New Britain Survey: Food

I'm getting close to the end of talking about my New Britain survey, but I just have to talk about the food. It's a question missionaries everywhere can be sure of being asked: what kind of weird food do you eat?

No, I didn't eat any bugs or lizards or anything on the survey; we actually ate really well. The most common food we ate was either rice or root veggies cooked in coconut cream, with a sauce over it, often made with leafy greens, fish, or canned meat (think Spam).

Here's a plate of coconut rice with cooked greens on top:

Along with our normal food, we also had some special treats, like this "tapiok cake" (I believe it's made from cassava plants). We got really excited when our hosts presented us with this delicious snack.

Women use shell scrapers to grate the hard cassava root, which they mix with coconut cream, wrap in banana leaves, and cook over a fire. (In the picture, the cassava cakes are sitting on the banana leaf they were cooked in.) It's crunchy on the outside and chewy on the inside!

Another special treat we had on the survey was good fruit. Laulau is similar to an apple, and the flavor ranges from quite tart to deliciously sweet. They range in size from about one to three inches across, most of them being on the small size. On one small island, I was given a bag of huge, sweet laulau (including the one pictured below) and enjoyed every bite!

(To "pick" laulau, someone climbs a laulau tree and shakes it. Lots of fruit shower down, and people pick up the best looking ones, leaving the small, unripe and bug-eaten ones on the ground.)

Ok, this last picture isn't of food. But it's of something that spends lots more time in peoples' mouths than any food does: betel nut. People of all ages crack open the small hard fruit with their teeth and chew the soft, bitter flesh. When mixed with lime powder (made from sea shells) and leaves from a peppery-tasting tree, the betel nut produces lots of bright red spit in peoples' mouths. Almost everywhere you go in PNG, you find betel nut spit stains like the one below on the ground.