White tax

Well, in the first 48 hours of my time in India I have already been swindled by Muslims, Hindus, and a Sikh. I am happy that if at least this country is full of people trying to steal my money, at least it crosses lines of faith.

My flight to India was fine. Watched bad TV, ate good Indian airline food, chatted with the man next to me. He was from Delhi. He told me to get out of Delhi as soon as I could. I think his advice was right.

Going from the airport to my hotel should have been a simple process. Get bags, go to taxi stand, get taxi, go to hotel. No, no, no. Instead, I get in a taxi we drive for a while. He tells me that he thinks he heard my hotel burned down earlier today. Recognizing this awful lie from the warning section in Lonely Planet, I tell him that it hasn't. He says that we will stop at a travel agent and they will set me up with a new hotel. I tell him, "Never mind, just drop me at the train station." He gets upset. I demand it. He drops me at a metro station, which is obviously not the train station, though he claims it is. I get in another taxi, ask for my hotel, located on a big street of hotels by the train station. He too tells me the hotel has burned down. I tell him I had just spoken to the hotel that day. He says it just happened. I tell him to let me off at the corner. He demands thirty dollars, while we had certainly agreed thirty rupees (there is no such thing as a taxi ride which would cost thirty dollars in Delhi...). We get into a shouting match. He tells me I am going to be robbed on the lonely street corner. He might be right. The third taxi at least has the creativity to show me an area under construction and tell me that the government has recently bought all the land around the station for development of government housing. Luckily he also had the courtesy to drive past the train station at some point, so that when I tire of him and he drops me off on yet another dark corner, I can at least walk several blocks back there.

It was obvious to everyone that night that I didn't know where I was. I ask for a cab from the stand at the train station to go to my hotel. They tell me it will be twenty dollars, four times the price of an airport cab to get less than three blocks, so I refuse. I wander a bit longer. I finally get a rickshaw, almost at one a.m. and get to a hotel, which is not mine, and give up. The guy didn't even speak enough English to tell me that my hotel had burned down and/or been built on.

After a night in the filthiest room I have ever slept in, I wander back to the station, orient myself, and find my intended hotel - fully standing. Wandering the city, I have had cabbies, cops, security guards, waiters, teachers, and tailors all try (and some succeed) to part my money from me. Sometimes they think of something clever or do a small service for me to incur guilt. Sometimes people just walk up to me and say "You should give me some money." Sigh. Maybe I am just not a developing country kinda guy. Or maybe I just need to get out of Delhi.

Video Adventure: Angkor Wat

Off season

I don't think I have ever felt quite as close to going nuts as I have for the past couple days. It's a bit ironic that the most lonely and directionless I have felt on my Watson journey has been on my vacation. When I arrived on Ko Chang a week ago, it was raining. When I left this morning the sun had cleared for the first time since I had been there. Apparently a typhoon has been passing through the area and soaked the island through and through - but it felt like something more. Though I was initially charmed by my nice little bungalow on the lagoon, it quickly became my prison.

The proprietors of the scuba shop I decided to get my certification from lied a bit in saying that the rain would not be a trouble in getting me in the water. Rather than not being a problem, it became a constant excuse to put off the classes. I made it through all the reading material, the videos, the swimming pool, and even a dip in the ocean in the first day, then the process was delayed seemingly indefinitely. I read books until I ran out of things to read. I wrote on my computer until a hard drive malfunction killed it (a problem which likely means I will writing much less frequently from here on out and the loss of some of my beautiful photos of Thailand). I wrote until my notebook got soaked in a downpour. I walked through the hardest rain I have ever seen, getting wrinkly fingers just from standing outside for four hours, until I ran out of island to walk on. And then I gave up.

Mosquitoes. Closed stores. No hot water. No end in sight. The last straw came this morning when I opened up the bag of a cinnamon roll which I had purchased as a reward to myself for not going crazy over the previous week. Laying in my bed, I found that my tasty treat was swarming with small, glossy black ants. I sighed and threw the cinnamon roll away and leafed through my guidebooks for the umpteenth time trying to figure out what I would eat when I felt one of those small, glossy black ants bite down on my scrotum. I jumped from bed and forgot all about breakfast. I knew what needed to happen as soon as possible. If there was ever a sign, that was it. I needed to leave the island.

