Long Valley Rice Harvesting Workcamp (4)—Food

I believe that eating is the biggest hobby of all of us during the workcamp.  Starting from morning till the night, we were always eating.  Especially everyday only after working for one hour in the morning, Tree  from Korea would tell us that she was hungry.  Though others didn’t say anything, if you see how fast and how much quantity of food that we ate in every meal, you would know that how hungry was this group of wild beasts.

Dinner time!

A characteristic of workcamp is that volunteers are always responsible for all the meals, so everyone can always enjoy the delicacies from all over the world.  Our food varieties were so wide and broad, from the Russian mixed veggie soup, the French crepe, the Korean bibimbop, the Indonesia baby food porridge and the Hong Kong fried eggs with tomatoes and tofu mixed veggie soup.  Eating, was definitely our biggest enjoyment after a day of hard work.

Tree from Korea was preparing the dinner.

A unique or challenging characteristic of this workcamp was that, I was the camp leader and I had a very specific diet.  Those who know me well know that I am almost a vegan, I don’t eat fish, meat and eggs, and almost no dairy products (except the Indian Ghee which is clarified butter).  For the benefits of meditation, I also don’t eat five kinds of strong smelling vegetables (eg garlic and onion).  I don’t take any drinks which have caffeine and I don’t take alcohol.  In order to help in digestion, I don’t drink right before, during and after meals.  And, I am allergic to mango.

We always went to the Sheung Shu wet market to buy food together.

Beside me, Rice from Indonesia is a devoted Muslim, so he doesn’t eat pork and doesn’t take alcohol as well.  And this workcamp just coincided with the once a year Ramadan, so he would only eat and drink before sunrise and after sunset.

Rice from Indonesia drank his first sip after a whole day of fasting.

On the contrary, there was a ‘carnivore’ among our volunteers--Ben from Hong Kong.  He said he didn’t eat any vegetables except broccoli, and he ate meat in every meal.

So you can imagine, there would be so many jokes coming out among us in this period.

The most classical one was that on the first dinner after a day of work, it was Ben and Rice responsible for the meal.  As I knew Ben well, so I kept reminding him to cook something for me while we were buying the food and even during he was cooking.  Unfortunately, as there was a miscommunication between him and Rice, so the only vegetable dish on the disk was cooked with garlic!

Thanks Get for making vegan crepe for me.

Then the next day, it was Candy from Hong Kong and Dima from Russia responsible for the cooking.  As Candy kept reminding herself that what I didn’t eat, so she finally forgot that Rice didn’t eat pork!  Luckily, Rice didn’t mind to eat the vegetarian dish with me.

Except cooking team, others were in the cleaning team, responsible for washing dishes and cleaning the floor.

On the first day when Rice observed Ramadan, the weather was super hot and sunny.  We had worked under the sun for half of the day, I found that Rice was very slow and tired, I thought that he must be very hungry.  Only until when I reminded him to drink plenty of water in the afternoon, then I was shocked to know that he couldn’t even drink any water during the fasting period!  My negligence was all because I was used to the fasting way of Hindu, which allowed drinking water.  Oh my god!  Luckily, he also thought that it was a very dangerous way of fasting, so he decided to postpone the fasting days.

Finally on the last day of workcamp, Rice still put chicken powder into the tofu mixed veggie soup carelessly…And when we were eating out in the Sheung Shui cooked food center, I forgot that there was pork in the dishes of omelette rice, Singapore style fried rice, sweet and sour pork and barbecue pork!

Lunch time!  There were only six people, because Rice was fast, so he would hide himself inside the house whenever it was the meal time.