A Cow Head 25th

Day one of marinading

          I recently found myself in a conversation with a few people about birthdays and what constitutes a memorable birthday celebration. As I sat there thinking about the question I tried to reflect on as many individuals’ birthdays as I could, but found myself unable to remember anything before the age of 18. I guess that makes sense given that it is always easier to remember things that occurred more recently, but it got me thinking about my birthdays especially since mine was coming up. Turning 25 is not exactly a milestone birthday other than I think I can now rent a car in America, which isn’t my idea of exciting. The more I thought about it the more resolute I was in my decision to do something memorable for the big 25. Considering 24 was spent in the middle of a Peace Corps sponsored workshop, I felt that I hadn’t yet partaken in a Paraguayan style celebration of me. That being said I still didn’t have much of an idea of what I was going to do, or who I was going to include until inspiration struck me like a sack or bricks or in this case bones.

                                  I was having lunch a few months ago at Julio’s, my community contact and host father in O’Leary, during Paraguayan Labor Day. Julio’s brother, Jorge, operates a brick making operation in his backyard. In celebration of that important day he and his buddies were busy participating in; well let’s just say imbibing the copious amounts of the local nectar. I noticed that between gulps they were picking at an oddly shaped piece of meat wrapped in tin foil. I asked Julio what they were eating, and he quickly told me that it was a cow head. They promptly served me some tongue after my inquiry, and have to admit it wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be. Having been brought up in a time and place where organs and other less desirable cuts of beef are not consumed, I was intrigued at the prospect of grilling a cow head for my birthday. I thought when else would this even be an option let alone delicacy? I decided right then and there that was what we were going to do. I’ll concede that living in Paraguay, or any country for that matter, makes celebrating a birthday memorable, but feasting on the head of a beautiful behemoth bovine was exactly the kind of bang I was looking for.

The turn

                                  I asked Julio if they were expensive and if he knew where we could get one? He immediately said that they only cost 35,000 Gs. (roughly $8.00), and that he knew a guy that would sell one at a good price. I am not sure why I was so excited at the prospect of eating the head or a large animal. If head was such a treat why does nobody eat it aside from the obvious? That all didn’t matter what did matter was how they hell were we going to prepare and serve it?

Fresh off the grill

                                  I was eager to get peoples opinions about how to cook and marinade the cow head. Julio told me that the best way to do it is to put it in a bath or vinegar, garlic, pepper, seasoned salt, and cumin. Not having any basis to disagree I said that sounded great, and in the weeks leading up to my birthday celebration this past Saturday I was sure to get a bevy of opinions from my friends around the community. Given that Paraguayan cuisine isn’t exactly world renown, I was surprised by the mixed reactions I got from people when I told them about my plan. Some people loved the idea while others looked at me in disgust. The diverging opinions sort of baffled me at first, but the more people I asked the clearer the reasons for the differing opinions were. For anyone who has spent some time with their grandparents growing up can attest, their food preferences can at times leave a young child running for the bathroom. Now I’m not talking about gross vegetables or leftover whatever, but more along the lines of internal organs. I have vivid memories of my grandmother and I going out to eat at a buffet style family restaurant where fare had many dishes that were geared towards the more elderly clientele. I always remember having grandma ask me to bring her a plate of chicken livers to which she would eat at a maddeningly slow pace while waited often times impatiently by engorging on enough soft serve ice cream to me as sick as I perceived chicken livers would make me if I ate them. The chicken livers were easily her favorite dish and would constantly rag me about not trying them. The older I got the more I relented, but I never acquired a taste for them and probably never will.

