La Ciudad de Salud

TEHUACAN, Puebla, Mex. -- Officially, my family eats two meals a day: breakfast and lunch. In reality, it´s more like five: breakfast, brunch, lunch, dinner, and bed time snack. It usually goes something like this...

Most mornings, everyone has fruit, toast, fried tortillas, and coffee. They drink NesFrappe, the instant cappuccino mix made by Nestle. I find it tasty, but ironic. This is a coffee-exporting country, and yet every Mexican I know drinks instant Swiss grounds!

Around 11:00, it is time for brunch -- usually tortillas and fruit, maybe some beans and more coffee. This is also around the time that the taco/tortilla lady comes to the house. She walks around the neighborhood, selling freshly baked tortillas and freshly fried tacos door to door. People buy the tacos in bunches of 3 or 4 and eat all of them at once, in addition to their mid-morning ¨snack.¨

Between 2:30 and 3:30, it is time for lunch, the biggest meal of the day. Carefully prepared meat, chiles, tomatoes, and more are combined and serve as the main dish. My host mom is awesome and has started buying turkey and soy-based meats to accommodate my ¨no red meat¨ lifestyle choice. I was surprised to find out that turkey hot dogs and soy sausage are readily available here. And my mom is a great cook -- everything she makes is delicious, so much so that it is hard to believe that it isn´t real steak. But I have read the packaging and it´s true -- she´s amazing. Anyway, along with the meat we get rice or beans, fried tortillas, regular tortillas, and sometimes some vegetables and fresh juice. All of this is followed by dessert. The other day, my family and I made a stop at Sam´s Club, and I introduced them to cheesecake. This was probably a mistake, but more about that later.

After lunch, I usually am stuffed and feel like never eating again. Usually, I don´t eat for the rest of the day, but my host mom complains that I am starving myself, and Monse (age 12) says I eat less than a bird. Fortunately for me, I miss the next meal because I am in class.

Around 8:00pm, a ¨light¨dinner is served: beans, tortillas, and chiles. My host mom sometimes pickles the chiles and serves them as a side dish. They are a hit with everyone in the family. But, like I said, I feel fortunate to skip this meal.

I get home from work around 9:00 or 9:30. Around 10:00 or so, the two youngest kids go to the store to get their night time snacks -- cookies, candy, or more fried stuff.

I think on an average day, the kids eat about 3,000 calories. They´re all chubby, but not as fat as you might expect. I believe that school mandates a certain period of exercise each day, and they do walk a lot, I suppose. But I think the biggest factor is the elevation. People must burn more calories when they live at high elevations because the air is thinner. Their bodies work harder to carry oxygen to all the muscles and organs. This means that even when I am sitting still, I am burning more calories than I would being sedentary in Maryland. And at 5,500 feet, Tehuacan´s air is pretty thin.

However, eating like this over the course of a lifetime certainly does cause health problems. High blood pressure is very common, but heart disease is not the number on killer. In fact, intestinal problems like colon cancer claim more lives in Central and South American than anything else. Because of this, people are making a greater effort to incorporate more fiber into their diets. Therefore, foods like All Bran and other high fiber cereal and snacks are gaining popularity. But they are expensive, and the poorest people can´t afford these ¨luxuries.¨I think it would be a heck of a lot easier, anyway, to just cut tortilla consumption in half -- especially the fried stuff. Eating 2 or 3 tortillas per meal is just crazy! But man, are they good.

Like many other foods here, the tortillas are different than those we´re familiar with north of the border. First, here they´re made with corn, instead of flour. Second, they are only about 5 or 6 inches in diameter. But rememeber, people eat 10 or 15 a day.

Many times, tortillas are stuffed with about 2 ounces of chicken, rolled tightly, and deep fried. This is called a taco. No lettuce. No tomato. Salsa and sour cream are served on the side as dipping sauces or drizzled over the top when the tacos are served on a plate. It´s greasy, greasy, greasy. But the night street vendors sell them for less than a buck a piece and they are delievered door to door, so it is unlikely that they will lose popularity anytime soon.

I hope my attempts to keep my calorie intake below 2,000 doesn´t cause my host mom to have an aneurysm!

Tehuacan is called ¨the city of health,¨ but this is obviously not a reference to the local diet. This city is home to some of the best mineral water in the world -- water that is believed to have special healing powers. (Peñafiel is the biggest local beverage company. It´s owned by Cadbury-Schweppes, so our local mineral water is exported far and wide in Orange Crush and more than a dozen other popular beverages.) But no amount of magical Orange Crush is going to help me reverse the effects of this greasy diet. The only things I can do are to be strategically absent during meal times and make my commute to work a brisk 25 minute walk, two or three times a day.