Chicken

From my journal: February 3, 2010

Currently, all the stores in Ine are out of meat because the weather has been cold and windy so no one is going fishing.  Therefore, more people are eating canned meat, depleting the stores’ supplies.  The waves on the ocean have also been really big and rough, preventing the Roxanna boat from making regular trips to Ine to bring supplies of food from Majuro.  So tonight for dinner we slaughtered and boiled one of our chickens.  I am all about free-range chicken, which Ine chickens certainly are, but they are all thin and stringy and very tough.  But I feel much better about eating a chicken from Ine than eating the chicken that comes frozen in huge boxes shipped to this country from somewhere undoubtedly very far away, the kind of chicken normally eaten at parties.  What a waste of resources shipping all that foreign chicken when we have plenty of chickens right here in the Marshalls.

Along with the tough chicken, which is now stuck in my teeth, I also got to try something new.  Niriti did not gut the chicken before cooking it, but instead cooked all the organs inside with the rest of the bird.  As she was cutting up and dishing out the meat, she pulled the organs out and distributed them to the kids.  Amongst the organs were small yellow undeveloped eggs.  They told me they were very tasty, so I tried one.  I was a little skeptical at first and a bit grossed out at the idea of eating an undeveloped egg, but it turned out to be quite good, just like eating the yoke.

At this point, I will eat pretty much anything as long as it won’t kill me.  Maybe it’s the lack of variety in my diet, but I get excited over anything now.  I keep telling everyone that I want to eat dog before I leave because when else am I going to have such an opportunity?  The next time they cook up one of the local dogs, I hope to be included.

They do have peanut butter here and they love it, but it is expensive so it’s a special treat that doesn’t show up in my family’s house too often.  I bought a jar of it at the beginning of last year to liven up my pancakes, but it disappeared so quickly that I decided it wasn’t worth the money to support my family’s love of peanut butter.