The Difficult Task of Eating Lunch and Dinner

The Difficult Task of Eating Lunch and Dinner / Leon Padron Azcuy
Posted on April 5, 2014

HAVANA Cuba – Imagining a Cuban nutritionist in a health centre is like
flying a kite without air. Given the general scarcities, these
specialists in healthy eating, in their efforts to propose adequate
diets to patients with obesity, high cholesterol or diabetes, have to
act as circus magicians.

How can anybody guide you on what to eat to improve your health when you
can't obtain essential foods such as milk, beef, fish, seafood, when
malangas (a kind of sweet potato) are available occasionally and
potatoes are unobtainable?

Carmen, a nutrition specialist in various hospitals, finds her work
makes her sad. "We all know what deficiencies we have to put up with. It
pains me to see the looks on the faces of the old people who ask what
they should eat, and complain about the impossible prices of fish, a
pineaple, or oranges, from the healthy eating suggestions I give them so
that they can recover their good heath", she told me.

Most people – Carmen included – can't afford fruit, on their miserable
incomes. Imagine an old lady whose social security payment doesn't even
allow her to buy medicines, or a single mother without economic support
from her child's father.

Worthless junk food

A balanced diet is necessary to control certain conditions, but it's
also necessary to maintain your health. The worthless junk food eaten by
Cubans is really an insult to the palate, is responsible for the small
stature of today's kids, the early loss of teeth, and the use of canes
on the part of many under-70's, due to deterioration in their bones.

It's impossible to avoid catching diseases, when we are eating our
monthly ration of "enriched mince*" (whose ingredients no-one knows),
the little bit of chicken you get when there isn't any fish; and other
"leftovers", dating back to the 90's, of the notorious Special Period**,
which never ends.

Who would tell the Cubans of the island that their food would be much
worse than the diet the 18th and 19th century colonist farmers gave
their slaves? In the plantation barracks they did not go without dried
beef, bacalao (a type of fish), beef, milk and other valuable nutrients.

The 1842 rules regarding slaves specified that the masters must give
their slaves two or three meals a day, with eight ounces (230 gm) of
meat, dried beef or bacalao, and 4 ounces (115 gm) of rice or other kind
of grain, accompanied by 6 or 8 plantains every day, or their equivalent
in sweet potatoes, yams, yuccas or other types of tubers.***

Before 1959, the chef Nitza Villapol, became popular with her television
recipes Cooking by the Minute. Later, in order to survive in the
revolution, Villapol (by then a party militant) adapted her recipes to
fit what you received in your meagre ration card. And ended up offering
a recipe for "grapefruit steak".

Even our very own Fidel Castro didn't escape the temptation of offering
cooking recipes. He recommended Cubans to drink some milk with a little
bar of chocolate. It seemed like a joke: "what chocolate, and what
milk?" asked the desperate mothers at home, who did not know what to
dream up to feed their kids.

It's absurd that the government can't guarantee every citizen a glass of
milk, and doesn't allow Cubans to set up private businesses to supply
milk and meat. It's hypocrisy to blame the low livestock output on theft
of cattle, when it is nothing else but another product of our misery.

What can we look forward to? Today's slave-owners refuse to relax the
state monopoly, the reason why Cubans can't enjoy a balanced diet. What
can Carmen, the nutritionist, say to the elderly person lacking in
vitamins who asks her what should I have for lunch and dinner?

Leonpadron10@gmail.com

Translator's notes:
*"Mince" refers to "minced meat" which, in Cuba is likely to be a
"mystery substance" rather meat.
** Fidel Castro coined the term a "special period in times of peace" to
refer to the time after the collapse of the Soviet Union when the sudden
loss of the USSR's financial subsidy plunged Cuba into a severe economic
crisis
***Source: El Ingenio, Manuel Moreno Fraginals

Cubanet, 4 April 2014

Translated by GH

Source: The Difficult Task of Eating Lunch and Dinner / Leon Padron
Azcuy | Translating Cuba -
http://translatingcuba.com/the-difficult-task-of-eating-lunch-and-dinner-leon-padron-azcuy/