Need to Lose a Few Extra Pounds? Visit a Developing Country and Try the Poverty Diet.
I just came back from an extended vacation to find my clothes hanging off of me in loose folds. No, I didn’t go to a fancy weight loss retreat. My vacation was an all-inclusive of sorts, but instead of a ship’s buffet of delicacies served up 3 times a day, I was studying Spanish, living with a Guatemalan family, and eating my meals with them.
The headline isn’t meant to be offensive. It’s just that this is the first time I haven’t had to make a New Year’s resolution to drop those extra 5 or 10 pounds. As I think about the crazy diets that people all over the country are starting this week – The Cookie Diet, The Eat-Whatever-You-Want-For-One-Hour-A-Day-And-Starve-Yourself-the-Rest-of-the-Time Diet, the Caveman Diet – I can’t help but reflect on the almost unfathomable privilege inherent in not only being able to choose what and how much to eat at any time of the day, but also in our efforts to not eat, when a large part of the world struggles to get enough to eat. Guatemala being only one such place.
My experience wasn’t typical compared to other students I spoke with. It was better. My host mom ran a small restaurant in her home kitchen, so she’s a very good and resourceful cook who provides meals with more variety than most students are treated to.
Here’s a typical day:
Breakfast: Mush – a very thin, watery oatmeal with a banana cut up in it (if you are lucky) and lots of sugar. We’d also get a pancake, but that wasn’t typical, and coffee – very nice!
Lunch: This is the big meal of the day. Usually a 2 or 3-ounce portion of some type of meat and a half-cup of rice or potatoes – always accompanied by tortillas (the one thing there was always more of). Sometimes we’d have a vegetable, but not always. On another day, we’d get a clear chicken broth with potatoes and squash in a small bowl, accompanied by a small piece of chicken (usually a back or part of a thigh) and occasionally, a quarter of an avocado.
Dinner: A small scoop of beans, two fried eggs and more tortillas.
This was it. No snacks, no desserts, no seconds, no big feasts, nothing. On Christmas Eve we had tamales, which were special, but it wasn’t a feast, it was tamales with sliced white bread, nothing more.
Though I was hungry some of the time, I was living quite well compared to most Guatemalans. So, I was surprised to discover that I’d lost about 7 pounds.
Here’s a snapshot of what poverty in Guatemala means:
According to the World Bank, Guatemala has one of the most unequal income distributions in the hemisphere. The wealthiest 10% of the population receives almost one-half of all income; the top 20% receives two-thirds of all income. Somewhere between 32% and 70% of the population lives on less than $2 a day (or about 15 Quetzales) depending on whom you ask and when the statistic was gathered. The cost of basic food items has gone up 40% in the past two years, pushing many people into poverty. By some estimates, up to half of children in Guatemala live with chronic malnutrition.
The poverty in rural areas is worse than in the cities. A schoolteacher or well-paid factory worker in a city makes about $130 – $150 a month, or about 1,000 Quetzales. What does this money buy, foodwise? It’s hard for me to tell, because when I went to a market or restaurant, I paid tourist prices. A typical and cheap breakfast in a restaurant cost me about 20 Q. At the market a dozen tortillas cost 2 or 3 Q; a few pieces of fruit, 5 Q; a bag of rice, 10 Q; a half a chicken, 14 Q. Even if you consider that the prices for locals might be a bit less than the prices I paid, it’s not difficult to see how hard it would be for a family to get enough nourishment.
Many Guatemalan people (especially indigenous rural dwellers) have nothing to eat all day except tortillas. Some days they might get beans or rice, but not every day. Luckily, many rural Guatemalans are able to practice subsistence farming, or they would surely starve. But for many, even this tenuous way of life is threatened. As the country opens to more foreign investment and privatization through organizations like the World Bank, and treaties like CAFTA, more and more lands are being opened up to extractive industries that contaminate the land and push rural Guatemalans into lives of even more miserable poverty in the cities. You can read about Guatemalan resistance to open pit mining here.
The next time you’re worried about those extra holiday pounds, please take a moment to count your blessings. I know I will.
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6 Comments
January 7th, 2009 at 12:56 pm
Hey Vanessa — Were you part of a larger Spanish language immersion program?
One thing I wondered about was the meat at lunch — If, for ex, that 2-3 oz of chicken could be traded for a lot more beans, or if, for climate / agricultural / other economic forces where you were, the chicken was actually more readily available than more beans…. I guess some people would rather get the meat, but I’d readily trade for beans if I knew I’d get more food that way — Just curious.
green LA girl’s last blog post..Clicklist: New maxims
January 7th, 2009 at 2:59 pm
Thanks for such an honest and common sense article. It is hard to remember that much of the world doesn’t have the abundance that we have in this culture. Thank you also for using this forum to enlighten us as to what poverty means both in Guatemala and around the world.
jh
bodaweightloss
January 7th, 2009 at 3:38 pm
Green LA girl: Yeah, I hear you. I’d rather have the beans too, but despite the fact that I just wanted to be an easy guest and eat what was put in front of me I think there were cultural, rather than agricultural or economic factors at work around the meat thing. In Guatemala, meat is both a luxury and considered to be nourishing. So I think it was more about hospitality (serving us what they thought would satisfy us and make us happy. I know that’s why we got pancakes for instance!) and also trying to balance our meals properly for nutrition. And no, I wasn’t part of a larger immersion program but rather went through a certain school that was recommended to me (which I would highly highly recommend to anyone who is interested in the politics, history, and culture of Guatemala as well as the language). Email if interested in more info on the school.
jh: thanks for the kudos. It means a lot to know that people care about reading articles like this.
January 7th, 2009 at 4:41 pm
I spent some time in Costa Rica on a student program and though the diet was simple, it seemed more rich than what many of the locals had. We were served mostly seasoned rice, some fried or scrambled eggs here and there, a lot of stewed squash and beans, but the portions were always generous. Twice we had fresh cheese. Once we had fish and sometimes there was chicken, which I didn’t eat. I don’t remember any red meat. They did give us random rolls and biscuits frequently, which I think was not really so much a local dietary staple as an attempt to provide fare we non-ticos would enjoy.
Everything was simple, but tasty. It was all so fresh. The main thing I noticed was the lack of dairy and nuts – I was a vegetarian at the time and was used to eating dairy and nuts as my protein sources. Eating mostly rice, beans, juice, salads, and salsas of various types, after only a month I’d lost about 5 pounds. I also just felt better, I have to say. Lighter and cleaner.
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