The Heart Is a Muscle / El corazón es un musculo
By Barbara R. Drake
I used to think that France was the most food-obsessed nation on
earth. Then I moved to Peru.
I used to think that France was the most food-obsessed nation on
earth. Then I moved to Peru.
Life halts twice a day in France for the gastronomic liturgies of le déjeuner and le dîner. Afterward, the French people refold their napkins and return to the all-consuming business of being French: i.e., being frighteningly exact about money, arguing about philosophy and literature, and dressing better than everyone else except the Italians.
Here in Peru, however, food consciousness — preparing, eating, talking, thinking about food — goes on 24/7. Peruvians discuss food with a singular intensity and concentration — and I mean all Peruvians, all the time. I sometimes believe that you could wake a Peruvian from a dead sleep, and in less than ten seconds he’d be up to a serious food conversation.
I’ve seen Peruvian businessmen standing on line for a table at Punto Azul, in Miraflores, engaged in a forty-minute dispute over whether Ecuador’s ceviche is the real thing. (As a point of comparison: Can you imagine two U.S. executives on a business lunch talking about steak for more than two minutes?) I’ve braved an hour-long car ride to a burial in the Lima desert where the mourners spoke exclusively of where to eat after the service. (The deceased was a beloved tía, by the way.) I’ve been lectured at by an elderly fruit salesman on Av. Benavides as to why Peru’s mangoes are the best in the world, a topic that is apparently worthy of a master’s thesis.
Here in Peru, however, food consciousness — preparing, eating, talking, thinking about food — goes on 24/7. Peruvians discuss food with a singular intensity and concentration — and I mean all Peruvians, all the time. I sometimes believe that you could wake a Peruvian from a dead sleep, and in less than ten seconds he’d be up to a serious food conversation.
I’ve seen Peruvian businessmen standing on line for a table at Punto Azul, in Miraflores, engaged in a forty-minute dispute over whether Ecuador’s ceviche is the real thing. (As a point of comparison: Can you imagine two U.S. executives on a business lunch talking about steak for more than two minutes?) I’ve braved an hour-long car ride to a burial in the Lima desert where the mourners spoke exclusively of where to eat after the service. (The deceased was a beloved tía, by the way.) I’ve been lectured at by an elderly fruit salesman on Av. Benavides as to why Peru’s mangoes are the best in the world, a topic that is apparently worthy of a master’s thesis.
And then there is El Piloto.
Among my husband’s relatives in Lima is a younger cousin whose husband flies commercial jets for LAN airlines. I’m not an expert on pilot personality types, but the ten or so professional pilots I’ve met over the years have tended to be even-tempered men with excellent eyesight who talk about their kids, their cars, sports and the weather.
That’s true of the pilots I’ve known in Peru as well, but mention the words pasta or lúcuma to them, and their inner Peruvian foodie explodes to the surface.
Particularly El Piloto, a compact man with a resonant voice who embodies the English word gusto.
Two months ago at a Sunday family almuerzo (lunch), El Piloto became determined that I should be in 100 percent agreement with him that Peru has the best Italian food on the planet. I tried to argue that the best Italian food is in Italy — I know, I’ve tasted it — but El Piloto pooh-poohed that banal idea.
“¡La comida italiana en Perú es la mas rica del mundo!” he thundered at me across la mesa. (My disagreeing seemed to invigorate him.)
“¡Por qué las verduras peruanas son mas frescas!” he went on, turning to his brother-in-law (a former pilot, it turns out, but one more subdued than El Piloto).
Yes, yes, the two Peruvian pilots concurred. The vegetables in Peru smell better, taste better. The ground is fertile, the farmers know how to work the land, la tierra is sacred here….
Actually, I agree that much of Peru’s produce is exceptional. What kept me from chiming in that afternoon was my inability to match the enormity of my relatives’ enthusiasm for the topic. Not to mention the prodigiousness of their conversational stamina.
I left the table, poured myself a generous glass of red wine, wandered into a library where the kids were playing video games, watched Mario beat Luigi twice in a race, took a siesta on the couch and came back to the dining table nearly an hour later. The pilots were still at it:
“¡Pero la pasta en Perú es buenasa!”
I ran into El Piloto again a month later at a birthday party for his eight-year-old son. He was aflame with the news that Gastón Acurio had opened a new anticucho restaurant at Av. Dos de Mayo, in Miraflores.
“Imagine this,” he told me in Spanish. “An anticucho platter for two. For only 18 soles!” (Americans: divide by 2.5 and you get the approximate cost in U.S. dollars – around $7. Europeans: one Peruvian sol = approx. 0.3 euros.)
“What’s wrong?” he asked, when he saw that I wasn’t leaping up and down with excitement over Restaurante Panchita. “Don’t you like anticuchos?”
I confessed that I don’t eat skewered cow’s heart.
“But it is delicious, more than steak!” He furrowed his brow. “You haven’t even tried it, have you?”
“No,” I admitted. “I don’t want to eat the heart of any animal.”
“You have to get over that,” he pressed. “Look, you eat steak, right? That’s a muscle. Well…el corazón es un músculo también.”
El Piloto made a fist and opened and closed it rapidly, like a heart beating.
“¡El corazón es un músculo!” he repeated, pumping his thick hand at me.
“Right? Isn’t it true?” he nudged my husband. “So why not eat it?”
I kept looking at El Piloto’s fist throbbing like a crazy músculo. A strange idea occurred to me.
“I’m going to have a t-shirt made for you in Gamarra,” I told him. “ ‘El corazón es un músculo.’ Right across the chest. It’s a good message.”
