Fishy Business

Ah, what a fabulous week! We have all of Holy Week off for break, and I went to the beach with four of my friends and my host family. We did nothing but take in the sun, swim, dance, and eat really good food.

Here in Ecuador, people mostly eat whatever foods are locally available. If you live in the mountains, for instance, you probably eat a lot of potatoes, whereas if you live on the coast, you eat a different type of tuber called yucca. But what this means for my vacation on the beach is that we ate a lot of seafood caught by local fishermen. The fish practically flop out of the boat and right into the pan (in some cases, that´s almost literally true—they eat fish whole here, with scales, fins, eyeballs, and everything). Calamari and shrimp are cheap and readily available—as is shark. Needless to say, we dined like royalty on fresh seafood and luscious fruits.

In fact, if you like seafood, you´ve probably eaten Ecuadorian shrimp. A few years ago, the government gave large chunks of the mangrove forests in Northern coastal Ecuador to shrimp farms. Before, the mangroves provided food and livelihood for hundreds of people, who hunted shrimp, mussels, and crabs in the deep mud and spindly roots. The shrimp farms though, razed huge portions of the mangrove forests to put in pools and mass produce shrimp. A few people became extremely wealthy overnight on shrimp exports, and the rest ended up living in shacks perched over the polluted salty, polluted river, eeking out a living on what´s left of the mangroves.