Food in River Village

The food today was a bit of an adventure. Dinner was just salad – which apparently means a salsa-like mix of tomatoes, onions, and cilantro – and fries, Humdullah. At lunch, though, we had a big meal, and my “triangle” never seemed to get any smaller. (Since most Moroccan families eat out of a shared dish, we’d been taught that, to be polite, you should mentally cut the dish into evenly distributed, pie-piece-like “triangles”, and then only eat from the triangle in front of you. It’s the same idea as splitting a dessert by cutting it in half, but applied on a larger scale.) It took me a while to notice that Mma kept pushing vegetables and other chunks of food, from her triangle and those of my assorted brothers and sisters, into my space. So even as I diligently ate the food from my triangle, it kept getting refilled. I finally had to surrender. I’d really been hoping to empty out my triangle – an impulse undoubtedly left over from my being raised to “clean my plate” – but it was impossible. With many, many “baraka, Humdullah”s (I’m blessed enough, thanks be to God), and finally a “Safi!” (Done!), I got them to stop urging me to eat more.