Though I had two days left in my scuba course, I didn't care. I paid for the part I had completed and ran as fast as I could. From taxi to ferry to taxi to taxi to bus - I made it to Bangkok - and I can feel peace returning to me. A lesson was learned; off season is a time to stay off the island. Tomorrow I likely venture to Cambodia. I only hope I can find peace there.

So, this is a monsoon?

Apparently there was a plane crash somewhere in Thailand, but I am without internet for the most part, so I hadn't heard. Alive and well and down in Ko Chang, a little island with a lot of rain. I arrived here with sunny skies, but haven't seen a break in the steady downpour since. I am considering getting a scuba certification (a bit of a dream...) but weighing the cost vs. rain balance.

Video Adventure: Bangkok and Golden What?

Apparently it was windy on top of the Golden Mount Temple.

The longest leg

Today I take off on the longest leg of my journey. I leave CIMMYT at 4:30 on the 11th to get to the Mexico City International airport for an 8AM flight to Los Angeles. After three hours in the land of freedom I will be making my way to Seoul, South Korea via a 13 hour long flight. Due to the magic of time travel and the international date line, I will arrive at 5:30pm on the 12th. From there, I take a five hour flight to Bangkok where I will be beginning a two week long vacation. I expect to spend my time eating disgusting amounts of Thai food and scuba diving... unless the monsoons are monster... then I will just spend my time eating and nothing else. Currently the forecast says to expect rain for the next week. Huzzah! Adventure abounds!

Update:
I made it to Thailand. The food is amazing, even if it's on the street and only costs 85¢. The 33 hours traveling was about as good as you can imagine. I slept when I wanted to and didn't when I didn't. Plus I got to watch five movies across the Pacific.

Oh, and there are elephants in the streets. Whoa.

Three months out

So, the Watson Fellowship comes with few expectations. I have to stay out of the country. I have to do my project. And I have to write a two page report (which I am told to think of more as 'a long letter back home') every three months which summarizes what I have been doing with my time. This is my first of those reports, neatly encapsulating my time in Mexico.

Dear Rosie, Watson, et al.,
It’s amazing to think of how much I have already seen, learned, and eaten in the past three months. Mexico was a country I never yearned to go to – but it’s a place I have slowly grown fond of and I have consistently been amazed by. It seems that everything is changing, but there is a dedication to history here like nothing I have ever seen before. It’s a country of paradoxes and great beauty.

I have spent the bulk of my time in Mexico working with CIMMYT (the International Center for Maize and Wheat Improvement) in Texcoco. The center, located just forty-five minutes outside of Mexico City, is full of helpful and engaging people and groundbreaking research. Norman Borlaug, Nobel Peace Prize winner and agricultural scientist, put CIMMYT on the map by starting the Green Revolution from these fields and labs. The center continues to do work which is changing the lives of billions world wide through seed improvement and distribution, information dissemination, and research in farming practices.

I had wanted to spend time at CIMMYT to learn about the history of the organization, what CIMMYT has done in the past, what it is pursuing today, and more about plant genetics generally. My goals have been met and exceeded on every front. Talking to the staff at CIMMYT I have been able to get a very real sense of what struggles international agricultural development is still facing. I have been intrigued to learn about the politics of funding that CIMMYT must contend with to keep afloat. My understanding of the practical challenges in maintaining global food security in the face of spreading of disease and climate change has also widened considerably.

Working with partners of CIMMYT, I have been able to spend time on farms and in fields talking with farmers and helping to conduct research regarding regional changes in crops and cropping systems. Traveling in Chiapas and Veracruz, I heard first hand accounts of trials and victories of how people are adapting to their dynamic situations. I got to hear from workers in the field about the rising price of seed, the cultural struggles regarding the adoption of Conservation Agriculture farming techniques, and struggles to farm in the face of NAFTA. Walking through fields or sharing home cooked meals I was able to talk to farmers about what they eat, why they eat it, and what they think is important about their diet.

Returning to CIMMYT, I dove into learning more about upcoming changes in the consumption and growth of wheat worldwide. The research I was doing eventually began to take shape and has become an article for the forthcoming CIMMYT publication Wheat Facts and Futures where I will be listed as a co-author for the work I have done. Taking advantage of the resources (of people, books, and test plots) which are available at CIMMYT I have been given a crash course in the what, where, why, how, and who of wheat. I have been able to maintain my independence, coming and going as I pleased, while still forming a strong bond with an amazing institution; an invaluable gift.

