While I was in Ecuador, we traveled to many different “habitats” in the environmental sense (the Andean highlands, the cloud forest, the Amazon, the coast, etc.). The culture was equally rich and diverse in each of these ecologically diverse regions. Thinking back to my experience in coastal Ecuador, I had traveled to the small town of Puerto Cabuyal to conduct independent research. The town is developing a tourism program with a volunteer house but it is not yet finished so I stayed in the house of the community’s president along with a couple other people that came with me. Our main purpose in the community was our research, but we were doing this research to help the community so it was important to us that we get to know the families. Our meals were provided by the families of the community. We arrived during lunchtime the first day so we had lunch, dinner, and the next day’s breakfast with one family, and then we did the same with the next family. This allowed us to have a significant amount of time with each family. What we learned was that the culture around eating on the coast is very different than that of the capital city, Quito. One of our first days in Puerto Cabuyal, we sat down for lunch in one of the houses and were served a soup, which is common throughout the regions of Ecuador. The next thing we were each given was the largest plate of rice, plantain, and chicken I had ever seen. We all managed to finish this meal, thanked our hosts, and headed back to keep working. Our dinner with that family was also quite a lot of food, which was very different for us as, back in Quito, dinner usually consisted of a piece of bread and tea or coffee. This we were not able to finish. For the next few days, we would show up to meals, introduce ourselves, make a little conversation, and then proceed to kindly ask that the hosts just serve us half of the planned dish size. By our last couple of days, we would walk into a new family and they would serve us less before we had said anything.
This experience was funny but it was also a little confusing. I was also so worried about the food situation because, in Ecuador, it is generally considered polite to finish everything on your plate as a way of appreciating the cook for their hard work. I had mostly been living in Quito so when I went to the coast, I was not expecting the volume of food that was considered normal there. I was in Puerto Cabuyal with two of my professors, who were both Ecuadorian, and that definitely made me feel validated in my feelings because we had expressed to each other how we were feeling about everything. My professors were able to explain that on the coast, they do tend to serve a lot more food. It made sense to me, especially in Puerto Cabuyal, because it is a fishing village so all the residents are constantly doing a lot of difficult manual labor and need to be eating a lot to perform at their best.
I have some worries that people took our actions of not finishing the food as rude, just because I did see many other times in Ecuador that people would be disappointed when someone did this. But on the other hand, I do think that they could see we were trying to be really respectful. I do think they found it funny, at least at some points, because the families we ate with in the later part of the week would chuckle a little when they handed us our food. They told us they had talked with the other families and already knew we did not eat as much. I do think that being respectful in every way we could was perceived well and the families were not offended by our inability to finish our plates because they could see that we really just could not eat that much.
I think that this exercise is a useful method for deepening cultural understanding because seeing a situation from everyone’s point of view allows me to explore how this experience impacted not only myself, but also the members of the community.