Word of the Day: tortuga- turtle, tortoise
I was putzing around the kitchen early on Saturday morning, getting ready for school, when my host mom came in. "Did the tortuga scare you?" she inquired. Given that I was still attempting to convert myself into a functional human with my morning coffee, I wasn't sure that I had understood her. But no, my Spanish comprehension in this case was accurate, and she took me to see the tortoise that was currently residing in our shower. I should preface this by explaining that this was in our indoor shower, which is your regular, standard issue shower with sliding doors. For practical purposes, we almost never use this shower because we don't usually have running water at most times of day when one would want to shower. Instead, we shower outside, pana y barril style: bucket baths. Far more eco-friendly, efficient and preferrable on chilly (relatively speaking) mornings when you don't want all the parts of you to be cold at the same time.
I have no idea how I didn't notice when a turtle was brought into our home, because was rather large and I was home the entire day when it supposedly appeared. Regardless, it quickly became very clear that turtle would become food, and soon. Yesterday, someone from my host family, or maybe a bunch of them, were responsible for killing it.
An instinctual American reaction to this might be, that's sort of barbaric and foreign, why eat a defenseless turtle? And killing it yourself! ?! I wasn't home for lunch yesterday, so I didn't actually eat it, but I may have to soon. And maybe it's especially delicious. After my initial mental freakout, however, I forced myself to take a step back and be critical of my own culture. Is the hypocritical American charade of pretending that there is no killing involved in meat, eating things raised in cages, slaughtered in factories, served without bones or feathers or fins out of plastic packages any more noble? It's an essential question that I've wrestled with, in my on- again, off- again vegetarianism. Do I deserve to eat meat if I'm unwilling to partake in its production, essentially foisting my morally problematic work onto someone else? Of course, this type of dilemma is admittedly a very fachenta problem, only an issue for someone who, gracias a Dios, has enough food to eat and income to make choices. As foodie Anthony Bourdain bluntly put it in an episode of No Reservations about Mozambique "Much of the world already is living a vegetarian lifestyle, and they ain't too $%&#*^% happy about it." It's true, I've never before seen so much aspiration towards meat eating as I have in Nicaragua, where most of the population can only afford meat de vez en cuando.
The majority of Nicaraguans, especially in rural areas, have some connection to the meat they eat. Not so much for most people back home. The tendency of post-industrial societies like America (by no means new but increasingly exaggerated) to outsource our morally problematic tasks is explored in a fascinating book by Timothy Pachirat, "Every Twelve Seconds: Industrial Killing and the Politics of Sight". Through anthropological work undercover in a slaughterhouse, he draws connections between the way we produce (most) meat in America and other macro-trends in politics, such as our willingness to outsource fighting wars to a tiny majority of Americans, increasingly, drone operators. We've grown too squeamish to confront so many of the things that make and so we make sure this work falls to invisible populations, compartmentalized from our daily lives.
In my next post, I'll connect this "Politics of Sight" to recent reading a staple of modern eating: sugar. Sweet, sinister, sugar.
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