Family food follies

There is a dish that my mother (in America. Hi Mom) makes that I’m extremely fond of back home, bittermelon stuffed with ground beef (pork maybe?). I don’t normally like bittermelon because it’s bitter as balls but the way Mom makes it renders the bittermelon a little bit less bitter and a lotta bit more delicious. With the bouts of homesickness spreading through the K4s as we spend more time at permanent site, you can imagine my delight when I discovered that my host mother here in Cambodia also makes the same dish! The first night she made it I had to exercise extreme self control to not dump the entire dish onto my own plate, and instead waited until everyone else was finished eating before clearing it off. This was also the night where my host mother chose to ask me what of her dishes I like best and I foolishly gave a concrete answer and pointed to the stuffed bittermelon dish.

Since that night I’ve had the stuffed bittermelon dish with every single meal. In addition to that, my host mother also makes a lot of different stir fried vegetables because I had said on my very first day during site visit that I really like to eat vegetables (I was hoping to prevent the training family situation where every meal was nearly almost all meat because I was treated as a guest and in most Asian countries you serve guests your best meat). I don’t really have a problem with this because I am eating exactly what I like to eat (but since I am also pretty finicky I might start to get sick of the stuffed bittermelon if I have it with every single meal…oh well, I’ll climb that mountain when I get to it) but I started noticing today that some of the other members of the family might have a slight aversion to my taste and my host mother catering to that taste. Namely, my younger brother and sister.

My younger brother (13) and sister (9) are typical children in that they like eating things that are delicious and unfortunately vegetables do not fall into that category, especially not vegetables with an offensive bitter taste like bittermelon (I myself did not have mature enough taste buds to handle it until at least high school). Today during lunch all my sister ate was rice with soy sauce until my host mother decided to make her a couple of fried duck eggs. Today during dinner there were no duck eggs, so all my sister had to eat was rice with soy sauce. My brother didn’t even eat lunch at the house today—he hid away at grandma’s house where the quantity of meat undoubtedly outnumbered the quantity of greens. Today at dinner, he walked in from his English class, sniffed at the dishes present (stuffed bittermelon and stir fried green beans with beef), and announced to my mother that he didn’t want to eat dinner because he wasn’t hungry.

My mother delivered a swift reprimand, her voice cutting through the air, causing my brother to sit down obediently, and help himself to a spoonful of rice with two green beans. After he finished he announced he was full and wandered into the living room to watch TV with his sister, who had long finished her satisfying and nutritious meal of rice and soy sauce.

I’m not really sure how to handle this situation; do I tell my host mother that I like to eat more meat and feel around to try to find the middle ground, or do I just hope that she’ll come around and realize her own children are actually starving because none of what she’s making is delicious to them? The thing is, there is meat at meals; it’s just stir fried into the vegetables. I don’t even think I would be able to handle eating any more meat than I already am; at my training family I often felt greasy and sick because of the lack of vegetables. I think I’m going to bank on the latter, and that host mom will start making more child-friendly food tomorrow because her already underweight kids are complaining of starvation.

The worst part, though, is what my younger siblings might be thinking of me behind their cheerful smiles. “Damn foreigner, why couldn’t we get a real one who actually likes to eat meat? Instead they stick us with the American who looks Asian, eats vegetables, and parks herself in our hammock every day from 12-2. Just our luck.”