Palate Shock

(photo by Terrapin Trails)

In-and-Out tasted bland after coming back from Cambodia.

Yes, most countries are developing faster than Cambodia.  No infrastructure.  Garbage everywhere.

Yes, there was political instability with the biggest protest in 30 years.

Yes,  I feared social anarchy, plotting my escape to the US embassy or Vietnam.

But after biting into that burger, I couldn't help but feel sorry for the United States.

The United States has one of the most sophisticated infrastructure for growing, transporting, and even scientifically analyzing what we eat.  Yet most American food lacks the capacity to provide nourishment and satisfaction after eating.

Rich and poor Americans alike are constantly hungry, thinking that nourishment comes from quantity, not quality.

Exactly a day after coming back to the US, I walked into Target with my friends.  I was shocked at how sterile the food was.  A whole aisle dedicated to food in bar-form, some only 100 calories!  Boxes are covered with photo-shopped pictures with numbers and chemicals only an organic chemist would understand.  All provide the illusion of fulfillment.

Food in Cambodia is about survival and instinct.  Although some food borrows techniques from modern agricultural science, most of it is still unchanged and organic.

When you drive half an hour away from the city, tanned faces of farmers are sweating, bending, and plucking.  All hope their crop produces something.  The green rice paddy is checkered with patches of dry dirt and weeds.  These are the failures unable to feed, a little closer to death.

The harvest then gets packed briskly and tightly onto anything that runs on gasoline, only to be hoisted across pock-marked roads.

Delivery, seller, buyer all  converge to market, a canopy-covered sweaty arena of organized chaos.  Everyone's movement figuratively and literally tries to survive the mass chaos.

A pedestrian is almost run over by a motorcycle weighed down by onions.

The seller haggles high.  The buyer low.

Mothers and daughters looking, rubbing, smelling, using their feminine instinct to satisfy their family's guts.

Everyone follows the instinct fighting for the last penny.

When the prizes are bought, the food was harvested or killed within the same 24 hours.

The buyer is usually the cook as well.  A good cook will be like a mother tending her baby as she cleans and nurtures the food with all the love and affection she can give.  Sometimes sweating for another 3 hours in the kitchen heat.  When all is said and done, the food is ready to provide nourishment.  When you eat, you feel the power of food down to your very bones.

Food in Cambodia completely satisfies the instinct for hunger.