Surviving fieldwork: Food

Now that I'm in Guwahati and able to better control when I eat, what I eat, and how much I eat - or almost, since the guest house only has Indian food and serves dinner at 9pm (but I can choose not to eat here) - I thought I'd about my eating experiences from the past two months and some strategies I've adopted in order to survive. It's not that I was mistreated or anything, but sometimes being the guest has its risks. Also bearing in mind that every household I've been too has had different eating habits, the three main factors I want to mention here are: 1) what is being served; 2) how much is being served; and 3) when it's being served.

1. What's being served
To begin with, I'm pretty lucky in that I can stomach most things - from amphibians to innards to fermented soya beans - and I can handle spicy food to a certain degree. So when my hosts ask me what I eat, I say I eat anything. But this actually surprises them, since most visitors to Nagaland are from the rest of India, and generally more picky about their food. Some of my friends also don't eat dog (which I wouldn't actively seek out) or blood curry (which I would actively seek out). Nagaland isn't kind to vegetarians (except at that Lotha wedding I attended in Kohima) but people are generally able to still cater for them, even if it's just a single vegetable dish and dal. After a month of feasting, I really wasn't that keen on meat and fat anymore - and thankfully neither were some of my friends.

I don't do so well with monotony, so being served the same dish everyday makes me lose my appetite (my friend Lauren is more familiar with this), but I remember that this trip I mentally prepared myself for rice at every meal and to focus on the variety of meat and vegetable dishes I was getting. (At the end of my last trip I had such a bad craving for salmon sashimi. I was surprised and thankful this trip when Ab.'s brother brought back seaweed sheets from Delhi.)

2. How much is being served

The ideal situation is being able to serve yourself, so you can eat as much or as little as you want. The most important rule here is controlling the amount of rice on the plate from the very start (and to take into account the fact that you're expected to have seconds). Of course, sometimes the host insists on serving the rice from the start - one person did so even after I had quite loudly protested. The problem here is that many people are used to eating mountains of rice and also to serving mountains of rice to their guests, where I would only have about the third the amount back home. My last trip I remember absolutely dreading every single mealtime because of the vast quantities of rice I felt compelled to eat. It doesn't help that since I'm bigger than most people here, they instantly assume I eat more than them.

But mealtime shouldn't be nausea-inducing, and I did discover this trip that it is perfectly reasonable to give rice back right after it has been served without offending too much - it's much better than having a heap of leftovers on the plate that might be taken as a sign that the food isn't good. Another thing I've had to get used to is eating a lot more rice with a few dishes, since I used to having a little bit of rice with a whole lot of other dishes.

I know friends doing fieldwork in other parts of the world often face the problem of not getting enough food (some hosts may think a couple of biscuits is enough for a meal), but in Nagaland, the danger is more from being overfed as the guest.

3. When it's being served
Towards the end of my stay in Nagaland, I was asked at what time I normally 'took food'. My reply:

"I eat when I'm fed."

And it was true. My stomach no longer knew when it should be filled, simply that it is should be filled when food was provided. My first week I had to get used to having lunch at 8am and dinner at 4pm. Then at another friend's place, I was having lunch at 11am and dinner at 8pm. On Christmas Day, I remember getting tea, biscuits and Sumi sho at 7am, then being offered lunch at 8am, before the Christmas feast at 2pm. After nightfall I think I just had a light snack.

I suppose there's not a lot one can do about mealtime, apart from adjusting slowly to it. One thing I did to cope with having a big meal at 8am (remember, mountains of rice) was to wake up early, like between 5 and 5.30am so that my hunger would build up slowly. The other thing I did was to have snacks on hand like dried figs, or ask for bananas to quell my hunger during long stretches without food.

A pretty nice dinner set-up - and just the right amount of rice for me!

Also, these mostly apply to more intimate settings when I've been invited to people's homes for food. Ironically, it is much easier to get through the big feasts without feeling nauseated because they're all done buffet style, so you just line up, take as much or little as you want and go sit somewhere where people are too busy to observe how much you're eating. I also noticed when returning my plate that other people had left mountains of rice on their returned plates, which made me feel better about myself.