Breaking Food Rules

I’ve officially broken all the food rules that our special travel doctor insisted upon following in coming to Laos. There weren’t many: no fresh vegetables; no uncooked seafood; no tap water. Okay, in my bravado I’ve overstated the case. The only way I’ve really broken the tap water rule is through using it to brush my teeth. And by using ice of which we knew not the source, even though we were pretty sure it was legitimate. Okay, rule three is intact.


Still, rules one and two have been broached. Multiple times.

For the record, I sat across from our travel doctor, a native of India, and asked her to look me in the eye and say that, when traveling to her home country, she never ate fresh vegetables or uncooked seafood. And, in her defense, she looked me in the face and lied, saying that, yes, indeed, she always made sure everything was cooked.

My wife the prevaricator also smiled and nodded vigorously, insisting that we would follow these rules as good health-conscious citizens of the first world. I, on the other hand, wise old hand that I am, knew that we would have tremendous difficulty with rule number one for one simple reason: the Lao diet is predicated on fresh vegetables.

We broke both rules already in Thailand. We ate fresh cabbage that is a prerequisite with a dish that we had there. We also had fresh oysters in a spicy sauce. However, we assuaged our guilt by insisting that this country was safe, that in Laos it would be different—we would be different, a sentiment reinforced by our hotel proprietor who insisted that there was a significant difference between the cleanliness of vegetables in Thailand as compared to Laos, over there on the other side of the river, a mile away. Sy and I looked at each other as if to renew our vow: once crossing the border we would renew our dietary virginity and stick to abstinence.

But almost immediately after crossing, we found ourselves in so many wonderfully compromising situations. At the evening market, my mother-in-law and her friend stopped almost immediately to buy something small and seed-like. After buying some flip flops and pausing on the edge of the covered portion of the market, these seeds which were really bugs emerged. They’re buttery, we were told, and in the flow of the moment we tried them without hardly thinking: buttery indeed they were, though the texture was the difficult thing to get past, chitinous and leggy. “They taste like popcorn,” said my son, ever the simile-master. Indeed they did. But where did they fall among the food rules? Were they seafood? Certainly not. Were they cooked? At the edge of carnival of humanity that was the dalat lang—evening market—one didn’t stop to ask.

And then our hosts themselves on our first night in Laos served us fresh vegetables. How fresh? I-watched-her-climb-a-tree-and-pick-some-kind-of-leaf-and-then-serve-it-to-me-a-minute-later-on-a-plate fresh. With fresh hoi ta lee: oysters—the same dish we ate in Thailand but almost infinitely better due to the fact that the oysters were more fresh, the sauce was spicier and purer, the entire dish was topped with dried garlic, and we had this fresh-off-the-tree herb that was a soft, sweet chaser. Oh, and we also drank Beerlao—the number one beer in the world, my host informed me, and I didn’t disagree—with it. There we were, simultaneously smashing rules one and two. I should have asked for tap water to complete the clean sweep.

There’s that braggadocio again; no doubt the next post will come from the hospital infirmary. Yes, indeed, I did feel a little bit like Anthony Bourdain on the episode when he insisted what he was about to eat would land him in the hospital, but he ate it anyway. Still, when in Rome…

***

Sure enough, last night I woke up with something that felt like a cross between constipation and diarrhea. I cannot be sure it wasn’t simply too much Beerlao, bottles kept getting opened and my glass filled when I wasn’t looking. Still, when one has invested significant cash in various pills to head off diarrhea before it starts, an early morning stomach ache gives one pause: Am I beginning the final war with third world diseases?

And is it worth it? In addition to the fresh, soft tree leaves last night, we also had fresh pineapple, the characteristic acidity replaced almost entirely by a pure sweetness; fresh short bananas, I don’t know their American name but when you buy them at Walmart they taste more pasty and strongly clovish than these, which were again sweet and perfectly textured; and fresh bamboo, which is again simply purer, the texture crisp-tender yet melt-in-your-mouth sweet.

But I’m still waiting for the horror to materialize. I think my jep tong—stomach ache—was the result of the beer and not of the food, for which I’m grateful. So onwards and upwards. There’s a crop of coconuts staring at us from a palm tree on location; this and other delicacies—and adventures—await.