“Si, El corazón es un músculo: Cuídalo [Take care of it],” added El Piloto’s wife. “And add a picture of this guy’s hand. With blinking lights!”
The heart is a muscle. This is what Peruvians are teaching me.
Well, perhaps it’s okay for other people to eat this muscle. For now, I prefer just to exercise mine — metaphorically.
By developing compassion for those who are less fortunate (for the millions of impoverished Peruvians who can’t afford to eat at a place like Panchita’s, for instance), by learning to wait patiently in line at the supermarket or bank (something Limeños do far better than North Americans do), and by appreciating the values of a people-centered society where it’s customary every day to have a relaxed, sit-down meal with friends, family or co-workers, the key ingredient being company.
Few things in in our daily life are so important that we can’t pause to share time and good food with others. This former New Yorker’s heart is learning how to do just that.
____
An earlier version of this essay was originally published online at An American in Lima (www.americaninlima.com ), on March 8, 2009.
Particularly El Piloto, a compact man with a resonant voice who embodies the English word gusto.
Two months ago at a Sunday family almuerzo (lunch), El Piloto became determined that I should be in 100 percent agreement with him that Peru has the best Italian food on the planet. I tried to argue that the best Italian food is in Italy — I know, I’ve tasted it — but El Piloto pooh-poohed that banal idea.
“¡La comida italiana en Perú es la mas rica del mundo!” he thundered at me across la mesa. (My disagreeing seemed to invigorate him.)
“¡Por qué las verduras peruanas son mas frescas!” he went on, turning to his brother-in-law (a former pilot, it turns out, but one more subdued than El Piloto).
Yes, yes, the two Peruvian pilots concurred. The vegetables in Peru smell better, taste better. The ground is fertile, the farmers know how to work the land, la tierra is sacred here….
Actually, I agree that much of Peru’s produce is exceptional. What kept me from chiming in that afternoon was my inability to match the enormity of my relatives’ enthusiasm for the topic. Not to mention the prodigiousness of their conversational stamina.
I left the table, poured myself a generous glass of red wine, wandered into a library where the kids were playing video games, watched Mario beat Luigi twice in a race, took a siesta on the couch and came back to the dining table nearly an hour later. The pilots were still at it:
“¡Pero la pasta en Perú es buenasa!”
I ran into El Piloto again a month later at a birthday party for his eight-year-old son. He was aflame with the news that Gastón Acurio had opened a new anticucho restaurant at Av. Dos de Mayo, in Miraflores.
“Imagine this,” he told me in Spanish. “An anticucho platter for two. For only 18 soles!” (Americans: divide by 2.5 and you get the approximate cost in U.S. dollars – around $7. Europeans: one Peruvian sol = approx. 0.3 euros.)
“What’s wrong?” he asked, when he saw that I wasn’t leaping up and down with excitement over Restaurante Panchita. “Don’t you like anticuchos?”
I confessed that I don’t eat skewered cow’s heart.
“But it is delicious, more than steak!” He furrowed his brow. “You haven’t even tried it, have you?”
“No,” I admitted. “I don’t want to eat the heart of any animal.”
“You have to get over that,” he pressed. “Look, you eat steak, right? That’s a muscle. Well…el corazón es un músculo también.”
El Piloto made a fist and opened and closed it rapidly, like a heart beating.
“¡El corazón es un músculo!” he repeated, pumping his thick hand at me.
“Right? Isn’t it true?” he nudged my husband. “So why not eat it?”
I kept looking at El Piloto’s fist throbbing like a crazy músculo. A strange idea occurred to me.
“I’m going to have a t-shirt made for you in Gamarra,” I told him. “ ‘El corazón es un músculo.’ Right across the chest. It’s a good message.”
“Si, El corazón es un músculo: Cuídalo [Take care of it],” added El Piloto’s wife. “And add a picture of this guy’s hand. With blinking lights!”
The heart is a muscle. This is what Peruvians are teaching me.
Well, perhaps it’s okay for other people to eat this muscle. For now, I prefer just to exercise mine — metaphorically.
By developing compassion for those who are less fortunate (for the millions of impoverished Peruvians who can’t afford to eat at a place like Panchita’s, for instance), by learning to wait patiently in line at the supermarket or bank (something Limeños do far better than North Americans do), and by appreciating the values of a people-centered society where it’s customary every day to have a relaxed, sit-down meal with friends, family or co-workers, the key ingredient being company.
Few things in in our daily life are so important that we can’t pause to share time and good food with others. This former New Yorker’s heart is learning how to do just that.
____
An earlier version of this essay was originally published online at An American in Lima (www.americaninlima.com ), on March 8, 2009.
____
AUTHOR INFO
Barbara R. Drake is a writer and teacher who moved from the United States to Peru five years ago with her husband, a native Limeño. Her articles and essays have appeared Huffington Post, Miami Herald, MSNBC.com, Caribbean Travel & Life and the Village Voice, among other outlets; since 2008 she has blogged about life as an expat and on social issues in Peru in her award-winning blog An American in Lima. Barbara currently teaches English in the translation and interpretation program at the Universidad Peruana de Ciencias Aplicadas (UPC), in Lima.
AUTHOR INFO
Barbara R. Drake is a writer and teacher who moved from the United States to Peru five years ago with her husband, a native Limeño. Her articles and essays have appeared Huffington Post, Miami Herald, MSNBC.com, Caribbean Travel & Life and the Village Voice, among other outlets; since 2008 she has blogged about life as an expat and on social issues in Peru in her award-winning blog An American in Lima. Barbara currently teaches English in the translation and interpretation program at the Universidad Peruana de Ciencias Aplicadas (UPC), in Lima.
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