BE WARY OF THE MEAT

Generally, I’m a meat loving guy. I’m not a carnivore to the extreme, but I do enjoy my meat. In Timor-Leste, I’m hoping more and more that I get a pass on eating the meat. No, this is not a feeble attempt to make sure that I don’t eat dog again, but recognition that meat and the way it is prepared traditionally in Timor-Leste is bad.

I have received beef, pork, chicken, dog, and some other unknowns (maybe goat) while working in the communities, and can’t recall a single good one. The quality of the meat is preposterous. Beef is grisly, full of arteries and veins, and impossible to eat with all the shattered bone pieces after they hacked (or more properly, bludgeoned) a leg to smithereens with a dull butcher’s knife. The chicken is always meatless, hacked to pieces and seasoned with something awful. Pork only seems to consist of the chicharron (the skin, the fatty layer directly underneath the skin, and a little of the adjacent meat) but when I get only that i get sick and end up puking my guts under the bridge down by the river. Not pleasant! My body just can’t handle that much fat. I have the same problems when I eat pig’s feet.

So, though meat is a rare occasion, once a week at most, I would prefer it even less. I can easily survive eating the many types of unique vegetables I find in my food here. Oh yeah, and those amazing lettuce, tomato, onion salads with salt, vinegar, and oil poured over top. There is something about a fresh, vine-ripened tomato that is delicious.