Honduran food, make up your mind

It’s kind of crazy how different the food is here in Honduras from that of their close-by neighbors to the north, Mexico. I’d say we’re all pretty familiar with Mexican food with its spiciness and flavorfulness: salsa, colorful varities of beans, green chile sauce, mole, lime-marinated carne asada etc etc. I like Mexican food a lot.

And personally, I’ve grown to like Honduran food too. But let’s be honest. It’s not as exciting or distinctively zesty as Mexican food is. Some people may even go as far as to call it ‘bland.’ We’re talking generic brown beans, rice, plantains and scrambled eggs as the standard fare. It gets the job done but it seems to lack character or imagination. The beans are the highlight of the meal, if that tells you anything (In fact, one of the biggest Honduran films of the past decade is called "Amor y Frijoles," which means love and beans... see the screenshot).

Hondurans love their food though, and simply have no interest in trying much else. And for them, spicy food is a no-no. But then there are a couple irregularities in this bland agreement that Hondurans have made with their food that have shocked me:

First of all, for a people who don’t generally like strong flavors in their food, they LOAD TO THE MAX their coffee with sugar. And I’m talking practically a 1:1 ratio coffee to sugar. 2 cups coffee, 2 cups sugar. When I visit my neighbors I can feel my teeth start to rot out of my mouth with every sip, as I secretly wince to myself trying not to be impolite. Sure lots of people in the States find black coffee a bit too bitter for their liking, but this is taking it to another extreme. Some of my townsfolk here would probably rather just drink plain sugar itself and leave the coffee out if they could.

So their behavior with coffee would lead one to believe that Hondurans are generally quite opposed to bitterness. In fact, it would seem that they go out of their way to ensure that there is no trace left of the culprit’s original flavor. But that assumption is, in fact, incorrect on the whole. The second shocking irregularity to the bland food premise is their surprising love for superbly bitter food.

At the end of the dry season, people in Honduras excitedly harvest flor de izote, a white flower that grows at the tops of spiky palm shrubs. It’s a pretty flower, kind of rounded and curvy, bunching together into grape-like clusters. But if you decide to sauté it up with onion then scramble in an egg, which is the popular way to consume the flor de izote here, you will instantly realize that your mouth begins to shrivel, never having tasted anything as bitter in your life. Taste buds die one by one and all the moisture in your mouth is consumed by some instinctive emergency reaction. Forget trying to taste anything else for the entire meal. But, from what I can tell, Hondurans are connoisseurs and relish in this flower’s intense bitterness.

Then there’s the pacaya, a medium-sized stalk that grows in the wild, that is scorched over a flame for about 15-20 minutes then peeled. Inside you eat the white and scalding hot membrane plain or mixed into scrambled eggs like the flor de izote. And it offers about the same ultimate effect: mind-blowing and incongruous bitterness.

So I guess I am left a bit confused about how to define Honduran food. Blandish, cavity-inducingly sweet, or freakishly out-of-control bitterness.

In Defense of Transportation in the 3rd World

 Upon re-reading my blog post about riding buses in Honduras, I feel that I’ve unfairly excluded some of the positive aspects. The following is thus a brief defense of public transportation here. Read only the bold sentences if you want to get through this quickly:


-In the first place, public transportation can take you to just about any place in the country, including the smallest villages. The vast majority of people in Honduras use the public transportation system as opposed to driving their own cars. According to the survey I did of my town last year, only 6% of people here reported owning their own car. (It does seem, however, like most people in my town at least aspire to having their own car, but as it stands, it’s prohibitively expensive to buy one and much more so to pay for gas and maintenance.) The positive consequence of this dependence on public transportation is that Honduras’ carbon emissions are immensely and responsibly low. Not to mention, Honduras isn’t involved in the messy politics of the Middle East like America (though I won’t go into their recent history with Venezuela).


-Public transportation is cheap. It costs me L28 (just under $1.50) to get to Santa Barbara from my town, about two hours down the winding and steep mountain road.


-On my town’s bus, as is probably the case in the rest of rural Honduras, people often use the chance to catch up with friends and neighbors and sit quietly and politely chatting (and gossiping) for the entire ride. For the most part, it’s a refreshingly friendly experience. True, things get a little less friendly once you get onto buses between bigger cities, but it’s almost never hostile.


-Passengers are usually surprisingly helpful to strangers. More than once, my bus has stopped to let passengers hop off to help push stalled cars on the side of the road. When would a public bus ever stop to help another vehicle in the States? Also, people will help other passengers move heavy bags or hold kids in their laps if there’s no more room to sit. People will give up their seat to elderly people and women with children. If the bus is struggling to make it up a steep stretch of road, passengers seem happy to get off and help push or pull! In the States, people would most likely get angry and probably consider calling their lawyer.


-There’s no need to wait at a “bus stop.” In fact, that concept doesn’t really exist: You can flag a bus down anywhere along the road and get picked up. The same works for getting off. Just yell out “baja” (the equivalent of the impersonal “someone is getting off here”) and they’ll stop and let you off, helping you with bags if you need it. Of course, the dark side of this is that you can be in trouble if you’re trying to get anywhere in a hurry.


-If you’re hungry or thirsty at any point during your travel you won’t have to wait long for someone to offer to sell you tasty greasy/sugary food or drink. Same goes with needing pills for anything from mental slowness and forgetfulness to back pain, new toothbrushes or a chip for your cell phone, or God. It’s practically foolish to pack considering all the things you can purchase while on the bus.Ultimately, people take riding buses here as part of daily life and are much less worried about regulations and cold efficiency as we are in the States.


Cheapness is mainly what’s important. That and upholding a sense of empathetic communal support (ie ‘we’re all on this bus together’ type of thing). So I’d say it’s only fair to consider all the negative stuff I mentioned in my last blog post with all this good stuff when talking about riding buses in Honduras. But when it comes down to it, I still miss the freedom of having my own car.