Food-Sharing in the Tropics

It’s time for one of my insightful, but likely unoriginal, observations.

If you move to the tropics, you’ll soon find out that food doesn’t last very long here. Even if refrigerated, things go bad pretty quickly.

My solution was to invest in a variety of airtight plastic containers. This helped a lot.

Before the days of refrigeration (or the discovery of other means of food preservation), the best option would have been to share the food. This serves two purposes: It avoids waste, and it promotes goodwill. The person you shared your food with is likely to do the same for you in the future. As an added benefit, he’s less likely to chop you to pieces.

This applies to all hunter-gatherer societies. When ancient Europeans killed a mammoth, and there was too much meat for the small band or village, they might have invited a neighboring village to come over and feast with them and take some of the meat back to their own village.

That was a long time ago, but the tropics are still the tropics to this day. Food-sharing is an important part of Dominican culture, more so than what I’d seen in the US. I suspect this is true in most tropical cultures.

One of the benefits of living in a poor country is that one has plenty of opportunities to give food to hungry people. Unlike so many of the homeless in the US, poor people here are likely to thank you profusely if you give them leftover food – and they’ll scarf it up. There are even one or two gringos I know of who will do this; it’s not just locals.

In the Dissident Right, we often speak of “high-trust societies.” What most of us have in mind is societies like Europe (pre-invasion) and Japan. I must point out that, in some ways, Dominican Republic is a “high-trust society.” If you give leftover food to a homeless person in the US, he’ll probably throw it out; there are sick, cruel, people who will poison or contaminate the food, and then give it to a homeless person. Nobody seems to worry about that here. Perhaps, if somebody did that, locals would remember his face and deal with him appropriately. On several occasions, I’ve forgotten things (even a wallet), and it was still there when I returned, or somebody picked it up and gave it back to me – and I’m not implying that Dominican Republic is just like Japan. Not by a longshot. What I am saying is that, poor and backward as it is, there is still a large reservoir of trust and kindness. If you travel anywhere in the third world, be careful and vigilant, but also look for the positive – because you’ll find it.