Food for thought

From 3rd July


(Befriending camels in Wadi Rum)

Although breakfast was being served after the desert tour I had missed (see previous entry), and I knew I might miss a meal too, I didn’t care. I was getting reacquainted with Wadi Rum camels who were passing just outside the camp. I wasn’t very hungry anyway, and when I slipped back into camp I assumed my absence had gone unnoticed; it hadn’t.

“Why did you not eat?” several Sri Lankans asked as they crowded around me.
“Oh, no problem. I was looking at some camels.”
“No, this is not good. You must eat.” But there was no breakfast food remaining, and I continued to try to convince them I was, in fact, not hungry. “Why do you say you are not hungry? You haven’t eaten, you must be hungry.” Wishing to avoid going into detail about why I wasn’t hungry, I tried to walk away. The group sat me down, saying I must wait until some more eggs could be cooked and jam and bread found. I ate the heaping mound offered me reluctantly, and noticed the camp was strangely quiet and watchful. Thinking the Sri Lankans seated near me and staring at my food were suspicious, perhaps concluding it was a second breakfast, I felt I had to explain myself.
“This is the first time I eat today, ok?” I said stupidly. They continued staring. One of the men said something sarcastic in Sinhala and the rest laughed quietly. Something was up, but I couldn’t tell what, so I asked what the man said.
“He says eat your fill,” a woman explained in English. I nodded in his direction. It was only much later that afternoon that I learned the 1am traditional Arab dinner allegedly made half the camp sick.
“Last night they were smelling it and saying it was no good. The chicken didn’t even have salt,” Angelica, a tall eleven-going-on-twenty year old Sri Lankan whom I had befriended easily for her observant nature, her good sense of humor and of course, her English proficiency.
Recalling how I had eaten the salad, the rice and chicken with relish, I replied, “I didn’t notice anything strange about the food.”
“Oh, they were all saying it wasn’t good,” she said seriously. “Besides, we never eat Arab food unless we cook ourselves [usually for their Arab employers]. My mom says to never eat it off the street [from street vendors] or at another house. We don’t know if it’s clean or not.”
“I eat street falafel and shawarma all the time, and I haven’t been sick from it,” I said. I thought back to an interview with a Qualified Industrial Zone (QIZ, like a Free Trade Zone or FTZ) agent three days prior. He had gone at length to impress me with the rowdiness of his Sri Lankan contract factory workers and how unclean their living quarters were despite the management imploring them to clean it. “In their living quarters they fry garlic, eggplants, these things in their small pots,” he had said, wrinkling his nose. “It smells disgusting – no disgusting is not strong enough a word. Is there a stronger word?” he had asked me.
“Repulsive?” I offered reluctantly.
“And when you come visit the QIZ with me, I’ll show you how dirty they live, these Sri Lankans. And we give them good clean food from the cafeteria,” he continued. “And they go on strikes when they don’t get fish with their rice!”

I turned my thoughts back to what Angelica was saying as we strode through Aqaba’s fish market. Placing my hand over my nose, I tried to ignore the bloody bits of fish littering the gutters of the meat shops. Shark fins freshly sliced hung like trophies in shop entry-ways, and Angelica continued: “We always get fish when we come to Aqaba. It’s so much cheaper here than Amman.” I watched her family members haggle over a slab of bloody fish; a wizened Arab shopkeeper placed the raw fish meat barehanded on a scale.
“Won’t it smell on the bus on the way back?” I asked, lightheaded at the thought.
“We brought coolers and ice,” Angelica replied cheerily. Then less cheerfully she commented, “I guess I’ll be eating a lot of fish this week.”
Fish shopping completed, we returned to the bus for lunch. “Where are we eating, do you know?” I asked Angelica.
“Burger King,” she said. That, more so than the raw fish, make my stomach turn. Two weeks ago the international church I attend took a field trip to the nearby Burger King; over the next few days, about half the congregation became sick, myself included (see entry “All part of the experience”). At the time, I had assumed it was the Filipino or Sri Lankan meals I had been served; now I was more suspicious of fast food joints than any “ethnic” dish offered me. I told Angelica about my food poisoning at the Burger King in Amman.
“Well, this should be better than the one in Amman,” she affirmed.

The 46 orders had been placed in advance, but when we picked them up, intending to eat them on the bus, the confusion began. Angelica’s uncle opened one of the brown bags and held up the tiny sandwich, a greasy, junior sized bun, and began shouting. As an example, the single serving greasy brown bag was passed around, and the angry voices multiplied. Since they spoke in Sinhala, I only could guess at what was happening. After ten or fifteen minutes of arguing with the poor tour guide in broken Arabic, the Sri Lankans gathered up the food and returned the three large sacks containing 46 smaller sacks to the Burger King. “What happened?” I finally asked the Sri Lankan priest.

“My people have been cheated!” he exclaimed. “They got this small bun only for 3JD (about 5 dollars) – no fries, no drink!” I suppressed a laugh.
The Brazilian and I were unimpressed, having seen the Burger King menu in Amman. Fast food in other countries, Jordan included, is often expensive and indeed, a luxury, and I said this.
“Yes, she’s right,” the Brazilian joined in. “My friend and I ate at a McDonald’s in Amman and for the two of us to eat a burger and fries, it was 16 JD (about 25 dollars). It is too expensive,” he said.

The priest just blinked, bewildered at this revelation that reputedly cheap fast food was not cheap after all. Long story short, the Burger King honored the request to add fries and drinks – the smallest size, mind you – but reduced the meals by half. So half the group, enraged at being cheated, visited the Popeye’s restaurant next door and purchased what they considered a reasonable amount of food for a reasonable amount of money. The Brazilian and I exchanged, once again, a knowing look. Again, I thought back to the QIZ agent’s rant about Sri Lankan factory workers “taking their food for granted”. “They don’t know how much it costs us to have that food for them – good, clean food from the cafeteria,” he had said in defense of factory policy. “We can’t have fish every day like they want. That’s expensive!” And as the argument continued on the bus, I wondered who was right: the QIZ agent, the Sri Lankans, or no one. It certainly gave me some cross-cultural food for thought.