Food Blog-Final Draft "Taste the World"

Christian Rodriguez

English 121-023

Food Blog-Final Draft

Taste the World

No matter where a person may go, something they will always find is food. The great thing about this is that every culture and every place differs greatly from the last one. Even though we get accustomed to our own daily routines of food, a new place will always bring forth an abundance of new pleasures to your taste buds. This summer I experienced many new things, in which 3 of them strongly stood out as experiences ill never forget.

Originally I’m from California, but my parents are from Guatemala. I had actually never gone to Guatemala, but this summer I was finally able to go. Aside from my cultural background, through most of my high school life, I was involved in a sort of youth group called Young Life. Every summer Young Life offers high school students a chance to go to summer camp for a week in which the people who serve, wash dishes, help cook, do laundry, and clean cabins are all high school students volunteering to work for free for a month long session. I had always heard word of how awesome and a great experience it was, and so my senior year of high school I decided to try it.

This volunteer work is referred to as "Work Crew". In Work Crew there are many jobs but one I’ve always liked is the dishwashers called “pits". This was my first stop in my summer of fun, and as for the food, it was amazing! The Work Crew would always eat about an hour before campers, and since it was camp we would get an unlimited amount of breakfast lunch and dinner entrees every day for a month. The food varied from bacon and sausage to tacos and pizza and even steak and pork loin. The dessert would be the best part especially on giant cookie night. As good as all this food may sound, since campers would only be there a week we would repeat the same weekly cycle and by the end of the month I was sick of all the food. What made this worse was they would save some of the food to reuse for later entrees( and I mean specific items that wouldn’t be touched). So I would taste some previous meal ingredients in other meals, and the funny thing is that wouldn’t be the last place I’d see it.

Pits would have to wash thousands of dishes each day including plate’s silverware bowls cups, all the stuff the kitchen would use and much more since there would be about 500 campers. The funny thing was a lot of the food would still be on plates when we would wash them, as well as the dishes the kitchen would use and the smell would just keep on lingering. If Pits wasn’t hard enough, even farther back we had Deep Pits for those who didn’t value their lives and for dishes too big to fit through the dishwasher. This place would have some awful smells since the enormous dishes that the kitchen used would have to be hand washed here. Sometimes we would also send dishes that we would let soak because the food would be stuck on the sides. The combinations got gruesome as we would soak multiple meal dishes in the same giant sinks and the combination of lasagna and brownie would mix into the water. On top of everything it would obviously get clogged and with no garbage disposal we had no choice but to use our hands. The smell would already be overwhelming, but the texture was unimaginable. Although that month was extremely hard, I felt that it was worth it because it was a very spiritual experience, and helped me further my relationship with God. Not only that but it taught me a great lesson in humility, especially since the pits were always in the back, except for the occasional pits calls in which the campers would call out for us and we would run out like madmen. Besides the occasional smells that still haunt me from these repeated meals, I am extremely glad I did it, and proud of the relationships I formed.

I have a great relationship with my immediate family, but as for the rest of my family I had actually never even met them because most of them live in Guatemala. This year I was finally able to see them all, and the great foods that came with this country. Even though my mom does cook some Guatemalan dishes, it did not compare to a whole countries cuisine. My parents I and my brother stayed with my aunt in a fairly low income neighborhood, which actually turned out to be cooler than I expected. I got that small town feel out of it as we would walk the streets through dozens of small food shops and most people would wave to my aunt who accompanied us most of the time( It was kind of a dangerous area too). Each shop offered something different like fried plantains, sliced mango, coconuts to drink out of, and other cultural dishes like rellenitos, atole, and choripan.

Once again there was a down fall to the food I would consume, especially since my stomach was not used to the ingredients used in most of the food. Not only did the ingredients affect me, and my family as well, but the way food items were treated in this region weren’t the most sanitary. As we would walk in a meat aisle of a store most of it would have flies on it, luckily for us my aunt knew the clean and trustworthy store owners and we didn’t have to worry about this for the most part. It did take a hefty toll on my stomach though, but even in this condition I had to take advantage of all the new foods to try. While in Guatemala I was finally able to see how it was to spend time with all of my family as we would spend most nights outside of my grandma’s house telling jokes and stories while drinking coffee and eating sweet bread.

As cozy and inviting as Guatemala was, my next stop on my summer journey was one of the most physically challenging experiences that I have ever embarked on. I decided to go on a week long backpacking trip with some Young Life people, and man was it tough. This trip took someplace in the Wyoming Rocky Mountain region and we had to have enough supplies and food for a week, which luckily the guides told us what to bring and not to bring and practically supplied everything except for our boots and clothes and other necessities, which wasn’t much because it was all going to be on our backs. Things such as rain flies, shovel, and pots which I carried were all distributed evenly as well as the food packs, which guys carried 3 and girls 2. These packs were about 50 pounds each and although that doesn’t sound that badly, just putting it on required 2 people and when a person is hiking up and down a mountain for hours it becomes so heavy that the main areas the pack is resting on bruise, which felt horrible as you had to rest it back on those same spots the next day and start hiking again.

Since we carried everything we ate, every time a guide would tell a certain person that we would be eating one of their food packs, it was one of the greatest feelings knowing the pack just got lighter. The food itself was pretty decent considering everything we used was what we carried, especially pizza bagel lunch which was a double reward since it was one of my meals. Except for the occasional hot chocolate we would just have water which tasted pretty bad because it was from lakes, but that wasn’t what made it taste bad, it was the iodine which we had to put in so that we wouldn’t get diarrhea. We would always set up camp next to a lake so that we would have a water source, which meant we had to pee 100ft. away and do our business 200 ft. away, luckily we had hand sanitizer. As for hygiene, there wasn’t much of it because we couldn’t do anything in our drinking source and apparently deodorant would just clog up a persons pores making us even stinkier, and as for the toilet id rather not write our methods especially since we were following “no trace left behind” meaning we could not bring toilet paper(but feel free to ask me in person). The Guides would make all the food with minimal tools and since we only had one cup with a spoon attached it would get a little dirty, but we all dealt with our situation greatly and there were no problems. As hard as this trip was, it felt even greater at the end of the week when I had accomplished it and I learned a lot about myself and about this big blue planet we call home.

Every single one of these experiences not only brought forth new friends and relationships as well as a new perspective on my own life, but it allowed me to truly taste what these places and cultures were like. This summer has probably had the biggest impact on my life and I’m truly glad I took on these challenges and events. Since I stepped out of my daily routine, my daily eating habits were forced to change in good and horrible ways. Even though each of these new food experiences had its downside I would never trade what I learned and what I tasted for anything else, as long as I don’t ever see lasagna and brownies in the same meal.