Don’t leave beans out on the counter. They go bad. I almost panicked because it was lunch time and to make a new batch of beans would take a couple of hours of WAITING. Good thing I took my friend’s advice and soaked more beans last night. Soaked beans take less than an hour to cook—and for the first time, they are actually soft! Yes to Day 6 soft beans! (I was just getting used to the crunch).
I sat and watched the cook at Living Stones move around the kitchen. She has this grace and smoothness that captivates me. She washes, puts away, straightens, and organizes in one fell swoop. And I sit and watch.
“I like working.” She says, as she sees me watching her. I can tell. I ask if she always has, or had to learn to like it. “Oh Rachel, my mother was too poor to raise me—she lived out in the middle of nowhere. So she went into the city and gave me away. The woman who raised me used to hit me something horrible. I spent my whole life serving others and cleaning. And then, I got used to it. And now I enjoy it.”
The choices we make make us. I told her about the rice and beans experiment. “But,” I said, “I found out that really, to identify with the poorest people in the world, I should be eating rice and maize instead of rice and beans.” Yes, she said, it is true…she has seen too much of only rice and maize herself. She thinks back to her mother: “She was poor, so poor.” And shakes her head.
It is hard to see that things are getting so much better (in statistics) when all I see is bean prices going up, so fewer people who get them. How is this getting any better? And just look at the cycle: being hungry makes it hard/impossible to work, grow, and learn; which makes you unable to get the money to ever get the food to stop being hungry in the first place.
While there are many places dealing with food for survival—one meal from complete starvation—most of the children I work with are dealing with food consistency. Sometimes they have, sometimes they have not.
I saw a picture of a child’s healthy brain, and next to it, the brain of a child who did not know if they would have their next meal or not—it was almost a third smaller. Because poor people are dumb? No, because our brains, when not given consistent nutrition, go into survival mode rather than learning mode. And once there, it is hard to get out for awhile, even if you do have food at home.
I’ve been thinking about what my friend said about many people in Africa not eating fruit, even when it was available in season. Why would you only eat corn mush and fried leaves when there were mangos around? Why would you cook everything in heavy oil and salt? Why wouldn’t you plant more fruit trees?
It is easy to write it off and say it is due to a lack of education. But after being in education for 10 years, I am beginning to think it is more than that. And what is worse: what about the millions of Americans who make the daily educated decision to eat poorly?
I stare at the cake mix. I am making cake for the girl’s bible study at my house. I really, really want to lick the spoon. Or the bowl. It is on my fingers…drip, drip. It is the principle of the point. The point is blurry when I am hungry and oh so close. Bible study was about self-esteem. Funny the girls’ reactions to the mirror I held out to them…giggles, shying away, primping, ignoring. Powerful. I still preach this to myself. But I have to say—while eating only rice and beans, I never feel fat.
