the, uh, recipe of the week...two cups delivering newspapers...

those of you who know liam lynch got the joke in the title. if you don't, go to itunes --> podcasts --> lynchland --> episode two, skip to the sock puppet skit, and prepare to laugh till you cry.

this is the recipe of the week. of the week used loosely, of course. here we call it mealie-meal or pap, not polenta, but the deliciousness is all the same.

since the topic here is food: i've noticed people seem to be a lot less disordered in their eating here. things are made with sugar instead of corn syrup. there are plenty of 100% juice juices to pick from. portions are normal. drink portions are also normal, including coffee. there are not too many skinny sick looking white girls going around sucking on diet cokes like at home...instead there are so many beautiful, big, proudly curvy african women. just this morning at rosebank i saw a gorgeous lady on five inch gold heels walk by on the arm of her beaming husband; she had curves about as wide as my arm is long. she didn't look like she was wearing any spanx or whatever to suppress them, either, and her skirt was a bright apple green, not the kind of shapeless black thing an american woman her size might prefer in order to 'hide flaws'. her husband didn't look like he thought that ass was a flaw, hey! it was almost as if she loved how she looked. shocking! this acceptance that your body is gonna do the things it is gonna do, within reason, it is a positive outlook. that woman will never in her life be a size six, there is probably nothing in the world that could make that happen, and i bet she couldn't care less about that.

another thing: i've never heard an african woman do the requisite verbal guilt performance while eating (you ladies know it: oh my this is so bad for me, straight to my hips, but it's so divine, i'll just have a tad more then, maybe one more, oh i'm so fat, oh i have no self control *chomp*) ...a thing that is incredibly common at home. people eat butter and drink whole milk and eat whole yogurt and whole cheese and nobody panics over fat content. they just eat the rich things in proportion to other not as rich foods...at normal portion sizes. even the nastiest fast food: normal portions. fascinating! i wish i could import this non-confrontational, low-anxiety, common sense outlook about fat and food home to everyone i know who spent the healthiest, most attractive years of their lives truly hating themselves.