Prahokalypse Now

In the West you have to try very hard to be skinny. In Cambodia you have to try like hell to get fat.

There’s eating for fun and there’s eating for fuel. The majority of the developing world seems to see food for what it is – a scarce luxury that can be gone all too quickly. Westerners, specifically Americans, and specifically me, have always gone the other way.

Far the other way…

Growing up Greek-American, food was cultural. It was part of the vibrancy of Greek life. To eat and drink and make merry till you’ve had your fill (then YaYa drops another ladle of fakes on your plate). Overabundance at the table was a way of showing that WE, were OK. No matter what comes at us next (Nazis, Civil War, Yianni), we had a good meal beforehand.

As I matured and went out into the world as a young man trying to make an impression, I began to see things differently. Fancy dinner outings for work or women, while socially necessary, left me feeling cheated more often than not. The cost of the meal outweighing the extravagance of the truffled-oils infused with the last breaths of a baby panda.

It became less about enjoying the food and the company and the wine and more about status, class, and privilege. Things that I have come to Asia to understand better, and try to reset.

This morning, when I woke, I gathered my things, and moved to my porch to cook breakfast on my small stove. Two eggs fried with pepper. Simple.

While waiting for the palm oil to heat I noticed a young girl and her father setting out into the nearby lake in a small canoe. Fishing pole in hand, like most Khmer locals this time of year, I paid them little mind. Things are tough going into the monsoon season and foraging for food is all too common.

The surprise came halfway through the fishing expedition when the father spotted what appeared to be an injured duck. Alive, but seemingly unable to fly away, the mottled white and brown creature seemed contented to paddle idly around the lake in front of the canoe.

Slam!

Down comes the canoe’s oar on top of the duck – held firmly in the hands of the father. The small girl in the rear paddles frantically to maintain course and speed, laughing hysterically as she rows. The duck cannot take flight, but stunned from the oar, dives and resurfaces nearby.

Now standing proudly on the bow of his small ship, Asian Ahab gestures frantically to his rowing section to change course, dutifully on the trail of Moby Duck.

Slam!

Another great splash, another high pitched squeal of delight as the small girl is wetted from head to toe in her father’s maniacal efforts to put food on the family table.

A long pause. Then, triumphantly, the old man reaches beneath the water and emerges with his prize. Raising it up, the water beading beautifully off the oily feathers, he looks at his daughter proudly. She claps excitedly, perhaps hungrily, and points the small boat home.

This duck is a prize. It may be fed on discarded plastic and pulltabs, but a prize nonetheless. It will go further, be used in more dishes, and feed more people than a few greasy carp. A happy coincidence for everyone but the duck I suppose.

But such is life. The realities of it weigh on all, and push to the periphery such moral ambiguities. Everyone hustles. Some of the hardest working Khmer I know are quite literally starving in front of my eyes. Unable by hook or by crook to secure work steady enough to eat.

That said, things are changing. The rise of instant meals, and packaged, processed meats and seafood from China and Vietnam, has made things somewhat cheaper, but taken the priority off fresh local ingredients.

Young hip Khmer families now crowd the few western-style chains, paying sometimes four times the average daily wage for a single hot-dog-stuffed-crust seafood pizza.

The spotless Formica, conditioned air, and helpful uniformed staff transports the customer someplace entirely un-Cambodian. To a generation brought up on fermented fish, eaten from a child’s tea-party set on the edge of a congested street, it might as well be from another planet.

Pizza Company – Phnom Penh, Cambodia

The old may turn their noses, wanting no more of this culinary imperialism. But the young, reared on badly dubbed movies and Friends episodes, seem to crave it like they do blue jeans and Bieber-cuts.

For the time being anyways, a walk down any beach in Cambodia at sunset is still usually peppered with middled aged Khmer women sitting, fully clothed, in the surf. Soaking wet in their mandatory floral print pajamas, they sift the sand with bare hands, collecting tiny molluscs the size of a thumbnail one at a time.

Laughing and joking between themselves along the surf line, they may as well be at the salon. Generally a semi clothed child follows behind, either helping to collect, or carefully holding the bucket while playing in the waves. Later on they will somehow coax a delicious lemongrass and garlic bouillabaisse from this paltry handful of tiny shells.

There will be little fussiness at dinner for the young ones. No broccoli pushed aside in defiance. The memories of famine and privation linger on the minds of not only the grandparents, but the parents themselves. The children will be fed from their laps if they won’t feed themselves. Balls of sticky rice, three-fingered into the mouths of squirming babes – always a fantastic mess.

The relationship to food out here is different obviously. More ‘hands on’ to say the least.

My sincerest hope is that the old ways are not thrown out entirely, simply adapted.

Cambodian life is open air. Most are born without air-conditioning and will die the same, never lacking for the smell of earth, and rain.

Eating local foods al-fresco, even if your food feels like it tastes like exhaust pipe, is the Khmer way. So drop an ice cube into your beer, get another slice of hot-dog pizza, and relax. It’s a beautiful night.