KZBlog

Not to suddenly harp on food, but I had an interesting conversation the other day with a group of colleagues. I mentioned in an earlier post that one stereotype here of the US is that our meat does not taste good (I put this down to differences in what constitutes properly cooked meat). Another is that all of our food is genetically modified and chemically altered. Now on that second point, I can’t argue as much. A lot of food in the US is altered in some way. I did put up a half-hearted fight for the idea that breeding food that doesn’t spoil as fast or is pest-resistant is maybe not the worst thing in the world.

But what I thought was most interesting was that one woman claimed that the solution to the problem was to grow all your food yourself. Now here in the northern part of Kazakhstan, where there is snow on the ground 6 months of the year and the temperature gets down to -20 or -30, I’m not sure if you can really grow enough to feed yourself in such a short growing season. I’m not sure you can grow anything much more than potatoes in such a climate, unless you decide to use hydroponics or some kind of indoor garden.

One man stood up strongly for the argument that all a human being needs to eat is meat. Kazakh ancestors, I gather, didn’t stay in any one place long enough to garden, so all they ever ate was meat (and animal by-products such as milk and blood). In fact, according to this colleague, beshbarmak with onions and noodles is not real Kazakh beshbarmak. Authentic beshbarmak should be noting more than boiled meat! (By the way, it is widely believed that meat from Akmola state, where Astana is located, is the best of all meat in Kazakhstan).

I believe that back in the day, Turkic-Mongolian nomads ate a diet that was largely meat. But I’m not sure how long they lived back then or how healthy they were! I’m not ready to cancel food imports from the rest of the world to Astana quite yet.