That which doesn't kill us...

The human body is amazing, it’s strength, it’s resiliency. It is amazing how delicate the balance it maintains. Amazing how food for one becomes the source of suffering for another. How the physical systems respond to the psychological input of cultural norms and acquired tastes. How one man’s horsemeat is another man’s dog food.

I will tell you this; Kazakhstan is no place for vegetarians or the gluten intolerant or Jack Sprat. Or even those who dwell too much on sanitation or the basics of safe food preparation practices. It’s not that there is anything wrong with the food. The people here appear well nourished, healthy, robust. But for our Westernized palates and sensibilities, it has it’s tough moments.

First, there is the sameness. Now, this is true in much of the world, not just Central Asia. We are nearly unique in the North America and Europe, in the variety of tastes and cuisines we have at our front doors. We go out for Chinese, Mexican, Indian, Ethiopian, French, Italian, Spanish, Greek, South American and Japanese. The majority of the world eats the local cuisine, day in and day out. There are some foods that have circled the globe, pizza being the easiest example, with regional variations. But generally, in Mexico you eat Mexican food, and in China you eat Chinese food, and in Kazakhstan, well, you eat a blend of Russian and traditional Kazakh food. This consists mostly of meat, potatoes, pasta, onions, cabbage, sausages, cheese, mayonnaise, jam and bread. Eat and repeat. Tomato sauce, tomatoes, cucumbers, sweets, and tea are thrown in to ‘break up’ the monotony, along with a few odd offerings such as the fake crab meat known in the U.S. as ‘surimi’.

We have our own cook, which is a luxury in some ways. She is here for breakfast, lunch and dinner. She gets paid $10 a day. She is a good cook, and spends long hours in our kitchen preparing homemade doughs and spicing meat and frying things. Lots of time frying things. But more about that later. Portions started out enormous, as quantity is evidently 'synonymous' with 'hospitality' here. Bacha’s ‘day job’ is as a registered nurse. She no longer works full time at the hospital, but occasionally leaves us to reheat our dinner or sends over a surrogate when she is called in to cover for someone. Her profession also leads to some interesting moments, such as when I discovered the source of the banging in the kitchen was she and Ceric, Habiba and Zhana’s cousin and our ‘driver’ (we walk everywhere, but Ceric appears to be the only one in the family with a car) hammering a nail into the back of the kitchen door. The nail was going into the door for the purpose of hanging an IV bag which ran into Ceric’s arm. Of course. Bacha said something about his heart, but it remained unclear what necessitated this treatment. For a number of days following this, I would come across Ceric sitting at our kitchen table, receiving his medication via IV. Whatever the medication is still sits in bottles in our kitchen cabinet.

Now, given Bacha’s true profession, you would think she would be up on sanitation and the issues that can arise as a result of unsafe food handling. But it seems not. We have a small, unheated balcony just off the kitchen that doubles as food storage and extra food prep space. With the sun the temperatures probably climb toward 50 degrees during the day, but are considerably lower at night. I often find chunks of meat sitting on the counter, uncovered, or a chicken sitting in a bowl awaiting dinner. This is also where bags of stale bread and food scraps are gathered in bags, pending some unknown fate, and bags of onions and potatoes and heads of cabbage are stored. Later, that same chicken is chopped up on the kitchen table. I am sure the table gets wiped down, but I am guessing no bleach solution is used. I feel like we are always one meal away from a case of food poisoning here. I am guessing the human body develops defenses to the things to which it is repeatedly exposed, but I hope not to be here long enough for that. Dishes get washed, and there is dish soap. But when the dish soap ran out, the dishes still got washed without it, for nearly a week. Many dishes are served ‘family style’. Now at home that would mean you take some and put it on your plate. Here that just means you stick your fork in and eat right out of the bowl. There might be 8-10 people at the table, and the dishes are simply passed back and forth. We stick to the main course a lot in those circumstances. And a visit to the butcher's area was enough to put you off your feed for a few days, according to Bruce. I know my limits, I didn't look in.

Then there is the issue of water, apart from the question of Typhoid, that is. We were told by Zhana that the water here is ‘pure’, good to drink right out of the tap. Two things about that. First, this is a mining town. The bauxite mines literally ring the town. If you have looked at my link to the Google earth image, you have seen the slag piles and pools of unnaturally colored water that accompany them. Perhaps there is a filtration system, but it seems unlikely it is state of the art. I have no information on bauxite mining, but it seems many mining processes require chemical use on some level. Secondly, the water is all coming through these Soviet-era pipes that run throughout the city. The inside of the teakettle has a light brown crust of mineral deposits nearly an 1/8” thick, which flakes off into the water. The emergency jar of water kept by the sink for when the water goes out, has a brownish tinge to it. And when I do laundry, the run-off water comes out blackish, with sand and sediment in the bottom of the tub it drains into, unexplained by the dirtiness of our clothes. So Bruce makes his trek to the corner store every other day for a ‘water run’. There is no way to know where this water really comes from, but at least I can see through it.

