I am craving white rice.
Fatty rice. Fat rice.
Happy rice.
High GI magic filled with carbohydrates and calories and sugar. When we lived with my aunt who was not really my aunt but your lover, there was always a pot of cooked rice. There is a joke circling the internet currently, an Asian man runs out of rice and though there is other food to eat, he has failed his family.
Despite countless diets, low carb, high protein, low fat, it is white rice that spreads inside me like a warm hug. The hipster European in me says eat the brown rice, the quinoa, the zucchini noodles. But white rice feels like home.
Fear and guilt also feel like home, but these days I’m all for harm minimisation. This is what I’ve learned after years of therapy, after training as a therapist myself. Eat the fatty rice.
….And about potatoes, and meat.
When I was a child, I thought that potatoes were an expensive food. You rarely bought them. On those rare occasions that you did buy them, you would buy a single potato, chopping it finely to put it in a casserole dish. Or there would be mashed potatoes, a treat and not a staple side dish. It didn’t occur to me that potatoes were not a Filipino staple.
I always liked vegetables and rice, a symbol of poverty in the Philippines. And yes I liked meat that didn’t taste like meat. I remember watching you fry bloodied meat or boil pink chicken legs with blue veins turning black in the boiling pot. It seemed counter-intuitive to eat what was once alive. Perhaps these thoughts are a mark of my privilege. When you are hungry, you will eat anything that is edible, and things that are also inedible.
These days I am vegan, another choice that might leave you aghast.
Children can be disappointing, one of my colleagues told me.
Excerpt from “A debt that cannot be repaid.”
Word upon Word 