Food, Farming and Fishing in Bangladesh

The word “bazaar” comes from South Asia. In Bengali it means “marketplace.” When I took this picture in a market place of this graceful chicken cage, woven out of bamboo strips. Because electricity (and therefore refrigeration) is rare and unreliable in this hot country, you always buy chicken live and clucking.
I was intrigued at how easily people in Bangladesh could climb trees when there were no branches or other toeholds for the first thirty feet of trunk. You might think it’s easy to just shimmy up, but actually it’s very hard. They climb palm trees to tap the sweet sap of date palms that is boiled down to sugar, and they knock down still-green coconuts out of coconut palms. Green coconuts —called “dab”—have a liquid inside that is a perfect formulation for oral re-hydration solution for someone for someone whose stomach is in bad shape. Furthermore, I have been told by medical people that it is sterile and can be used as an intravenous (IV) drip.
So how do they climb up so easily? They loop rope around their ankles. It allows them to get the traction they need with their feet. Back in the U.S. as a teacher, I had a student who had grown up in South America. He said they use the same trick there.
Cooking in Bangladesh is done with an adobe earth stove, called a “chula.” The smoke comes right out into the room, no chimney. They say it keeps mosquitoes at bay and helps preserve the thatch roof that most houses have for several years. The woman here is cooking a “parota,” which is sort of a cross between a pancake and a flour tortilla.
I get a little embarrassed when I reminisce about the food in Bangladesh. I didn’t know much about the country before going. I was going to sacrifice 3 Spartan years of my life to helping the starving masses. When I got there, I enjoyed the sensual pleasure of eating “Bangla kabar” (Bengali cooking) every day. My passion lead me to learn food and cooking vocabulary first, and those are the words I’ll never forget even though I don’t speak much Bengali anymore.
Fish, chicken and beef can all be made into a rich “torkare” (curry). To say that curry is a sort of stew does not do justice to it. It’s the harmony of the freshly ground spices that makes it so delicious. Turmeric, hot pepper, garlic, onions, coriander, cardamom…also spices like ginger and cinnamon that we associate with sweet baking all combine to stroke your taste buds. Even ordinary potatoes become a feast when curried, as does spicy lentil “dal” and stir fried vegetable “baji.” The price of spices is a current event you read about in Bangladeshi newspapers. A person would be considered to be virtually starving if they could not afford spice for their food. You eat lots of rice with the meal.
The word “chutney” comes from South Asia. In Bangladesh, it takes the form of spicy mango pickle. You might be able to find some in well-stocked grocery store.
There are lots of tropical fruits in Bangladesh, too, like mango, guava and jackfruit. The bananas were small and had one or two hard seeds a little smaller than a cherry pit. But they had a better flavor and were sweeter than ones I buy in the grocery store now. I won’t even go into all the “mishti” (sweets). I don’t usually eat deserts, but I was helpless to resist Bengali sweets.