Our flat has a refrigerator, but typically here food is purchased meal by meal, rather than in the ‘bulk approach’ most of us use in the U.S. If I have to go to the grocery store more than once a week at home, I am peeved. Here, Bacha runs out to pick up a few things before she makes dinner, and shows up with bags of food first thing in the morning. The refrigerator is used loosely, mostly to store milk and butter, alongside the plates of sliced sausage and cheese we never touch. Leftovers placed in the refrigerator are never covered. Dinners left for us to reheat are left out on the counter for a few hours, conveniently next to the microwave. And nothing is served really cold. In fact, cold drinks are considered a health hazard, as they are believed to cause sore throats. Our cook, the registered nurse, insists on putting Jaden’s juice glass in a tea cup of hot water before he drinks it, much to his consternation.

We all consider breakfast the one meal we can count on. It typically consists of “Kasha”, which is a porridge made of some grain. It could be wheat, corn, oats, buckwheat, etc. It is made by heating milk and sugar and then cooking the grain in the mixture. Generally the kasha is accompanied by something else, which can vary from blinis to fried eggs with a big chuck of sausage in the middle, to a frosted, dry-muffin type bread, to french toast with jam. Always, meals here include hot tea, served with cream and sugar, and drunk even by the youngest children. Bruce has coffee made in a single serving french press, both of which we brought with us. Jaden has trained Bacha to pour him juice with every meal now, and since we don’t know how to explain that he shouldn’t get it with EVERY meal, we just let it continue.

Lunch is the big meal of the day, as is typical in much of the world. The food is plentiful, but is treacherous with oil and poor cuts of meat. For the first two weeks or so, we got soup every day, along with another huge portion of food. The soups were generally cooked with liberal amounts of oil and salt, and often included chunks of boiled beef, which is where the menu took on an unfavorable cast for Bruce and Jaden in particular. It was the 5th grade lunch room on spinach day all over again. There was grimacing, groaning and kvetching. Lots of kvetching. They pushed the food around with the spoon and bemoaned their fates. Jaden was actually better about eating it than Bruce. Finally, we asked Habiba to tell Bacha ‘no more soup’. Also, no more boiled beef, served any way, as they would also come atop pasta, sometimes beside the soup, in the same meal. The funny thing about this was that Habiba told us that Bacha was making the daily soup for us because “American’s often have trouble with their stomach’s,” and she thought soup would be good for the digestive system. This picture is two weeks worth of oil and salt, and a year's worth of dish soap...

Besides the soup, pasta is a main feature of lunch as well as dinner, and always includes some meat, but little else. There may be a thin sauce, and there is nearly always a layer of oil in the bottom of the bowls. Other times Bacha will prepare a type of dumpling. ‘Manti’ are the traditional Kazakh dumplings made from a thin dough wrapped around ground beef meatballs and eaten with mayonnaise. There are Korean dumplings, which seem very similar to Manti, only different in shape and slightly heavier dough. There are fried dumplings, again wrapped around a ground beef filling, or occasionally onions or potatoes. These can come in a variety of sizes and shapes, and are good, but repetitive. Plates of a salami-like sausage and cheese are common accompaniments to the main course. There is also bread with butter and jam at every meal, and since we have asked, we now get tomatoes and cucumbers fairly regularly, and there is a bowl of fresh fruit. Don’t get the idea these are standard however, as fruit seems mostly reserved for special occasions.

As for dinner, it is much of the same. Meat and wheat being the dominant themes. I was told there is a Kazakh saying that a man needs “two cows and a half a horse” to survive the winter. Apparently this was the measure of the amount of meat a Kazakh adult would eat throughout the winter during the nomadic years of Kazakh history. Bruce has managed to steer the menu toward chicken and rice from time to time, his perennial favorites. We asked to be on our own for lunch twice a week, as we did bring some food from home: Tuna, peanut butter, mac and cheese for Jaden. Habiba told us that we ‘can eat that food at home. Here you should eat Kazakh food’. We tried insisting that we wanted to eat our food. She is under the impression that Americans only eat packed foods and foods with preservatives and chemicals. She wants us to have the ‘natural’ food they eat here, as she is sure it is better for us than our regular diets.

We have not yet figured out what exactly they eat in the orphanage, but do know it consists of a lot of pasta and kasha. We stuck our heads in the other night as they were making dinner. Jaden is fascinated by the big stoves and many pots. They told us they were serving kasha, bread, butter, and tea to the children. The pediatrician also told us they give them sweets daily- cakes, pies, cookies, all homemade in the orphanage. But they limit their chocolate intake to special occasions, and don’t feed the children fish or sausage. Fish because there is no body of water here that isn’t contaminated, and they don’t get fish from the sea this far inland. Sausage because it isn’t deemed ‘safe’ by the Health Ministry. But they assure us it is OK for us to eat. Comforting.

So, we try not to think too much about what we eat, and we try not to think too much about what we’re not eating. We have some movies and shows we brought on our computers, transferred from Tivo. The food commercials are the hardest. Jaden is psyched to come home and be a night owl with his Daddy for a few days as they adjust the time change. One of the things he is most excited to do when he gets back to Boulder is to go to the Lazy Dog on the Pearl Street Mall and eat chicken wings and play bubble hockey. So, anyone with some late-night time on their hands early May, look them up there. And anyone with some late-night time on their hands early June, and a yen for eating Sushi can look me up then. In the meantime, enjoy all of the culinary delights you have at your fingertips, and enjoy that little piece of the diversity of the world in which we live from the comfort of your own towns.