I was fortunate enough to be able to spend a month of time living in the small town of La Purification, house-sitting for a CIMMYT employee. Living there gave me an opportunity to explore the local markets for my own kitchen and to get an authentic experience living in rural Mexico. Every chance I have taken to bake I have been able to confirm what I have long read – the flour in Mexico is no good to bake with. Breads which I can normally make without a second thought have taken great focus to try to reproduce here – and still turn out not quite right. The low and weak protein levels can be seen and tasted in every non-industrial produced bread product I have eaten. The necessity to import higher quality flour means that much of the wheat grown in Mexico is actually exported for lack of a solid domestic market.

I have also spent a significant chunk of my time in Mexico in Oaxaca City. Oaxaca is widely known to be one of the hot-spots for political activism – especially relating to native rights - in Mexico (the city was at a standstill last year when a teacher’s strike ended up occupying much of the city and the media outlets there). This political activism trickles down to an emphasis on the importance of regional diet and cuisine. Oaxaca is popularly termed ‘the land of the seven moles’ (I had the fortune of meeting the author who claims to have coined the term in hopes of bringing more tourists to his community) – giving credit to the variation which takes place in recipes even within small geographic areas due to microclimates and regional tradition.

By spending time hanging out in markets, pestering cooks and restaurant owners, and enrolling in short cooking courses I was able to get good look into Mexican cuisine and talk to those who make food about why and how they make what they make.

Talking to someone about grain is inevitably an awkward experience – but I have been amazed to find time and time again in Mexicans a passion which is wholly new to me. When Mexicans call themselves ‘men of maize’ it’s not just an allusion to their fondness for this staple crop, it’s a matter of national pride for having been the birthplace of this species; it’s referring to the religious significance this crop had to pre-Hispanic culture; it’s talking about what it means to be Mexican. Though the intrusion of wheat tortillas and wheat based snack foods is undeniable, nobody seems sure for the reasoning of this dietary transition. The cause-effect cycle is muddled, but for better or worse, the diet has changed considerably just in a lifetime.

Again and again, I was stuck by how inevitable the transition away from corn and towards wheat is. Groupo Bimbo, the largest bread manufacturer in Mexico and the fourth largest food company in the world, is impressive in its omnipresence. Even in the smallest towns – lacking basic sanitation and only intermittent electricity – every store would be stocked with Bimbo snack cakes. Some called it progress, some called it a cultural invasion; but the war for minds and bellies is being slowly won by multinational corporations – not by farmers and artisan cooks.

As I leave Mexico, I am excited by the solid base of knowledge I have acquired about such a variety of things and the confidence I have reinforced to go out and learn more. Every person I speak to teaches me about something new and shows me another path of food politics I would love to pursue. I am happy to have broken bread with so many fine individuals here and I can’t wait to see what comes to the table in India.

Sincerely,
nathan leamy

Bimbo Bonanza!

With narrowly three days to go, I finally accomplished one of my big goals for my time in ol' Mexico. I got to visit the amazing and appalling Bimbo bread factory. This wheat-fueled leviathan is a symbol of the change which is taking place on our shelves and in our bellies worldwide - and it smells like a yeasty heaven to boot.

First off, some caveats. They didn't let you take cameras (or anything electronic) into the factory, so I got no pictures of this breaded beast. Second, Bimbo bread is the eponymous product of Groupo Bimbo. The word 'bimbo' doesn't mean anything in Spanish but was (supposedly) constructed by a combination of the words 'Bambi' and 'bingo.'

So, I had made it a goal to get to see Bimbo's factory because Bimbo is big. Huge. Bimbo is synonymous with bread here. Fourth largest food company in the world with almost six billion US dollars in sales last year. So why have you never heard of it? It seems there's a lot of trouble with the name - but you have certainly heard of lots of the subsidiary companies - Wonder Bread, Entenmann, Orowheat, Tia Rosa - and more. They are responsible for making 5,000 different products - all of which are incredibly unhealthy and most of which are terrible tasting (with the notable exception of the ever amazing rich, frosted chocolate cake donut made by Entenmanns). As a Mexican company with a virtual monopoly on sliced bread in Mexico, it's amazing to see how much and what kind of advertising there is for the company. Somewhat ironically, many of the ads focus on nutrition.

