If you're going to work in the developing world...

...you have to be able to deal with poo.

Those sage words were spoken by our former USAID representative, and she has proven to be more right than I ever expected. As you might anticipate from a title like that, this may not be the most appetizing blog post you have the good fortune to read today. My apologies up front if anybody walks away from their breakfast or is bothered if I happen to let fly with an obscenity now and then. Shit happens; we'll all get through it.

I hadn't really thought about Amy's comment much more - she made it several months ago - until I read this article today: http://www.slate.com/id/2175569/nav/tap3/

Although like most Americans I generally go out of my way to avoid dealing with crap, the article threw into sharp relief the different types of personalities we have on this team, representing a pretty broad cross-section of consumers, from guys who think the Double Quarter Pounder with Cheese is God's greatest gift to gastronomy, to people more on my end of the spectrum. I may not like seeing goats slaughtered on the way to work, hung on meathooks next to the road, and then slowly coated with dust and wasps until all that's left at the end of the day is a lonely yellowed chunk of something, no more identifiable than the origins of the aforementioned hamburger, but I can still harbor an appreciation for the fact that at least the goat lived a pretty respectable life up to that point. Unlike its American cousin, the McDonalds beef cow, at least the goat ate grass and roamed relatively freely, as opposed to being force-fed corn, antibiotics, and rendered byproducts of its brothers and sisters to make up for its grotesque and otherwise limited diet. Also, the goat didn't live and die atop a steadily growing pile of its own crap. That alone has to count for something.

So anyway, distasteful as a freshly butchered slab of goat or sheep may look while hanging next to a mud shop and enveloped in a cloud of bees, I can readily admit that if you stick that thing in a pressure cooker, roast the hell out of it, and throw it onto a plate of rice, it's a damn good meal. If you're into the whole organic movement, it's hard to get more organic than what I've seen around here. Alternatively, it's just as good if you grill it on a skewer and wrap it in a piece of local flatbread. Nine times out of ten, local foods like Palau (the rice and meat plate) and kabobs are immeasurably better than the processed, pre-cooked stuff they serve most nights in our dining facility.

That being said, there's still the McDonalds crowd on the team that shies away from anything more adventuresome than an occasional piece of local bread, and this is where the Slate article comes in. For better or for worse - at least if you can take Dr. Sepkowitz's word for it - it's not too hard to figure out who on this team has eaten more shit than others. And although I guess it should pain me to say this, I probably come out on the higher end of that spectrum.

The reason I find all this blog-worthy is that Dr. Sepkowitz appears to be quite right. Not that I've studied it scientifically, but the people around here who seem to get sick the most are the ones who most strenuously avoid the local food and stick with the processed, boiled, vacuum-sealed dinners the US military has the generosity to send to us. I've been sick maybe three times as a result of bad food since I got here, and I'm not convinced in any of those cases that the local food was at fault. I have my limits - there's no five-second rule in Afghanistan, as far as I'm concerned - but I suspect that the occasional trace of fecal matter in my next kabob won't be any worse for me than the "restructured beef patty" that might be the entree in my next MRE.

Two other thoughts come to mind. One is that the people who skip the local cuisine aren't just short-changing their immune systems; they're missing out on an element of the local culture that we have the incredible good fortune to be able to experience on a daily basis. Where else in Afghanistan can you drive down the street and have dinner on the back porch of a restaurant, while listening to the river flowing ten feet away?

The second issue is that the Panjshir Valley produces the best fruit that I've ever eaten. I can understand the Army sticking with strict hygiene standards about where meat comes from and how it's prepared, but we could buy nearly all of our fruits and vegetables locally, save a tremendous amount of money rather than shipping all the same stuff into the country, and the quality would be better. Money would go back into the local economy, the logistics tail required to supply us would shorten, and food quality would increase. The watermelon this summer...best I've ever had. The Army-supplied watermelon? I can't speak for how it tasted, but the whiteness and stringy texture told me all I needed to know. The one Panjshir peach I had the good fortune to eat a few months ago? No shit, no exaggeration, best peach of my life. The Army-supplied peach? Again, I don't know what it tasted like, but I'm pretty sure the big brown spot on the bottom wasn't an extra patch of juicy deliciousness. And then there were the local apricots...best apricots ever. They were so sweet and juicy that it took me a few minutes to figure out that the aftertaste reminded me of eating a raw sugarcube. It turns out - and I never knew this until the locals looked at me like an asshole for throwing away the pit - that if you crack an apricot pit open, there's a delicious nut inside that's kind of like an almond. Now you know.

I'll close with a story that makes me laugh, but also makes me kind of sad. I was trying to convince a visiting Army guy to try the local food, and he wasn't going for it. Finally he leaned over and half-whispered that he had been told in training not to eat food sources (like local vegetables) not approved by the Army, because they might have "been fertilized with animal shit". I started to tell him that fertilizer, by definition, pretty much is shit, but I quickly stopped myself. He (and an amazingly large number of others) can go on thinking fertilizer comes in pellets from a plastic bag you buy at Home Depot, and that meat is pre-made by a butcher behind a wall at the supermarket, shiny plastic and styrofoam included. Meanwhile, in response to the question posed by Dr. Sepkowitz at the end of his article, I'll go on eating just enough crap to keep myself healthy. You should join me.