Esmeralda’s Fridge

This is a Fridge from: Honduras |

This Fridge is from Copan Ruinas, Honduras.
his is not my fridge, its Emeralda’s, the elderly woman I live with. I teach middle school in a bi-lingual school here in Copan Ruinas, Honduras and am renting a room in Esmeralda’s home. Esmeralda technically lives alone, other than me and a young lad from the UK who both rent rooms. However, her home is flanked by those of her two daughter’s, their respective husbands and children and some in-laws cousin of so-and-so who’s always around, forming a sort of family compound full of energy and hungry bellies. Its almost always a full house and when Esmeralda isn’t cooking food for me, the Brit, her relatives or the two engineers who eat three square meals a day because they are still unmarried and therefore helpless in the realm of personal nourishment, she is pickling vegetables and re-frying beans to take on her weekend laundry excursions to her husband’s worksite about 6 hours away. She has to catch the 5am bus each Friday to do all the cleaning and washing in enough time to get it all done and let the clothes hang dry by nightfall. Anyway, about the fridge… The most notable aspects of her fridge are that it generates virtually no waste; no plastics, no Saran wrap, no “disposables”, no tin foil, no Tupperware. The refrigerator is actually subject to a constant cycle of simple use, rather than consumption and waste. Rarely does any object see a shelf life of more that 2 days before it is consumed by one roving mouth or another. On the rare occasion that a plate of half eaten tamales lives beyond its palatable lifespan within the fridge it gets thrown out back in a bucket for the cleaning lady’s pigs. Moreover, the fridge really doesn’t even contain any ingredients, her almost daily walks to the market negate the need for storing up and also insure that our caloric consumption basically is the embodiment of the concept “buying local”. She buys what she needs and cooks it on an ongoing more sustainable basis; making bulk batches of tortillas, scrambled eggs with meat, refried beans, pickled chilies, and rice dishes and supplementing these with other treats that come walking up the cobblestone street balanced on the heads of neighbors or hot from the stoves of her daughters. That said, I’ll admit that blindly romanticizing all forms of consumption in the so-called “underdeveloped world” can be a little precarious. Its not all perfection and bursting local economies. I can be pretty sure that the farmers who grew those veggies and harvested those eggs are living in abject poverty. Meanwhile its beyond likely that those fabulously local veggies were showered regularly with a chemical contaminant I’d never wish to know about and they certainly never make it to my mouth without an extremely unhealthy dose of MSG, used innocently and without the remotest knowledge of its detrimental health effects as a flavor enhancer on EVERYTHING in the Honduran diet. Nor are the foods ever left fresh and healthy but instead become cooked silly and lifeless, in Teflon (that carcinogenic black non-stick film in “modern” cookware), usually with excess amounts of lard. In short, its an odd yet interesting convergence of dietary world’s, mixing the best of old school sustainable habits with the worst of what globalization’s brought swiftly in the backdoor.