After spending the past year and a half in Bolivia, I was surprised to find out that upon going back to the states, one of the most shocking things to me was food. There tended to be a lot more of it (and a lot more of people I passed on the streets as well) than I remembered and it seemed strange to me that try as I might, I just couldn´t manage to avoid corn syrup... it´s in EVERYTHING. So, I´m indulging my curiousity right now by reading ¨the omnivore´s dilemma¨ which talks a bit about the history of processed food and the strange empidemic of diet that US dwellers face today. In the meantime, however, I needed to bring back something for our beloved youth group here in Santa Cruz, so I decided to share with them part of a carepackage put together by a sunday school class at Chris´church. The treat, as you can tell by the picture, was a pack of twizzlers. ¨It´s something typical from our country,¨I told them as I indicated the directions for making a straw out of it. One of the nuns (actually from Argentina) piped up and said, ¨It´s really yummy and I like it because it´s not super-sweet. How do you make it?¨ I replied by simply laughing hard. Her comment helped me realize the reason for my reverse culture shock. All the typical treats here (and in Argentina I presume) are made by grandmothers, aunts, uncles and tend to be very tediously done and thus special. But long ago (afterall, licorice is an old fashioned candy as I understand it) we stopped making our special treats and have begun to rely on companies and laboratories to pump out all our sweet goodness. And since it´s chemically altered and mass produced, it´s cheap enough that we don´t even have to have a special occasion to eat it!
After laughing, I explained how it´s really just a bunch of chemicals and I don´t really know how they make it and it´s kind of a sad part of my country. Luckily, my mom still makes apple dumplings and monster cookies whenever I come home, and I do at least see and remember that part of life (though I must confess that Christmas is not the same for me without that crochetted boot filled with christmas tree peppermint nougats ($2 per bag at the dollar store)
