Croatia Empty House Notes 6: Squat Life and a Chef-Level Food Subculture
Editor's note: The author is a student in the Department of Environmental Engineering at National Cheng Kung University, and studied agriculture as an exchange student in Croatia. This piece follows the previous article, and after the squat (occupying vacant houses) action, continues to discuss the definition of what counts as "garbage," as well as the possibility and life history of these "garbage" items being put to continued use.
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When many people hear that someone has come back from abroad, the question they most want to ask is "What do the people there eat?" This is especially obvious among Taiwanese people, but wanting to understand Croatian eating habits by learning about the food I ate in Croatia... is really not an ideal approach. For example, I'm quite afraid that by then, in many people's minds, Croatia will be a country so poor it has no water, no electricity, and has to build its own fires for warmth.
Croatia does have its own culinary characteristics, but usually they aren't the kind of dishes that exist nowhere else and only Croatians eat. And if there really are such dishes, they usually aren't very tasty... The more interesting dish I've seen is vegetables stuffed with meat. In summer they usually hollow out bell peppers, and in winter they use pickled cabbage as the wrapper. The fun part is that they don't just stuff in ground meat; they say ground meat alone gets boring, so they usually add white rice. The first time I saw it I thought it was hilarious - these Croatians were actually stuffing braised pork rice into bell peppers.
As for soup, they put thin strands of noodles in it so there's something to chew while drinking the soup. In Taiwan, you either don't add any, or you add a big pile and make it into noodle soup.
"The people here really are kitchen gods!"
But it's still more interesting to introduce the cooking inside the squat, just as my younger brother, who came to visit me before I left, said: "The people here really are kitchen gods!" The point isn't actually how delicious the food they make is - although it's usually so good you wouldn't think it's vegetarian at all. The point is that it's hard for people to believe that this extremely bizarre kitchen could actually produce such interesting food. Everyone has to cook according to whatever situations might arise in the squat, such as no water, no electricity, no gas, no rice, no pasta, and so on.
Because the kitchen conditions and ingredients are different every time, sometimes the situation is awkward and everyone keeps putting it off and putting it off. When finally some very creative person thinks of how to cook and decides to make a meal, everyone jumps up excitedly saying they want to help. This is also my favorite job to do, but every time they ask me to make Taiwanese food I'm completely at a loss, which is super embarrassing.
Situations of lacking staples like rice or pasta sound absurd, but they really are a big problem. The market will always have enough vegetables, but they will never have potatoes or white rice that are about to go bad and need to be thrown out, so staples are truly something that can only be solved by spending money. But at least this trouble is the easiest to solve - just "make" it. Around December an Italian named Marco came to our place, and it just so happened that he could also make pasta, pizza and the like. The reason I say "just so happened" is because really not every Italian can make them, just as not every Chinese person knows Wing Chun and qigong.
