field jobs, even more so in the jungle, and even MORE so after four months in the jungle…

At home if I dropped a piece of vegetable – a cucumber slice, for instance – on the floor of my kitchen, I would probably throw it away. Here, so long as it doesn’t land in the mold patch that is spreading across the floor from under our cooking area, then it’s okay to pick up, blow the dirt off of, and toss back in the salad.

Squishy carrots are not bad carrots, they are just more challenging to peel (which you really only need to do if they are moldy).

To drain pasta we prop a colander on a rock outside the kitchen and dump it in. One time someone tipped the colander over and pasta fell into the grass and dirt, right where the dogs and chickens often wander (and shit, presumably). At home, most people would probably not eat that pasta. Here we have a limited supply of food, and more importantly, we were hungry, so we just picked up all of the not-terribly-dirty pasta, rinsed it off, and served it up (with oregano, so you couldn’t tell the good leaves from the bad ones).

Oregano also works when you realize (a bit too late) that one of the four bags of pasta that you just dumped into the pot was filled with tiny little bugs.

We get all of our bread for the week in town on Fridays, so by Wednesday or Thursday our bread supply is dwindling and usually moldy. If it’s the “good” mold (white mold that you can pretend is flour), then you can just rub it off and it’s good as new. If it’s the “bad” mold (green spots), then we have something called “mold remediation”, where you cut off the mold spots and then toast the bread on the stove. That will give it another few days of life before we usually end up tossing it. If we have a lot of extra bread on a given week, or just lots of moldy bread, we make croutons! Some weeks we do end up with heaps and heaps of bread because the nearby lodges will generously give us some of theirs… usually because it’s already going moldy (and we’re hungry field biologists who will eat anything, apparently). That is usually crouton bread. One week we DID end up composting a bunch of it because we had about 30 pieces of (quite moldy) bread per person, and Friday was approaching. We don’t usually waste, but we also like un-moldy bread on occasion.

Lately squirrels have been getting into the kitchen and eating our vegetables. I normally wouldn’t eat a banana with gnaw marks in it, but here it’s fine, so long as you just cut that part off. Same with yucca, plantain, cauliflower, and lettuce. Besides, the outer layer of lettuce was probably turning black anyways, so we would’ve just peeled that layer off.

When rats were getting into our giant sack of rice, we just scooped out the yellow-tinted areas and use the good rice.

Eggs. Oh the eggs. We buy giant flats of eggs at a time, which is something like 180 eggs. We don’t refrigerate them. They are fine for the first several weeks, but at some point they start going bad – very, very bad. At first the yolk just sticks to the inside of the shell – that’s fine. Then you’ll notice a little black spot on the inside of the shell. That’s still okay, assuming it’s small and you don’t notice anything wrong with the egg itself. Large black spots are questionable – eat at your own risk. The definite NO is a black egg. When we notice that black spots have started appearing in the eggs, we crack them into a cup instead of the frying pan so we can dump it out and try again. At first it might just be one bad egg before you get a good one, but soon it will be four eggs, and towards the end of the flat of eggs (like right now) you could end up going through ten a morning. A while ago I got the “lucky” one – I cracked an egg into the egg cup and a black liquid oozed into the cup. BAD egg. Jack and I discovered on our camping trip that hard-boiled eggs are actually a good way to work around the black spots – when they are hard-boiled you can just scoop off the black part and eat the rest of the egg! However, right now most of our eggs are beyond bad. What we used to think were “bad” eggs (a couple black spots) are now the “good” eggs. There are also those with red spots inside, or whose innards have congealed. A couple days ago I finally decided that I was done with the egg roulette, but I made it until the last week!

Cockroaches are nothing. Cockroach on your dinner plate? Yeah, me too. Just swat it off and keep eating.

Finally, anything you drop while wandering in the forest is probably still fine to eat, so long as it didn’t land in a mud puddle or anything visible horrific.

Jungle food… yum!

Unsurprisingly, Pepto Bismol is now a regular part of my breakfast…