Meal musings

We get three meals a day at Coco Beach. Breakfast (with the bread of varying degrees of staleness, except when there is no bread, in which case we get bok bok (doughnuts) or rice cakes (like english muffins, only made with rice flour).
Sometimes there are scrambled eggs, other time a plate of fruit (banana or pineapple). Never both fruit and egg.
Lunch is the meal with the most vegetables as there's often a salad of sorts, plus rice, beans (or lentils) plus a stewy thing (usually fish, sometimes meat) or a plate of fish or squid, maybe some vegetables with potatoes (sort of like a stew) and sometimes something for the vegetarians - cabbage stuffed with pasta, or baked potato stuffed with pasta. A lunchtime treat is bok bok - which is basically deep fried fish in a doughnutty batter. Vegetarians will get either aubergine bok bok or, (rather pointlessly I think), potato bok bok. Frankly, if potato is going to be fried in any way, I'd rather just have chips. But anyway.
And then in the evening, there'll be more of the same, only fewer vegetables (never a salad) and you get dessert (usually fruit but sometimes ridiculously sweet peanut thingies). Anyway...
So, the vegetables tend to come from Morombe and the abundance of them depends very much on how recent a delivery we've had. The Coco Beach staff never need to go out shopping for their food supplies. For vegetables, bread and drinks they radio through their order to someone in Morombe and a 4x4 brings the delivery seemingly as and when it can - when the road isn't too washed out or dangerous and when the car works.
Meat is usually goat and tends to come from one of the Coco Beach goats (they proliferate much like rabbits) so no shopping required there. Same with chicken (rare), eggs and turkey. Not sure about the zebu meat.
The fish meanwhile, comes straight from the sea each day. It's so much better than a supermarket, though not quite as predictable. Every day, (weather permitting) a fisherman or two, or three, or sometimes a boy, will land on the beach in front of my hut in his (and
it's always a he) pirogue. Sometimes the pirogues are the ones with sails and a balancoire. Other times, it's the kind which you have to row, much like a canoe. They are never motorised. None of the villagers have boat with a motor on. The fisherman will walk up the beach, to the kitchen and present whatever fish he's caught to the kitchen staff or to the cook.
It seems such a luxury - to not even have to go shopping for your food, just to wait for it to come to you. Our cook will then make the meals based on what has been caught that day. Unfortunately, as all of this is totally weather dependent, we've had some rather lean fish periods this expedition. At least twice this expedition, the fishermen have been unable to go out and fish cos the sea was just far too rough. That meant no fish for about five or six days. That happened again this week as we had a bad storm the last Monday we
sent emails, and the sea was pretty rough for the rest of the week.
This meant, not only that was there no fish for five days and we had to have a few totally vegetarian meals. However, if that wasn't bad enough (for the meat eaters, anyway), our usual delivery from Morombe couldn't come cos the roads were too bad, and so first we ran out of bread and then vegetables. Think we even nearly ran out of chickens and goats! Then we ran out of potatoes. They NEVER run out of the potatoes
Thankfully, things have improved now (Sunday) as we got a delivery on Friday. But the fish situation isn't quite yet better.
The fact that the fishermen bring us what they've caught seems to have escaped one volunteer who complained this expedition that we were getting too many of the small fish - the pink eared emperors. He didn't like them so much as the big fish such as the barracuda and the tuna and so why couldn’t we have some more of them instead!?
We've had a number of weird complaints over the past four expeditions - but that one really took the biscuit. He clearly was not listening to the lectures where we've talked about the importance of creating a marine protected area because the area is getting rather fished out and there are not many of those big fish left. I tried to explain that what fish we ate was at the mercy of the weather, the conditions and what the local fishermen had caught. I hope that he got it.