On my last day in Brazil I’m thinking about sugar. It’s so sweet here! At my little table in the priest room there is a sugar bowl. I use it for my tea. Sometimes when I open the bowl a gangly red ant jumps out and tears off like a dog caught eating off the dinner table. I’ve caught this red fellow about four times (seems to be always the same guy); he must have quite a sweet tooth, but he wastes no time scrambling off, all six legs flying in different directions, when the lid blows off his sugarbowl. So I get a little spoonful of sugar for the tea (carefully avoiding little black specks), and I’m amazed how just a thimbleful of local sugar wonderfully sweetens a whole cup of tea. This must be real sugar, local sugar, sugar from the live canes. I’m used to the “new and improved” American sugar, which must be made from corn or plastic or some other cheap substance. The marvelous thing about Third World countries is their real food. The oranges, for example, are oddly-shaped, discolored, and as sweet as the sugar. They were, I’ll wager, picked from a local tree within the last 48 hours, and not sprayed with ethylene gas to make them look ripe. A simpler economy means simply better food. Once in a while the sister will plop a bag of Cheetos on the table, and how wan it looks, how embarrassingly helpless, next to real fruits and breads.
Real food means real bugs, since the sisters don’t spray the premises with poison gas. We have to share our sugar bowls with gangly ants, our bedrooms with mosquitoes (mosquito nets keep dengue fever at bay), and our dresser drawers with small lizards. But really, these tiny fellow pilgrims are not so frightening after all. You just have to get to know them. In fact, I think we would all enjoy life with more “real” in it, and it is only advertising that has made us intolerant to ants and off-white sugar and lopsided oranges. What is intolerable, if we would think about it, is the tasteless, colorless, textureless world of “products” our manufactured economy sells us (at every lower prices!).
I’m going to miss my friend, the gangly red ant, when I get back to the States. Man, can he run!
Real food means real bugs, since the sisters don’t spray the premises with poison gas. We have to share our sugar bowls with gangly ants, our bedrooms with mosquitoes (mosquito nets keep dengue fever at bay), and our dresser drawers with small lizards. But really, these tiny fellow pilgrims are not so frightening after all. You just have to get to know them. In fact, I think we would all enjoy life with more “real” in it, and it is only advertising that has made us intolerant to ants and off-white sugar and lopsided oranges. What is intolerable, if we would think about it, is the tasteless, colorless, textureless world of “products” our manufactured economy sells us (at every lower prices!).
I’m going to miss my friend, the gangly red ant, when I get back to the States. Man, can he run!
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