Today at breakfast Dave saw two tiny, black, pointy things sticking out of his spoonful of oatmeal. Upon closer inspection, they appeared to be a pair of pinchers from a black bug. It wasn’t the small weevil-type bug that sometimes gets into oatmeal if you forget about it in the back of the cupboard. It was a fierce-looking bug. Actually it was just the pinchers from what we imagined was a fierce black bug. Thankfully, the bug was nowhere to be seen. After that, neither of us has much of an appetite for our oatmeal. But although this was a particularly gross example, this type of thing goes on frequently here – finding foreign objects that should not be in our food. Pieces of shell in the walnuts, rocks in the beans, sticks in the raisins, hulls (and apparently black bugs) in the oatmeal. When we first arrived, I bought lots of groceries, especially fresh fruit and vegetables, at the outdoor markets here. That included raisins and nuts, which are sold from various containers or bins. Either could’ve been raised, harvested and shelled or dried by the babushka selling them to you. I liked this idea of freshness and that my purchases were helping the producer directly. But after finding small sticks and rocks in the raisins I bought several times, I felt that babushka should’ve been a little more careful with her sorting, and decided to buy them in packaged, labeled and sealed bags at the grocery store. Surely these would be packaged by someone who was paid to pay attention at the factory, and thus my bag would contain only raisins and no other surprises. After my first raisin purchase, I was surprised to find that my reasoning had been faulty. I found the same sticks and rubbish in my packaged, store-bought raisins that I’d seen in my market-bought ones. Apparently quality control hadn’t branched into the raisin department yet. Or maybe they’re picking out the big rocks and sticks and just leaving the little ones. So I resigned myself to sorting the raisins before using them. It was either that or buy imported German raisins, which would entail spending my entire weekly grocery budget on just raisins.
So I’ve adjusted to the little ritual of checking certain foods before you eat them. Other foreigners have adjusted in other ways. I know of a person who brings a suitcase full of groceries back from the States whenever she’s there. Not exotic, hard-to-find-in-Ukraine things like peanut butter or brown sugar, but ordinary things like cheese and oatmeal. I admit that I found myself snickering about this in the past (Just eat it! All the Ukrainians do!) but maybe she’s had a “black bug” experience, or worse. Everyone is entitled to be comfortable with the food they eat.
I’ve decided that eating a stick, rock or bug, especially cooked, will probably not harm be a bit. I know fellow MCCers who are eating bugs on purpose in other parts of the world where that sort of thing is acceptable. And that makes me thankful that I’m in Ukraine. There might be bugs in the oatmeal or sticks in the raisins, but at least it’s not on purpose and it's culturally acceptable for me to pick them out.
Laura