There seems to be a general campaign which Bimbo is leading to ameliorate the Mexican people to the idea of wheat. Ridiculous ads which say "The power of wheat!" or "Wheat is nutrition!" can be found hanging from the walls of mini-marts nationwide. Even odder, lots of their products brag that "wheat contains energy!" - an odd flip of the US norm where packaged products try to brag how few calories they contain. Even more surprising because obesity and diabetes are quickly becoming as large a problem here as they are back home. Corn is considered the normative grain in these parts - so to promote its mainly wheat based products (the company makes a couple brands of corn tortillas, but has its definite focus on the wheat flour) it has to promote the integrity of a whole crop. The odd thing is that a) wheat has little substantive nutritional value over corn. b) the way that Bimbo uses wheat is vile. Whatever nutritional benefit wheat has over corn is lost due to bleaching, processing, and the universal addition of extreme amounts of sugar.

So visiting the factory itself was great because it allowed me to see the belly of the beast - and admire the amazing machines which they use to make all this bread. Flour coming in from tubes, vats of anonymous chemicals are added to shorter rise times, and the factory contains the most complex set of conveyor belts running 24/6 (they close Friday afternoons to clean the place). Bimbo just signed a contract with the Chinese government in April, so I got to spend a good bit of time learning about the plans for expansion there. Sadly, many of my questions for my private tour guide went unanswered (someone accustomed to leading around groups of seven year-olds can't be expected to know where the wheat is grown of their products or the source of their gluten powder... I guess) but it was still a fascinating experience. Bad bread is big - and we can only expect it to get bigger in developing countries with no local tradition of artisan baking. The inauthentic commitments to nutrition is going to keep hurting human health as well as local diets... but you can't stop progress, right? And at least I got a dozen free donuts from the tour...

The Superlatives

People don't want to hear about the things you kinda liked or thought were kinda interesting while traveling. They want to hear about the biggests, brightests, bests... or worsts. This is list of lists of those things. All the extremes split into bite size categories. More to be added with time, categories added as I think of them or get suggestions. The list of lists will be updated throughout my travels with a link at right.

Best food I have eaten :

• Chicken in a chipotle sauce served at an Argentinean restaurant in Texcoco. Creamy, spicy, served with soggy french fries which are perfect to dab up excess sauce.
• Cohorizo enchiladas in Chiapas that demonstrated how great a sausage can be. Crisp, vibrantly flavored, and dripping fat.
• 30¢ tacos from the place by the movie theater in Texcoco. Savory and crunchy and salty and fresh and amazing. The best food I have ever had for 30¢.
• A meal in La Olla, in Oaxaca City Mexico: Oaxacana pasilla chile rellano with refried black beans and fennel; tomato and tomatillo salsa with unknown savory spice; guacamole made with a nutty flavored local avocado.
• Amazing Vietnamese spring rolls in Eat Me in Bangkok, Thailand. Duck, and mint leaves, cucumber, and sweetness. Made me feel like I was falling out of a dream.
• Chicken in curry paste and pork in coconut cream with red chili at an unnamed roadside stand on Ko Chang. Both were so steeped in flavor that the tastes were lingering in the mouth well after I had finished eating them.
• An amuse-gueule of salmon mouse with a tomato concasse and a little sesame stick. Appetizer of snails with wild forest mushrooms, cream sauce and thyme, with crispy crust. Main course of guinea hen with foie gras and wild mushrooms wrapped in a crust with brown butter sauce, with green beans, carrots, and small potatoes in Colmar France. After, I felt a bit like I would pop. (I did not).
• In Genoa I had a pesto dish which made me a bit weak in the knees.
• In Florence I had a pig side which tasted just like everything should taste.
  

The most impressive things which were made by dead people:

• Teotihuacán
• Monte Albán
• Baths of Nezahualcoyotl
• The National Palace in Bangkok
• The Golden Temple
• The Mini Taj
• Duomo of Florence
• Pantheon
• Pyramids at Giza
  

Coolest Animals I have seen in the wild

• Parrots
• Monkeys, monkeys, monkeys
  
• Crocodiles (including babies!)
• Raccoon
• Puffer fish
• Iguana
• Geckos
• Other small lizards
• Turtles
  
• Pelicans
• Storks
  
• Crabs
• Guinea Pigs
  

Animals I have seen on my plate:

• Rabbit
• Worms
• Crickets
• Ant eggs
  
• Cow
• Pig
• Sheep
• Chicken
• Duck
  
• Many unidentified fish
• Snails
• Baby cow
• Guinea Hen
• Goose
  
• Scorpion (okay, not on my plate, but a mezcal which had a scorpion in the bottle and an obscene flavor.)

