Gross food: one topic that never goes away. But first, some backstory. My dad and I have gone hunting together since I was pretty young; it’s a semi-sacred business in our family, and I was taught from an early age that it is generally bad to kill an animal unless you plan on eating it.<\/p>\n
Last week, I learned to kill turwex<\/em> (giant dragonflies) with the kids. Much like dove hunting, it’s heaps of fun and the bodies pile up rapidly, but you have to come up with something creative to do with the meat. We put a lot of doves on the farmers’ dinner tables back in the day, and around here I solve the dilemma by giving the turwex<\/em> to the kids I am hunting with, and they gladly gobble them up.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Today, however, the karma wheel rolled around, and smashed me beneath it. We returned from a particularly awful 12-hour trip, and got in kindof late. The neighbors, being excessively nice folks, invited us over for some dinner. The usual fare: really watery coffee, all-you-can-eat tortillas, and a thin gruel of boiled cabbage. I greatfully accepted my bowl, then noticed what looked like cinnamon sticks floating in it. “What a pleasant change of pace,” i thought. Then i noticed the cinnamon sticks had heads, composite eyes, and spindly legs.<\/p>\n Needless to say, Emily gave me The Look, and i knew there was no escape for me: time to chow down on Dragonfly Soup. The process was smiliar to the cow-belly soup from a few weeks ago: small spoonfulls, big gulps of coffee, swallow whole. Ignore taste.<\/p>\n As I was finishing my soup, the conversations went something like this (in mixed Spanish and Q’anjob’al):<\/p>\n \n Lina: “You don’t like the soup?”<\/p>\n Me: “No, no, i am just a little weak from the journey. I must eat slowly.”<\/p>\n Lucy (one of the daughters) : “Can I have some more, Lina? Go extra on the dragonflies, please.”<\/p>\n (Lina dishes out some Mayan home-cookin’ goodness)<\/p>\n Me, to Lucy: “Are the dragonflies your favorite part?”<\/p>\n Lucy: “mmm-hmm.” (nodding, as she stuffs three into her mouth)<\/p>\n Emily: (under her breath)”Wow, you sure got a lot. I only got five.”<\/p>\n Me: “I hate you right now.”<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n \nI did, however, succeed in eating all that was set in front of me. My greatest fear now is that I will get sick tonight and throw up. There is no reason I should; all was well-boiled. But if I do, it will be the most traumatic even of my time so far in Guatemala, becuase all of the dragonflies in my belly are still mostly whole, as I didn’t chew a single one. And they are sharp and pointy, and will hurt if they get stuck in my nose on the way out. Pray for me. And, of course, i have no picture to prove any of this, due to the sticky social situation. Argh.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Gross food: one topic that never goes away. But first, some backstory. My dad and I have gone hunting together since I was pretty young; it’s a semi-sacred business in our family, and I was taught from an early age that it is generally bad to kill an animal unless you plan on eating it. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_s2mail":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-301","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-jims-guatemala"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jfanjoy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/301","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jfanjoy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jfanjoy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jfanjoy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jfanjoy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=301"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.jfanjoy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/301\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":392,"href":"https:\/\/www.jfanjoy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/301\/revisions\/392"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jfanjoy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=301"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jfanjoy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=301"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jfanjoy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=301"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}