Seeking Black Pepper and Cottage Cheese

 Seeking Black Pepper and Cottage Cheese

By Bobby Neal Winters

My wife and I have been seeking black pepper, pimienta negra in Spanish.  It’s been a hard thing.  We’ve been able to find the pepper corn easily enough, but pre ground black pepper is rather elusive.  Fear not, we have found it, but it has been a challenge.

We’ve decided to cook for ourselves a lot here in Paraguay.  It is a matter of having control of how much we eat.  As I’ve mentioned from time to time, I’ve lost a lot of weight recently, and I have absolutely no desire to gain it back.

For this reason, we are cooking for ourselves in the place we are staying. Well, lunch and dinner at least; breakfast is provided.

Food is basic to who we are, and it is a pathway through which trouble can enter our lives.  This is recognized in the Bible: The Serpent tempted Eve with the fruit of Knowledge of good and evil; Esau sold his birthright for a mess of pottage; the children of Israel sold themselves into slavery for need of food.  

At the beginning of his ministry, Jesus is tempted by Satan to turn the stones into bread, but he does not. He shows that we can control our hunger. He later performs the miracle of turning a few baskets of bread and fish into enough to feed 5000, proving in a case where he was in control that he did have the ability to perform the miracle.

In spite of the lack of spice in Paraguayan cuisine, I do like it.  It has lots of meat, lots of protein, and they tend to eat in social situations.  One of my students says his family--and most families--has an asado (barbecue for lack of a better word) every weekend. It’s an event for the whole family.

Since my diet, I’ve been given a good book on nutrition by a friend of mine.  A good diet is not only about calories, it is about the type of food we put in our bodies.  It is an old cliche, we are what we eat.

In the Gospels, food is a frequent metaphor for something else: Spiritual Wisdom.  When Jesus answered Satan’s temptation, he said, “It is written: Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes out of the mouth of God.”

Just as the food we eat with our mouths makes our bodies, the spiritual food that we take in through our eyes and our ears makes our spirit and eventually our soul.  I do distinguish between the spirit and the soul: the spirit is part of who we are; the soul is who we are.

If you listen, read, and look at things that encourage lust and greed, you will become licentious and greedy.  If you listen, read, and look at things that encourage generosity and kindness, you will become generous and kind.

If you want to encourage certain parts of yourself, you should feed them regularly.  The right things in the right portions.

Often these things are all around you.  We can find all of the meat and bread, fruits and vegetables that we want here.  Other things are more difficult to find, black pepper would be an example.  It is not a necessity, but it does help baked potatoes to go down more easily.

There are sometimes things that can’t be found, however.  We’ve not been able to find cottage cheese here for neither love nor money.  It is not a concept that exists.  They don’t see a reason for it.  The Paraguayans who were educated in the US did not develop a taste for it there, so it is not imported.

I will have to live without it until I come home.

As I press my metaphor, I would say that black pepper would represent a spiritual food that we don’t have to have, is not easy to come by, but we can have by putting out great effort.  This would be like in depth Bible Study.  Cottage cheese would be knowledge that we are just going to have to wait until God tells us directly. 

In the meantime, my wife and I have another week to spend in Paraguay before we come home to decadent pleasures of cottage cheese and mountains of black pepper at every turn.

Nos vemos pronto.

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like'' the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. Search for him by name on YouTube.