Buffalo Chips

Buffalo Chips
Originally uploaded by gaikokujinkyofusho.

Going to Band-e Amir I noticed two things (ok, so I noticed many things but two things relating to fire fuel) Cow patties and grass piles.

In the wide open prairie/mountain-meadow/tundra(?) I noticed piles of grass everywhere that were apparently being cut/collected for fuel (more on that in a future post) and I also noticed piles of cakes on the walls around the houses. These cakes are actually cow manure shaped into cakes and dried and later used as fuel.

I am sure some people are repulsed by the idea of even touching cow manure but I promise you it is more benign than say omnivore or carnivore excrement. An Indian friend of mine told me about the many ways manure is used in India and I remember seeing some public TV documentary that was suppose to show the poorest of the poor and what they were forced to use as cooking fuel, at the time they got me (I felt sorry for the people) but now I dont feel as sorry for them, well maybe I do but not because they have to touch cow manure.

Afghanistan has very few trees and what few trees are here are either used for construction (beams) or sold to Pakistan (the wood is pretty slow growing and dense thus fetches a fairly high price) so fuel for fire is scarce. If you have ever read a cowboy novel you might remember a reference to someone fetching Buffalo Chips; I remember these references and usually just glossed over them but later it occurred to me that buffalo chips were buffalo paddies. It actually is a pretty good fuel since it dries into a hard (almost chip-board like) discs and is high in cellulose and lignin (from all the grass that the cattle consume) both of which are high in energy (lignin is especially hard for cattle to digest so it usually passes right through their systems) so instead of throwing it out or leaving it in the stalls the people here use it (and hopefully throw the ash onto the fields but I dont know that for sure) for fuel.

This makes me think of biodigesters; if people are willing to collect manure then maybe biodigesters have a place in Afghanistan. Biodigester residue leaves a better fertilizer behind (instead of just carbon ash) not only that I have noticed that human feces is used as fertilizer, in my opinion this is the right idea implemented in the wrong way (processing the human waste to #1 harvest potential energy #2 reduce or get rid of infections that are transmitted through feces) but that is for another post.

Over irrigating?

Over irrigating?
Originally uploaded by gaikokujinkyofusho.

Here was an irrigation ditch (which I was assured was clean and pure enough to drink, by a Afghan doctor that was with us [this was the first assurance of many; these assurances quickly reduced what little faith I had in his medical ability]).

The reason I took this photo was #1 the surface irrigation used (which I *really* think afghans need to get away from [though admittedly alternate forms of irrigation are usually more expensive and more difficult to implement] since Afghanistan is *very* dry) #2 The scallions (I didnt taste them but I smelled it and it looks like scallions) that were practically being drowned. I am not a horticulture person I dont think scallions require constant water (I actually sank when I tried to walk into the field, reminiscent of rice paddies).

I supposed my point was to show how poorly water is used (wasted) here, I believe in another post I mentioned how, when I worked at a computer lab in college, students totally wasted paper (which was initially free) when printing it made me cringe at how blatantly wasteful people could be. The lab finally got fed up and started charging and whatyaknow the rate of paper usage was reduced by 3/4th in a week! I think the same is here, at places where there is a source of water people consistently waste water and I sincerely fear for the future of Afghanistans water tables.

Nuth'n says yummy like a wheelbarrow full of sheep heads...

Nuth'n says yummy like a wheelbarrow full of sheep heads...
Originally uploaded by gaikokujinkyofusho.

When being taxied around from place to place in Kabul (its not a great idea for foreigners to walk around Kabul at the moment) I see tons of things I want to get a picture of everything from 300 gallon pots which are actually ovens to… wheelbarrows full of sheep heads.

We had passed by this spot a few times so I thought I was ready to take a picture, or so I thought, the window on my side would not roll down, the driver noticed so he stopped right in front of the two boys selling the sheep heads (not 2 feet away, close enough that I couldn’t even open the door without hitting them). This was *not* what I wanted, pointing a camera in someone face and then driving off. I quickly snapped a picture through the window and told the driver to go (I *really* didn’t like this situation) but they kept saying go ahead and take a picture, even one of the boys started saying “take my picture” (he apparently didn’t notice that I was taking a picture of what he was selling, not him).

I had asked previously about how the heads are used and found that usually the are boiled and the soup stock is used but it is not uncommon for the head to be eaten. While I can stomach the head being used as soup stock the idea of eating something that is staring back at me would be a bit harder to swallow (literally and figuratively). In the southeastern US some people scramble pork brains with eggs though its been a long time since I have seen that.

Seeing these disembodied heads did make me think of headcheese though. I looked it up on Wikipedia and found that headcheese is made in a variety of cultures/places but not Afghanistan.

