Food

Food is a funny part of life for us. What we eat, what we find in the store, what we eat on our visits and among friends, these take a prominence here that they don't seem to when we were in the US. Now, don't get me wrong, we have always been people who love food. We loved hosting people for meals, loved going out to and trying new restaurants, had wide and varied tastes in food. We have always enjoyed food and even had great fun with the foods of the places we have lived before, whether that be Africa or South Asia.

Then we moved here. I am sure there are people who love Central Asian food. I am sure there are countries in Central Asia where the food is really good. We are not those people and don't live in one of those places. Our little corner of the world is a rugged and dry mountain climate and people who live in climates like this are much more concerned with simply staying alive than developing a rich and varied cuisine. As such, while we have very few terrible meals, we don't really have any we miss when we aren't here. Making local foods isn't particularly difficult, but we don't eat them in our house and don't make a habit of seeking them out. I am perfectly content to eat what is put before me in a village, but I won't be making it for myself.

Foods are pretty basic here. First there is the national dish, Osh. Osh means food. So their main food is literally "food". It's a rice dish, a pilau, basically fried and boiled rice with onion, carrot, garlic, some spices and some meat. Then there is ShirChoi, literally milk tea. With a bit of bread to dip or soak in it, this is generally breakfast, at least in the mountains, and often lunch for people in poor circumstances. Now it's more than just milk. Just to make it healthy and tasty they add copious amounts of salt and butter. This seems to be a mountain thing, they do a similar thing in Nepal among Sherpa and Tibetan peoples, but it's a big local dish that they are proud of. Bread, flat bread usually cooked in a clay oven, is at every meal and pretty much every time you sit down at someone's house to eat, bread is life here. Fried meat and potatoes, a few other special dishes that rarely show up in villages round out the general food choices that we get to face, all fairly bland and basic. There isn't much we hate (though there is a fairly not-great party dish for funerals and religious events that shows up every now and then and salt butter tea takes some getting used to) but really not much to miss either.

So we end up making our own foods much more than local stuff. This is often dependent on the vagaries of season, availability in the bazaar, even if the roads are open and imports can get up here. Sometimes our choices come down to hot dogs and bread, since that is what is here. Other times we have lots of vegetables and basics to cook almost whatever we want (as long as it doesn't feature pork very heavily, though duck breast fillets have shown up a bit lately and make a decent substitute). It's a pretty normal conversation to talk about finding different items, where they were, and how much was left.

"Yep, bananas are here now, about four dollars a kilo, such and such place in the bazaar."

"You won't believe it, but oreos showed up in the big grocery store yesterday!"

"Yeah, we have cherry Dr. Pepper right now. Don't know if they will ever get it again, but it's here."

"Hey, I found a russian thing that apparently is cottage cheese. Hope you can find it sometime, here is what it looks like, but I bought all they had. Sorry."

This can be a source of great friendship or great bitterness. It is hard to let go when a unique item from home shows up and no one bothers to pick you up some. On the other hand, when a random shop down in the capitals ships in a bunch of Dr. Pepper and friends pick you up some cans (or cases of cans as the case may be), it forges an unbreakable bond of friendship (at least from our side).

That said, we eat very well all things considered. Thanks to the Russians we get some of our favorite staples in stores here, including Gouda cheese (from time to time), mayonnaise, olives, and plenty of yoghurt. Cindy is quite adept at making bread, so we get sandwiches and such fairly regularly. We buy good meat in the capital and freeze it and bring it up, so even hamburgers and ground beef burritos get in rotation here. There are always a few little things that make eating a joy when they either show up or get sent to us. We want for nothing really but tastes of home can be as much emotional as tasty. Getting a food you haven't eaten since you were last home is a brief moment of joy that is hard to describe.

This is true even of people on short term trips. It's fairly normal to get short term personnel or visitors reminiscing about barbecue or sushi after two weeks in country, blissfully unaware of the years yet to come before you get to enjoy such things. You never know what you will miss until you can't get it, but we have to bite our tongues every now and then and avoid bringing up how long it is going to be before we get Chick-Fil-A so stop talking about it before I make you eat stale bread from the bazaar for the next week.

Food is so much more than just sustenance. It is fellowship and memories. It is sitting around a table (or a table cloth on the floor) and enjoying company. It is trust and hosting and so much of what we miss and what we enjoy. It's a picture of home and something to look forward to any time you miss anything about home.

So, if you ever wonder why someone who lives overseas has so much food on the list of things you could send or you wonder why their Facebook feed is a constant obsession with junk food, it's something that stands in for home in many ways. It doesn't matter if they live in a remote corner of nowhere or in one of the biggest modern cities on the planet, you never get a full taste of home until you get home. (Even in London, trying to describe biscuits and Jimmy Dean style pork sausage at a grocery store, yeah, we got some interesting looks). Sympathize from a distance and let them have their longing. And offer to take them out for a meal sometime...or even better, host them in your home for one.