On Food

A few food thoughts. I'm a practicing carnivore, but sometimes I get a guilty feeling about going round the world eating the local wildlife. But ... Llama, didn't like much the first time, in kind of chunks like braising steak. The day after I asked for omellette in the cafe at Tiahuanaco and they gave me a fried llama steak anyway. And this was much better.

I don't have a good vocabulary to describe tastes but this was much stronger. Most people say like "game" although how descriptive this is I don't know. It isn't much like the venison I've had.

The alpacca I tried last night was even stronger, and slightly vinegary. (Though this could have been the sauce.) In general I'd eat both again, unlike rabbit.


Needless to say, I liked La Paz more as I got used to it. Especially in the sun. Though it's always cold. (And this is mid-summer) The streets are filled with women wrapped in heavy woollen skirts and shawls, selling stuff. Often from neatly piled pyramids of everything from vegetables to shoes.

When I was a child, my father used to take me to Croydon's Surrey Street market. But I didn't like it much. Full of alien smells, and people shouting, and shops with too realistic slabs of meat and dead fish. And the street was always dirty with a mix of mud and squashed vegetables. I much prefered clean, sanitized supermarkets.

As an adult, I haven't quite got over the trauma.

My friend Hilan, on the other hand, dived into the La Paz streets (all of which are de facto markets) with alacrity, coming back with unusual fruits, dried bananas, fried beans (like better crisps), nuts and sweet fried peanuts. All of which, of course, extremely good.

"All Westerners see here is poverty" he announced. "They don't see how rich these people are in some ways." There's a far wider variety and better quality of food here than in the west.

Is this true? I make a feeble attempt at defending my beloved super-market. Surely there are 60 or 70 types of fruit and vegetable in my local Sainsbury's (UK) or Extra (Brazil). 60 or 70? Bolivia (as the guides are proud to announce) has 450 varieties of potato, most of which are probably available on the streets of La Paz. Along with thousands of other types of fruit and vegetable.

Bolivia and Peru between them have high mountains, coastal deserts, pantanal wetlands, Amazonian jungle and lake Titikaka. This is very wide range of environments and varieties of plants.


I think of the poor-looking farms we flew over as we entered La Paz. They look better driving across the high plains in the sunlight - a bit like the Austrian Tyrole - but still poor. However the point is, they can all be doing something different. Where as the supermarkets are enforcing conformity on their suppliers. And large-scale monoculture is needed to support it.

Here each farm grows what suits it's location, and what each family knows. And they manage to sell it in the street markets of La Paz. It's a highly decentralized, distributed, agoric system, which produces an extra-ordinary diversity. And it works to it's scale. Bolivians don't starve. La Paz has a million people. El Alto (the poorer district above La Paz) has another two million.

But it looks back-breaking hard work. I see women (and it seems to be mainly women visibly working the fields as well as selling in the streets) hoeing the earth with heavy hand tools. Occasionally men ploughing with oxen. Tractors only in Peru. I wouldn't swap my life with any of them. And I wouldn't advocate trying to preserve this life from the encroachment of middle-class, modernity. But there is something we need to understand and keep.