I’ve been thinking a lot about what I eat since arriving in Colombia. Food is an increasingly important topic here, with the country’s agriculture being diverted to biofuel production and with an onslaught of cheap food imports expected to result if the pending Free Trade Agreements with Europe, Canda, and the United States are ever ratified. Increasing food prices and declining national production were brought into sharp relief for me on a recent roadtrip from Bogotá to Cartagena, where I saw perhaps as many fields of populated with African palm as with cattle. African palm is used to make biofuel and before it grows to maturity it looks like the botanical incarnation of Sideshow Bob. Here’s a couple of pictures that don’t really do justice to the comparison.
It’s also hard not to think more about your food when it still resembles a living animal. I say this not because I’m on the verge of conversion to vegetarianism, but just to point out how rare it has become in the States for us to look our food in the face. I took the following pictures in the town of Tenjo in the Department of Cundimarca, not far from Bogotá.
The butcher got a kick out of my curiosity, and cheerfully volunteered to tilt the heads up so that they would face the camera. Here’s the result–you can just see her through the spaces between the heads and the trays containing the meat.
* Note: The African palm images were lifted from here and here.
