When I was in junior high, my father was assigned to the U.S. Embassy in San Salvador, El Salvador. After moving to this Latin American country as a child of 12, I soon learned the difference between the rich and the poor.
The well to do lived on a plateau in large air-conditioned houses surrounded by 9 foot walls topped with broken glass and barbed wire. Our homes had all of the amenities that we took for granted as Americans. We had an air-conditioned hacienda with electricity and running water. Each bedroom had an attached private bathroom. We were waited upon by servants and our neighborhood was patrolled by armed soldiers.
In contrast, the poor lived in ramshackle huts that were precariously perched upon the steep slopes surrounding the city. The poor had no electricity or in-door plumbing. The only public water faucet that was available within the immediate area lay behind the walls that encircled the Intercontinental Hotel. The people who lived on the steep slopes had to laboriously ascend a dirt trail. They then waited patiently in line to fill buckets that then had to be carefully carried back to their homes.
I do not know if the children who lived in these shacks attended school. As the son of a senior Embassy official, I attended La Escuela Americana, a private American school. A school bus picked me up from my stop across the street from where the women filled their water buckets. When the bus brought me home late in the afternoon, the women were always gone.
At dinner, my father had a simple rule. Each member of our family could have one serving and whatever we put on our plates we had to eat. The remaining portions went to the staff. The meals we enjoyed would not have been unusual to any American. Meat was an important part of our diet. Our breakfast typically consisted of eggs with a side of bacon or sausage. For lunch I had a choice of eating a sandwich made with cold cuts from home or I could use my allowance money to buy a burger from the school cafeteria. For dinner the main entrée was always some sort of meat. Throughout the week we enjoyed such food as roast chicken, meatloaf, pork chops, steaks, or ribs.
For the longest time, I assumed that our servants ate their dinner after we had completed ours and to some extent I was correct. What I didn’t realize was that throughout the week, Maria and Anita ate rice with refried beans and corn tortillas as their evening meal. They carefully hoarded the leftovers and after Church on Sunday, they had a party with the servants from neighboring houses in our barrio.
I didn’t realize this was happening until one morning when I saw the tortilla lady being turned away from the front gate. The tortilla lady was a fixture of our neighborhood. Shortly after dawn, nearly every day throughout the year, this entrepreneur carrying a cloth covered basket of homemade corn tortillas would walk through our neighborhood calling, “T-O-R-T-I-L-L-A-S” in a loud sing-song voice.
Servants would meet the tortilla lady at the front gates of their employers’ haciendas and for the cost of a few centavos, would purchase tortillas for the household staff. One Sunday morning, several months after we had moved to El Salvador, I saw the tortilla lady approach our home. “T-O-R-T-I-L-L-A-S,” she sang when she saw Anita, the maid.
Anita stuck her nose in the air and said, “No necesitamos tortillas porque hoy tenemos carne.” (We don’t need tortillas because today we have meat).
After having overheard this exchange, I felt ashamed over how naïve I had been. When I went into the kitchen a bit later to get a soda, I realized that our cook and our maid had saved the leftovers to share with their friends from the neighboring houses.
For a child of 12, this was a truly eye opening experience. Although I had long been aware that the quality of life was vastly different between the well to do and the poor, it had never occurred to me that the poor ate any differently from the rest of us. Sadly, throughout history, this has been true in nearly all cultures.
In Europe from the time of the ancient Romans (and probably before that time as well) through the Medieval period, the Renaissance, and the Industrial Revolution, the rich dined on roasted meats, chicken, and seafood while the poor subsisted on coarse whole wheat bread and porridges made from oats, peas, or barley. Throughout most of the world, the opportunity to dine on meat on a daily basis has been a sign of affluence.
As a child, I remember my father telling me about how poor my great grandfather had been. My grandfather lived in rural southern China and he was so poor that he had been unable to afford any meat with any of the family meals. To avoid feeling ashamed in front of his neighbors, he would buy fat from the local butcher. My great grandmother would use this fat in cooking the family meal and my great grandfather would deliberately smear grease over his lips prior to leaving his home so that his neighbors would believe that he was more affluent than he really was.
In thinking about how meat has played a part in history, consider also the introduction of Italian cuisine to the American mainstream culture during the early 20th century. Italian Marinara sauce does not feature meat and yet in 1924 after Chef Ettore Boiardi opened the Giardino d’Italia restaurant in Cleveland, Ohio, the demand for meat from the customers was such that he felt compelled to add meatballs to the spaghetti. He became so successful that he later went into the canning business and marketed his products under the phonetically easier to pronounce name, “Chef Boyardi.”
As a nation, America is clearly a land of affluence when compared to the poverty of many third world countries. The cultural belief that a healthy diet must include meat and that meat is also a sign of affluence seems to be ingrained in the American culture. According to USA Today, in 2007 the average American consumed 84.9 pounds of chicken, 63.5 pounds of beef, 48.2 pounds of pork, 17.5 pounds of turkey, and 1 pound of lamb or mutton.
I believe that we as a society, have the capacity to change. When I was a child growing up in the 60’s, smoking was a commonplace occurrence. People routinely smoked in restaurants, in movie theaters, or on airplanes – and fifty years ago, there wasn’t any such thing as a non-smoking section. Even after all these years, I still have childhood memories of choking on my dinner in a restaurant as a group of business men at an adjoining table smoked cigars following the end of their meal.
Look at how much we’ve progressed in the last half century. Smoking is now banned on all U.S. domestic flights. In many states, smoking has been banned in public places like restaurants or movie theaters. As a society, we now understand that smoking leads to all sorts of health problems including cardiovascular disease, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, and cancer. Perhaps in time our mainstream culture will also come to understand that a meat based diet is unhealthy and that a diet that’s high in saturated fat can raise LDL cholesterol, thereby increasing the risk of heart disease.
Sources:
A Look at the Average American Meat Consumption, USA Today, http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/money/economy/2008-11-14-3913750537_x.htm, November 14, 2008
Chef Boyardee, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chef_Boyardee