Strangest things I have imbibed:

• Mezcal – an alcoholic beverage which can best be described as if A-1 steak sauce decided to start producing tequila.
• Tibetan Butter Tea – This drink is quite literally just a big glass of melted Yak butter. Even I, The Lover of Butter, couldn’t take it. Added a bunch of honey and was able to make it through half the drink – but not without feeling quite ill after.
• Chartreuse - at a Mexican family birthday party I had this brightly colored drink forced upon me by a man who was taking a bit too much pleasure in forcing it upon me. The flavor was a bit like blindness.
  

The most awkward bathroom experiences:

• The flushless, toiletpaper less, seatless, outdoor bathroom in the back of a farmer's home in Chiapas... while I had diarrhea.
• The bathroom in the CAPU station in Puebla, Puebla, Mexico had a floor to ceiling gate you had to pass through to get to the toilets which my large backpack barely squeezed through. When I finally made it to the bathroom, the floor was being mopped by a cleaning woman.
• Several days in late November I was tied to my hotel room in Delhi. Every 22 minutes (give or take 4 minutes) I needed to go. And bad. Oy.

Airport Review:

• Out of the seventeen airports I am seeing during my trip one stands out above the rest. The Seoul Airport is a work of art - absurd, friendly, efficient, and from the future. I think I had everything I could ever ask for there - and some things I never even thought of.
• The worst airport comes in two categories. The Delhi airport is the sort of thing which makes you wonder "how do planes land here?" Dusty, no amenities, rushed, ugly, delayed, and dirty - it was nothing pleasant to look at.
  
• The worst airport experience however was the Ben Gurian Tel Aviv Airport in Israel. Though it features air conditioning, clean bathrooms, and high ceilings - the security and incompetence of the place was absurd and aggravating. While I had expected to be subjected to interrogation upon entering the country, I didn't expect the inquisition to be so strong upon departure. I don't quite know what got me into the mess, but at the pre-check in screening I was whisked off to a cubicle for interrogation for 45 minutes. They asked a little bit of everything: where I had been in Israel, why I had been in Mexico, what I studied, if I knew anyone in Cairo. I eventually was forced to bring out my laptop and show the interrogator my blog and allow him to read it (to which he snapped "Why have you written nothing about Israel yet??"). He then asked to look through the two hundred photos I had taken in Israel (to which he snapped "Why don't you take pictures of yourself?"). The men I dealt with were condescendingly and kept the aggressiveness of their voice barely checked. After that I still needed to get my bags checked twice - getting through the pre-check-in security took me over two hours. Afterwards I was greeted with wrong directions to my check-in counter, chided by security guards for walking the wrong direction down halls which other guards had directed me into, and having to hunt down an elevator attendant so I could give her my checked bag. Boo.
  

Craziest things I have seen in transit:

• In Mexico Ciy there are all sorts of things being sold in the metro - bubble gum, toys, CDs, brooms - whatever. There are also many people asking for money for various reasons - the blind, old women, musicians, small children. None were too out of the ordinary - except for one guy. One day I was on the metro, the doors opened and a man threw a white shirt full of something heavy into the center of one of the cars. He follows it in, shirtless, and begins to unfold the shirt, revealing broken glass inside. He proceeds to stand on his head as the train gets going, then throws himself onto the shirt, back first. He does this several times. Eventually he is bleeding a little and has some glass stuck in his back. He reaches back and pulls it out, puts everything back in his shirt-satchel, and goes on to ask for money from his unwilling audience. Craziest of all, some people gave it to him.
• In India there is an ongoing competition to see what is the strangest thing you can fit on the back of a bicycle or motorcycle. I am not sure what the final prize is, but there have been some pretty good entrants I have seen around. Four goats in a basket on the back of a scooter (Trivandrum), nine mattresses on top of an auto-rickshaw, which was filled with pillows (Trivandrum), and about 25 flats of eggs and a man on a scooter (Trivandrum). Largest number of people on one scooter? Six. (Oh, and by the way, it's required that men wear helmets in India - but not women - apparently much protest that it would muss their hair).