Digging in

                                  My desire to not eat chicken livers with my grandma is similar to my younger Paraguayan friends desire to not eat cow head. I noticed, however, that socioeconomic status had lot to do with people’s choices of meat and taste preferences. I guess this is pretty obvious because the less desirable cuts of meats are not only cheaper, but also abundant. Many families who have animals sell the prime cuts to supermarkets in the cities or towns and either keep the parts like the stomach, liver, or feet for themselves or to sell in their neighborhood. I notice this occurring in the supermarkets in O’Leary. From time to time there will be a display of a pig or cow head hanging on a sinister looking meat hook in the display case of the meat counter, but for the most part the most prominently displayed meats are shown in front with less desirable hidden in meat lockers behind the counter. It seems as though the supermarkets only display the expensive cuts for the obvious reason that they cost more to buy. Seeing something in front of your face underneath a sign that says special offer might change the mind of the shopper who originally went in to buy cow ankles or some other marginal cut. I have said in other entries that Paraguay is in many ways reminiscent of 1920-1950s America and the butcher shop and the cuts of meat people buy directly support that theory. As the country develops there is more money available to buy choice cuts of meat and more demand. As the demand goes up so must the supply that in turns drives down the demand for cheaper part of meat. It is basic economics, but unlike my upbringing in a time where all I knew were the best cuts of meat in Paraguay, I see the traditional meals and customs that come from the other cuts that have long since left most Americans perceptions of what is edible. Additionally, the number of butcher and butcher sops in communities across America plummeted as supermarkets became abundant and could offer the same meats for less cost. That has not yet happened in Paraguay. The local butcher shops still exist in rural areas and still sell what I’ll call more traditional options.

Playing with the jaw to avoid eating more

                                  My 11-year-old host brother Mathias says his favorite food is breaded and fried cow stomach. Some other traditional dishes that are often served in the rural areas included a soup made of internal organs called caldo ava, what my close neighbor and fellow volunteer calls cow ankle soup, and whenever possible whatever wild animal you happen to shoot when it stupidly wondered onto your property. Even though it is technically illegal, many people hunt and eat wild animals like alligator, carpincho, and opossum. I was recently served a big chunk of what turned out to opossum while eating over at Julio’s house. It had been rooting around the chicken coop in the wee hours of the morning and by the afternoon was the steaming chunk of grill seared meat in front of me. I initially thought it was pork, but my taste buds would not be fooled as I chomped down the first bite of chewy white meat. I did not like it, and took a dictionary for me to figure out what it was. Julio now tells the story that I stopped eating it as soon as I figured out what it was, but neglect to mention that we had eaten our body weight in food before it was ever placed on my plate. I am glad I did it, but probably wouldn’t be grilling the rodent I killed that morning had I been in that particular situation.

Our first ever bite

                                  For the most part, however, my time as a Peace Corps Volunteer has not been defined by weird foods or their subsequent food traditions. Sure I have a few stories, but they more often than not involve me trying something I have had a million times in a way that is only slightly different than the time I had it before and convincing the cook that it was the best version of it I ever had. In spite of all my younger Paraguayan friends telling me not to get cow head, I couldn’t personally think of a better thing to eat on my birthday. Even my close friend Claudio who is about turn 18 had never tried it, which I thought was incredibly given that his dad raved about how delicious it was suppose to be. It makes sense, though, because Claudio’s family is what would classify as middle class for rural Paraguay. They own a store, a motorcycle repair shop, and Claudio now owns a computer repair business in the center of O’Leary. Meat is very much a symbol and I have noticed during my time here that whenever I go over to a family’s house I am always given the biggest and best looking pieces of that is available. People will apologize if we are eating beans or some other non-meat dish because those foods are poor people foods and reminiscent of many people’s childhood when there was much less to eat. So in some way I felt as though the purchase of a cow head for my birthday was a celebration of my personal appreciation for the traditional festive foods of Paraguay.

                            

Leftovers

   It took 4 hours on the grill to cook the cow head after 24 hours of marinating, and to be perfectly honest it looked pretty much the same before it went on the grill as it did afterwards. As I helped Julio lift the cow head from the grill to the table where I was standing with many volunteer and Paraguayan friends I was not exactly salivating at the prospect of eating what was underneath After staring at the smoldering tin foil wrapped head for about 2-minutes I have to admit I was perplexed as to how we were going to eat it. Then with a clang Iris, my host mother, dropped about 15 forks on the table and said lets eat. I’ll now rank my top 5 favorite parts of the cow head, but first I feel that it is prudent to mention that none of it really tasted that good.

1. Back of the head meat

2. Snout

3. Cheek

4. Tongue

5. Brain

Post eye reaction

                                  Some of my braver friends ate the eye, but I was too thrown off by the prospect, and the brain I had just eaten, to give it a shot. The fact that they both woofed it down with minimal flinching after tons of ribbing from the peanut gallery telling them how they were going to vomit was admirable. To say that I left the table satisfied to me means two things. First I did eat enough to feel full. There is a surprising amount of meat on the head, but mostly it was because of my fear of getting nausea by over eating that told my stomach it was satisfied. Second, I couldn’t have imagined a more enjoyable birthday meal for sake of memories. It’ll surely be hard to forget that cold night in Paraguay where I ate my first cow head to celebrate 25 years of existence. Now I can say with confidence that if that is not what makes a birthday special I don’t know what is.

