Letters from Bart

I miss cooking December 3, 2009

I feel like life might be a lot easier if I had a proper oven and a gas stove. I was browsing over recipes the other day and realized that I cannot make 90% of what I crave at the moment, and it’s not for Pemba’s lack of access to any product in particular, but rather my own lack of capacity to cook them. I then realized that browsing recipes was making me sad, and switched to reading Atlas Shrugged, which rather remarkably helped improve my demeanor.

I love to cook, but working with a faulty electric burner with a proclivity of electrifying those daring enough to cook off it functions one to train one into acclimatizing their palate to adopt a conspicuously more rudimentary and uncooked diet. It’s dishearteningly Pavlovian.

One of the burners doesn’t work now – it had two to begin with. Of course, when the power ceases to function, neither of them work. This is why quite literally EVERY other person I know has gas burners – every last one. Where they found the electric burners here I have no idea – they are quite difficult to locate here. Gas burners – utility, convenience, lower expenditure, dependable in this land of rolling blackouts; all that would make too much sense. I also know from a little market investigation that the electric burner costs more than a gas burner would have, so forgive my expletive initialism, but WTF?

…but I have grown dangerously accustomed to the confounding bewilderment which drives the rationale for such decisions here in Pemba. TIA – apparently a ubiquitous excuse which functions at all levels of society here (including our local ’5 star’ Pemba Beach Hotel). Woe to the unsuspecting tourist – I have designed a survey to collect information from them this holiday season, and eagerly anticipate some colorful responses which will hopefully vindicate what I have, at times, questioned as some form of veiled personal elitism.

But then, so many things simply make no sense here, like the complete lack of some form of established fish market in a seaside city of 150,000 people with a purportedly strong local fishing tradition. They randomly will set up stalls at certain stretches of beach, but invariably lack whatever you might be looking for when you finally decide to stop. Gah.

Time for a vacation. I think the disappointing process of UHT consumption coerces one into complacency. I need to consume dairy that requires refrigeration and eat meat that hasn’t been frozen. Ah cheese – I miss you so… one day, we will be reunited and it will be a glorious, and messy affair.

Tata for now.