Adventures in Eating: Anthropological Experiences in Dining from Around the World

3: A Rat by Any Other Name: Conflicting Definitions of “Dinner” in Belize, Central America

43 Biographical sketch. Helen Haines is an archaeologist specializing in the development of early state societies. She started working in Belize in 1990 (when the following adventure took place) with the Programme for Belize Archaeology Project surveying Maya ruins in the National Reserve. In 2000 she obtained her Ph.D. from the Institute of Archaeology, UCL, in London, England, specializing in Maya archaeology. Her postdoctoral research involved working in Oaxaca, Mexico, and she has also been an invited scholar on projects in Bolivia and China. She is currently directing the Ka’Kabish Archaeological Research Project (KARP) in north-central Belize and is based in the Belizean/ Guatemalan community of Indian Church, where she recently purchased a small house with a large kitchen. During the academic year she teaches at Trent University in Oshawa and resides with her tubby Tibetan Lhasa Apso dog in Toronto, Canada, where she is able to indulge her (their?) passion for different cultural foods. One of my first fond memories of Belize involves food: fresh bananas handed to me by a stranger after I had been stuck for hours on the side of the road, C h a p t e r t h r e e Helen R. Haines Conflicting Definitions of “Dinner” in Belize, Central America A Rat by Any Other Name Helen R. Haines 44 miles from any village, in a Ford Bronco with a flat tire; no spare, jack, or tire iron; and only a temperamental CB radio for company. My companions had left me to watch the truck while they trekked off in search of help. It was my first trip to Belize, and stuck there sans map, water, food, and emergency equipment on a road that even twenty years later had no official name, I learned the first of many lessons about travelling—how sweet and important can be the gift of food. Despite all the anxiety and pains that day wrought (my pale Canadian skin was burned red for days), I still remember those bananas and how wonderful they tasted. I think what made that bunch so sweet was not their flavor but the fact that the people who offered them (colleagues I had never met before) had the forethought to pack them several hours earlier when they set out to rescue us. It wasn’t so much the food that tasted sweet but the offer of hospitality, an act that forever endeared me to the country that would become my second home. One might wonder how a twenty-one-year old Canadian, born and raised in one of Canada’s largest cities and who had never travelled outside her own country, wound up in a broken truck on a deserted, unnamed back road of one of the smallest countries in Central America (Figure 3.1). At the time, I was an undergraduate archaeologist trying to find a culture or place that interested me enough to devote the rest of my professional career to it. Needless 3.1. Map of the program for Belize National Park. (Map by H. R. Haines) A Rat by Any Other Name 45 to say, the hospitality implied by the bananas won me over, and I’ve been a devoted Belizean archaeologist for almost two decades. The interesting thing about those bananas was they proved to be an omen of things to come, for much of my life in Belize has revolved around food. Indeed the majority of my non-excavation-related memories center around buying, preparing, serving, or eating various different foodstuffs, from homemade Mennonite sausages in the northwest to conch fritters on the southern coast. In the case of gibnut (Agouti paca), however, my memories are occupied predominately with my efforts to avoid eating this creature. These attempts all came to naught one night at a traditional end-of-season celebration when I was forced to confront my prejudice over what constitutes “suitable” food for dinner. Biology and History of Agouti paca Agouti paca are small, furry piglike-looking creatures with a reddish-brown to dark-chocolate-colored coat; they are easily distinguished from their diurnal cousins, the agouti (Dasyprocta punctata), by the lines of irregular white spots that run lengthwise down their backs and across their haunches (Pérez 1992). Paca range in size from twenty-four to thirty-one inches (sixty to eighty centimeters ), and an adult can weigh up to twenty-two pounds (ten kilograms), with little...