Food, glorious food

Food, glorious food! Hot sausage and mustard! While we're in the mood. Cold jelly and custard! So goes the song, but here it could be changed to something with fish amok, fried rice and beef loklak – that’s if you don’t talk about the ants, cockroaches and boiled eggs with chicks inside that are all special snacks here.

You may remember me mentioning in the blog I wrote about a typical day in the field, that I’m vegetarian. Yes, I have been off and on since school and it is a battle of principled beliefs and the craving for a good schnitzel or burger; normally I am vegetarian for a couple of years and then go on a big trip to a country with no vegetarian infrastructure and thus am forced to eat meat (the first time it was excruciatingly difficult as meat repelled me at the time). And back in Europe I often just stuck with it, until a conversation with my best friend and vegetarian pain in the arse Paul (who I originally converted induced, stupid me!).

The first half of this year I craved meat, and was quite looking forward to the opportunity of being in Cambodia for six months to renege on my principles and go for it. So my first evening here, it was grilled beef with lime, chili, garlic and pepper. YUM! But then a friend pointed out that it was actually quite easy in Phnom Penh to be vegetarian. And I realised it was. So after two days of enjoying meat again, I was back off the bandwagon. And in Phnom Penh it’s easy – there is delicious food from all over the world for reasonable prices and everywhere has a vegetarian option or two or more on the menu. And at the end of the alley I live is a restaurant called ‘Vegetarian’ – now if that doesn’t give me the ‘vegetarian infrastructure’ I lamented, I don’t know what I am expecting!

It gets a little trickier out in the provinces. There are conspicuously no vegetarian cafés, Lebanese falafel shops or Mexican burrito places, and this is hardly surprising. I was positively charmed by Phnom Penh when I arrived at the diversity of the international cuisine and also the availability of traditional Khmer food adapted for veggies. Well, in the provinces, it gets a little more meaty and thus difficult.

Most places, if not in the centre of a provincial town, have a system reminiscent of a cafeteria, in which there is a table with several pots of different dishes from which you choose the meal of choice and get some rice to go with it. I have not yet seen a pot without fish, chicken, pork or beef. I just don’t think those dishes exist. And so normally I’ll be able to order some fried rice or if lucky they may even make me some fried vegetables to go with some rice, and if I’m less lucky at the beginning I would eat something from one of the pots, something with chunks of meat which look least likely to fall right off the bone and thus let me pick them out. Nowadays I tend to just go without the meal and by dinner time we can normally rustle up some fried rice somewhere.

Am I a fussy eater? Not really. I struggle with the thought that I come to a place and then make extra demands as I don’t want to eat the food of this country. Does that make me an arrogant Western person, unwilling to let himself be immersed by the culture of the country he is researching? Or does it make me a pragmatist who is happy to be in the provinces and eat a bland diet of fried rice and vegetables day after day, to uphold his dietary principles, but still enable him to do his research? Obviously, I come down on the latter side of the debate, but it does worry me what the people in the places we eat think. Particularly in a country overrun by Western development workers, many of whom seem ignorant of the people and the culture around them (but more on that another time!)

And then we return to Phnom Penh at some point and I breath a culinary sigh of relief. And off I go to my favourite café Java for coffee and scones, and maybe a pumpkin and carrot soup.