Measuring Environmental Impact

           If you are an avid reader of my ramblings, which I am sure most of you are, you have probably picked up on my tendencies to write about the environment both on large and small scales. Recently, I have been thinking a lot about carbon footprints, my individual environmental impacts, and how mine have changed since I moved to Paraguay a year and a half ago. Anyone can calculate his or her carbon footprint online for free if you are so inclined. Provided you have the necessary information to fill in the questions it can take as little as 10-minutes. Having completed carbon footprint tests at several junctures during academic career in high school and college I had come to the conclusion that no matter how sustainably you live your life most Americans have a pretty large footprint. Being able to develop a conscience about reducing ones carbon footprint is a difficult task, but is seemingly becoming more and more important in the American mainstream. Dozens of websites, magazines, and newspapers advertise how one can make their lives greener and reduce their carbon footprint. Reading about all these ways to save energy and reduce individuals carbon emissions in America got me thinking a lot about Paraguay and individuals carbon footprints here. After I took a look at several websites series of questions raging from energy consumption to transportation frequency, I came to the conclusion that it would be next impossible for me to effectively measure my impact here in Paraguay.

            For starters, my lifestyle here is very different than it was in the States. Many of those reasons are seemingly obvious, but the more I thought about them the more I realized how diverging my lifestyle actually is. I don't drive a car, when I travel I do so on public transportation, I consume more food that is grown locally because of Paraguay's economy is shaped, and all my electricity is pirated and produced hydroelectrically. I get my water from a well that, when I have it functioning, an electric pump propels into a water tank over my house. When I don't have the pump working, I flush my toilet, bath, and wash dishes the old fashion way by filling up buckets of well water by hand. The materials used to build my house are as follows: wood, metal roofing, nails, glass windows, metal bars protecting the windows, bricks, cement, and that's about it. My house has no insulation, no carpet, no air ducts, nor a sophisticated plumping system. Even in the nicer houses in the area, relatively speaking, there are not many differences in lifestyles. It is rare to see an air-conditioning unit because they are expensive and drive up the costs of electricity. Winter is short and often only cold for a part of a day eliminating the need for a heater. I find myself wondering if I am making conscience decisions to live "greener" here or am now a product of the circumstances surrounding my life?

            When I was in America I felt, over time, more conscience about the environment and how I could reduce my carbon footprint and live greener as I was growing up. Back home that included things like unplugging appliances, buying certain products, or recycling. Here those choices aren't as easy, but people live more sustainably. Granted Paraguay is a developing country, and within the wealthiest areas of the country there are many people who live more like an average American. For the vast majority of the population, however, people are doing a much better job of being green based on the definitions and indicators of your average carbon footprint test that is sponsored by some American institution or non-profit. Then again here in Paraguay the choices people make are less often predicated on environmental impact and aren't the socially conscience choices, but rather they ones will allow them to become more socially mobile.

            A good example is flight to urban areas. This is a trend seen in countless countries for reasons that range from inability to make a living off the land to better job prospects in the cities. In Paraguay, this phenomenon is similar to other larger countries like Brazil or China in that young people are flocking to the cities in droves to find work to help support their families, but uniquely different for number of reasons. Paraguay's economy is dominated by agricultural commodities particularly soybeans and corn. Most Paraguayans grew up farming, still farm, or at least own land somewhere that is still used for food production. Seemingly everyone knows how to grow food and maintain a field. A distinct part of rural communities identities are the cooperative nature of the families. None of us have much, but we live and work together is how the relationships come off to me. That identity is in changing due to the rapid population growth and limited opportunities to continue the traditional livelihoods. Many farmers, in a similar fashion to what happened in America beginning in the 1970s, have sold, leased, or lost their land to larger landholders who have the capital to absorb smaller farms. Young people are more and more drawn to the idea of moving to a city, finding a more white-collar job, and working the 40-hour workweek to attain a better standard of living. That standard is more and more measured by the ability to obtain things like television, nice phones, or air-conditioning. The countryside is progressively becoming a shell of its former self with a huge percentage of the population being older people still working the land, and their grandchildren. The parents have increasingly left the small rural communities in search of job and educational opportunities in the cities leaving the responsibility of child caring to grandparents. It is almost like they want the culture of the rural community with the commodities attainable from life in the city. None of this is uncommon with regards to development, but it begs to question whether environmental consciousness questions evolves as a country develops, and its economy shifts?

