The Peace Corps Madagascar Diet: Sud-Est version

This morning I was eating breakfast and thinking about what my favorite foods are. Mangoes, avocadoes, cherries, lobster, and chocolate all probably take the top spot. And lucky me, I live in a region that produces 4 out of 5 of those things! Still, it’s been a learning curve figuring out how to eat here, and how to cook for myself without refrigeration and running water. You all know that I love to cook, and back at home I’d think nothing of cooking everything single meal for myself. But it’s different doing that here, without having a refrigerator to rely on (for storing ingredients/leftovers), or running water, or lots of food options, or frankly, the money required to be an adventurous cook. We have tons of great local fruit in my area, so my fruit intake is excellent: right now my town is overflowing with oranges, bananas, pineapples, jackfruit, something called sakoa that I’d never seen before, my new favorite fruit pocanelle, which literally tastes like you’re eating vanilla ice cream, and soon there will be mangoes and lychees!. But I need to work harder to get greens in my diet, because I’ve been a little trepidatious about cooking the greens I’ve seen in the market. I’m also in an area with tons of great fish, but I haven’t cooked any of it yet. I will fully admit that I’m kind of intimidated by cooking fish here, since I don’t yet know how to deal with gutting/filleting a whole fish (there’s no such thing as a pre-cut, deboned salmon fillet!) But I’m hoping a fellow volunteer who lives nearby will help teach me. Also, it is soon to be lobster (langouste) season here, so I’m definitely going to be buying a lot of those!

There is a big market area in my town and every day, I can reliably get fruit, meat, eggs, grains/beans, vegetables, plus basic grocery items at any of the epiceries. However, Monday is the big actual market day in my town, and that’s when I can get good bread, and a better variety of produce. The things that I can always find—tomatoes, onions, green beans, greens, carrots, potatoes—I’m pretty sure I’ll get sick of very soon, so I’ve got to start being a little more adventurous. I was getting a little worried about my calcium intake, but then I realized that I can find really good yogurt in my town on my way to work: there is a mpivarotra yaourt who walks around the taxi-brousse station with a cooler, and sells really yummy little cups of yogurt for 500 Ariary (about 25 cents). You have to eat it on the spot because they re-use the containers, but it only takes a few minutes to eat. It’s always plain flavor, but has just a little bit of sweetness—really good.

Things that I am craving that are definitely not available here: New York pizza/bagels with cream cheese/black & white cookies (obviously), Chinese takeout (sigh), butter (you can only find margarine, which is weird since you’d think that a former French colony would have butter), cherries (double sigh), cookies and other baked goods (no one has an oven), real cheese other than La Vache Qui Rit (there’s really only 1 or 2 kinds of Malagasy cheese, and they’re only in Antsirabe, the dairy region), bacon (also strange, because there is plenty of pork here), ice cream (not many freezers here), almond milk/coconut milk, iced coffee, good wine, PEANUT BUTTER, almonds and other nuts, oatmeal…. See my updated wish list tab if you feel like sending me anything! J

For illustrative purposes, here’s what I ate one day last week:

Breakfast: coffee, 4 small bananas, half a small mofo de pain (sort of like a baguette).

Lunch: I splurged and went to a hotely (café) for lunch and had chicken with rice. That cost 3000 Ariary ($1.50), which doesn’t sound like a lot, but I’m trying to stick to a tight budget in order to save money for buying furniture as well as a vacation in-country in August, so I am trying to not spend more than 2000 Ariary a day on food.

Dinner: I made pasta with sauteed carrots, green beans, and tomatoes, and for dessert I had a grapefruit that my friend Marcelin gave me from the tree in his backyard.  As you can imagine, my weight has gone down considerably, which would be awesome except none of my clothes seem to fit anymore, especially since they’re all stretched out from handwashing anyway! It’s also fairly ironic that I’m now skinny enough to wear all the cute clothes I wanted to wear in New York, but being a Peace Corps volunteer, my wardrobe is t-shirts, tank tops, jeans, and shorts.

A few Mondays ago was a slightly more gluttonous day, perhaps because it was a national fety (Pentecost) and I was feeling celebratory, or maybe because I am finally starting to get the hang of how to cook for and feed myself here. I also walked all over town, for about an hour and a half total, though, so I figured that I probably could have used the extra calories:

Breakfast: 5 mofo balls (fried dough, each one about the size of a golf ball); coffee to drink

Lunch: fried fish with rice and greens at a hotely (splurged and went out because a friend was visiting me!); ranon’ampongo to drink (a hot tea-like beverage made from boiling the burnt rice at the bottom of the rice pot. This sounds weird but I’ve gotten to like the taste, and I drink it because it comes free with every meal at a hotely. Hydration is key, and I’ll take anything that’s free!)

Snack: a Rice Krispie treat that my mom sent me in a care package—I’d been saving it for a month!

Dinner: super amazing sandwich that I made on mofo de pain, with one whole mashed avocado, tomato, lettuce, and a fried egg; for dessert I had 1 small banana and 1 sakoa (looks like a small mango, tastes like a cross between an orange and a mango—delicious!)

Finally, you may be wondering to yourself now, how exactly does she cook, then? Although almost every Malagasy person cooks over an open fire, or uses a fatana-charbon to cook over charcoal, Peace Corps has us buy portable gas stoves that are rigged up to a gas tank. It’s expensive to buy the gas, but it’s better from a health perspective, because the particulate matter that’s inhaled from charcoal causes innumerable respiratory health problems. Also, environmentally, the production of charcoal is incredibly harmful, because it requires lots of trees to be cut down and burned. Some other PC volunteers in Mada are working on “green” charcoal production, which is made from agricultural waste products, but it hasn’t really caught on yet.