Those hanging h'orderves in the background are, I believe, lungs. The ditch behind them and in front of the pedestrians is actually an open sewer. This is actually not an uncommon scene, its pretty representative of Kabul, to the left a guy in jeans and a western-ish shirt, in front of him a business-casual looking guy, in front of him a guy dressed in traditional clothes, in front of him a woman in a burqa, and in front of her a older man in traditional clothes and full beard.

I want my "Macro Agriculture" Podcast!!!

Ok, first I guess I should elaborate on what I mean by “Macro Agriculture”, simply put I am referring to “International Agriculture” and since much of the world’s agriculture takes place in the third world I want my International Agricultural Development podcast!

 

I applauded Texas A&M University’s Ag News Weekly and the Kansas extension service’s podcast, Agricast. Both of those podcasts started just a few months (3-4) after podcasts came about (August 2005ish) but I could never get into them, much of my lack of interest was that these podcasts had little to do with me since they were on local issues.

 

Now there are more Agriculture related podcasts and some of them are a bit more my speed but still they still aren’t quite what I am looking for. Given the nature of my work I am intensely interested in agriculture that does or can apply to agriculture in the larger sense, that is, things like new technologies for developed and developing agriculture systems and policies etc. I guess if you took all the farming/agriculture related reports coming out of BBC and NPR then that would be about what I am looking for. I regularly do searches on the NPR and BBC websites to find the latest ag related reports but that’s not nearly as convenient as a podcast. Maybe if they made their site such that they were able to provide podcast feeds of reports that had key words (and no, you wouldn’t have to have some funky voice recognition since their reports are almost always offered as text and audio. Already sites like Yahoo News and Google News offer news feeds based on key words you specify so my idea doesn’t sound so far fetched (at least to me it doesn’t).

 

Breakfast: Plain as it can get

Breakfast: Plain as it can get
Originally uploaded by gaikokujinkyofusho.

Bread, honey, and tea... this is a reoccurring theme in my travels, simple food. I have been brought up (intentionally or not) to be a bit of a culinary snob, while I am not quite there (I can’t tell the difference between a $25 bottle of wine and a $2,500 bottle of wine) I do have standards of sorts. I feel that I can justify part of my snobbishness since I am perfectly willing to cook for myself, having been told more than once “I won’t have you marrying out of hunger” I learned fairly early on how to be a decent cook (or at least I can cook well enough that I will eat it).

So, my culinary afghan adventures have recently made a bit more sense to me in that I recently discovered that the reason that my lunch was fairly palatable and varied and my morning and evening meals were less so was because my morning/evening meals are prepared by the night watch. The lunch cook pretty much hides in the kitchen during the day (not atypical in Afghanistan) and all my meals are brought to me by the assistant cook.

Now having complained about my food I know many an American who would be perfectly happy with a bagel, tea, and jelly/cheese but I am not usually one of them. I am starting to look at stoves (think car camping stove) now since all the cooking here takes place in a cauldron balanced on a gas tank (not great for cooking with pans etc) which would explain the goulash consistency of most of my meals (that was not necessarily a put down, but everything is mixed together ala goulash).

I have been chastised before for being critical of native diets “Because those poor people don’t have access to other foods” but it has recently become apparent to me that simple native diets are often due to culture *not* lack of availability.

When in Moldova I used to be driven crazy by the lack of variety in my meals (it was not uncommon to have an egg fried in sunflower oil a slab of bread and wine for dinner (and salt if I asked for it) but I would look in the garden and see garlic, chickens ripe for the plucking (I paid for my food their so I didn’t feel guilty about taking a chicken), spinach, tomatoes, basil, and a bunch of other foods *right*outside*my*window* but it just never occurred to my host family to mix them (indeed when I tried making a tomato sauce they were horrified that I would put basil with tomato and couldn’t understand why I added *only* a capful of oil). I find a similar situation in Afghanistan. My meals are incredibly simple, and I honestly don’t believe it’s due to laziness and certainly not due to lack of availability. While I can’t get out and walk around as much as I would like I do see what’s available in the stalls along the side of the road. There is plenty of variety such as multiple varieties of lettuce, watermelon, a honey dew type fruit, peaches, plums, garlic, a few types of bread (the traditional afghan bread, which looks a lot like Indian “nan”s, is actually a pretty utilitarian bread in that it can be tastefully eaten with sweets like jelly or used as a pizza crust, or spread with something like hummus), onions, potatoes, okra, and the list goes on. This variety could yield some pretty tasty dishes but instead even the lunch cook’s meals consist of rice or potato, with bread (always two starches), and then a tomato n oil based topping which is sometimes a bit of meat like veal, or okra that has been my lunch for over two weeks… and that is the best meal of the day.