            Carbon footprint tests, environmental impact assessments, or whatever measure used to determine health of an environment have inherent biases. Paraguay is poor country that for the first half of the 20th century had most of its people living off the land. That lifestyle caused minimal damage to their environment, but also meant that there was virtually no enforceable legislation or services from its government because of how poor and isolated communities were. As its economy entered world markets in the 1960s, rapid deforestation took place to meet the demands for wood that developed countries were now not cutting down within there own boarders. The results of rapid developments effects on the environment and the consequences were being seen in places like America, but had not yet been witnessed in a country like Paraguay. The same story goes for industrial agriculture. It brings a lot of money to the country, but also brings causes land degradation and pollution to run rampant making it harder to live in the traditional fashion most people are accustomed to. It also forces those young people to leave the rural area for the urban in search of jobs to support their families. All the while families are more and more exposed and influenced by the resulting trends of a more developed economy. Those trends include changes in diet that lead to high-blood pressure and diabetes, a loss of vocational skills, and the slow degradation of small communities.

Itaipu Hydroelectric Dam

            This trend leads people to make their livelihoods through practices that the developed world find detestable like rooting through garbage to find valuable metals to name one example. There is no question in a carbon footprint test that measures amount and kind of garbage an individual burned. They don't ask how many liters of pesticides you spray on your land, and they don't inquire about shifting diets resulting from less consumption of locally grown foods into industrial food chains. My purpose in writing this was at first to do a personal assessment of my environmental impacts from when I was in America to now, but realized that I couldn't do it because I couldn't effectively include aspects of my life here to the formula provided in the tests. If someone breaks a florescent light bulb on the ground near my house I have no idea how much mercury I am now exposed to. When the dump one kilometer down the road is lit on fire to prevent garbage from blowing on someone’s land I have not the slightest clue if the wind is blowing in my direction and the impact that has on me especially if I put trash in a trash can that ended up at the dump that is now on fire. Without a doubt my carbon footprint here is way less than it would be in the states. I bike everywhere, only take buses about once or twice a week on average, I have a garden, I use a well, my power comes from a hydroelectric source, and my house is as simple as can be.

            Paraguayans care about there environment in same way that Americans do, but where they are in terms of development is more along the lines of where America was after WWII and into the 1950s-60s when companies were highly polluting and environmental degradation was at its worse. As a result Paraguay has some of the most modern and innovative environmental laws in its constitution, but the forces of development and progress impede the ability to enforce those laws effectively. Subsequently it can appear as if Paraguayans don't care about there environment when reality their decision making is a result of circumstances. It was easy for me to recycle cans, bottles, papers, and plastics growing up when all I had to do was throw it in a green container provided by the city. It is not easy to do that when the town I currently live in barely has enough money to collect garbage in the center of the town to dump in an open pit landfill on the outskirts. I feel that it is easy for my generation to scoff at those developing countries that have widespread environmental degradation that is getting worse by the day, but we weren’t around when America reached the point where those mentalities began to change making it easier to adopt a more socially conscience approach.

            I recognize that a number of different factors contribute an individual's, community's, or country's environmental awareness. People are products of the times, and there is never a perfect model in comparing differing societies relationship with there environment, but if one considers where America came from not long that long ago I bet that it would be very reminiscent to what Paraguay looks like today. A history teach in school once said to me in the middle ages if you took a rural farmer in time machine and set the dial to 100 years in the future their decedents would probably be doing the same thing in the same place speaking essentially the same language. If you took you great grandmother and did the same thing they likely wouldn't be able to function because of all the changes. This applies to environmental consciousness in the same way it applies to other aspects of life like work, education, and culture.

             My goals for this entry were to do a comparison of my environmental impacts here and back home. I quickly found out however, that it was more difficult than I initially thought. Societies are constantly changing with the times. America seems to shifting back towards many of those traditional values such as growing ones own food, getting deeply involved in communities, and slowly realizing that relationships are more important that commodities. It is a slow process that takes generations. Will Paraguay follow that trend or will change global attitudes shift the direction of this countries development completely? Obviously I have no idea, but it will surely be interesting to see what happens.