It is early afternoon and I am sipping my fourth cup of coffee. This is nothing unusual, as I average over a liter of coffee daily. I drink more coffee than I ever would have up north. In fact, when I go up north for a visit, I drink about half the coffee I consume here. Up there, I drink more beer than coffee; down here, the opposite. My food and drink intake differs when in Costa Rica.
Am I healthier down here? I think so. I also drink probably a gallon of water a day, advisable in this warm climate. I have been doing intermittent fasting for a while, where you take 14 or 15 hours between your final meal of the evening and the following day’s breakfast. I ride out the last few hours before breakfast with copious amounts of black coffee and water. Then I break the fast with a breakfast that almost always includes eggs and black beans. The inclusion of beans as part of my first meal of the day was unheard of when I lived up north.
When I first arrived in Costa Rica, my then-wife was a vegetarian, which, as Samuel L. Jackson said in a famous scene in Pulp Fiction, kind of made me a vegetarian too. I ate more fruits and vegetables my first year here than I had in my entire 30+ years previously. We had various trees in the yard to pick from—banana, avocado, cashew, water apple. Bananas at that moment became a staple of my diet, and continue to be to this day.
I ate my first-ever avocado straight up with a spritz of Salsa Lizano. I say “straight up” because I had previously eaten it only as guacamole. I found out why cashews are so expensive when I spent hours picking, separating, shelling, and roasting them. The cashew nut comes from a fruit. If you have a cashew tree with 100 fruits, it will yield 100 cashews, or about one cup. A full morning of work was eaten in a few minutes.
Water apples (manzana de agua) never hit the spot for me, as they left a soapy aftertaste. I was also introduced to guava, guanábana, guayaba, and countless other fruits.
When I tired of the veggie diet, there was always pork available. In the campo where I lived, somebody was always roasting a pig, it seemed, and on occasion, I would buy a little of the meat and marinate it in a bed of pineapple chunks and juice. Another dish I ate for the first time here was olla de carne. This is a rainy season/cool weather favorite, a broth loaded with roots and tubers like yucca and tiquisque and stringy meat that invariably gets stuck in my teeth and forces me to floss afterward.
Pejibaye is the one food that I had never seen—not even in photos—until I lived on a farm where they were harvested in three-man teams, as the regímenes were 15 to 20 meters high. One man used an extended tool to detach the clusters, while two men waited with a large blanket to catch them before they hit the ground.
The fruit is a bit hard to describe—it is the size of an acorn, the color of a carrot, and dry and fibrous. The consistency reminds me a bit of a chestnut. It is usually eaten boiled with mayo or natilla to lubricate it. The trunk of the pejibaye tree provides heart of palm (palmito), another delicious food I “discovered” upon moving here.
Only after spending time here did I realize my previous diet was so dull and lacking in healthy variety. All this recollecting has made me hungry and it is almost time for my final meal of the day—a nice portion of baked chicken breast, along with homemade wheat bread toasted with farmer’s cheese, a banana, and a few ounces of those black beans.
And if you are getting ready to eat while reading this, may your food selection be a healthy one. ¡Buen provecho!
