Blog #5 Cuisine-

Cuisine is an essential part of culture.  Recipes often involve local delicacies and are passed down from generation to generation.  This form of oral tradition could have lasted thousands of years, showing who you and your people are and where you come from.  This spreading and influencing of other ethnicities is yet another spread of the African Diaspora.  I found it particularly interesting in my research this week the divisions of cuisine in Belize.  As I was browsing a Wikipedia article(for general ideas) I noticed they had divisions for the cuisine based on ethnicity.  There was a section for creoles and a section for garifunas.  This was cool because I saw several other instances of this spreading in past research.  The creoles generally have dinner as salad with some type of meat.  They have all the general types of beef pork but also foods unique to me like iguana, deer, and gibnut. Garifuna cuisine tends to be ereba or cassava bread.  Belize in general is famous for its rice and beans cooked in coconut milk(seen above).  Fry jacks or Johnny cakes are a common breakfast food, comparable to our pancakes.  Cow foot soup is another delicacy in Beliz that I would rather not try.  Like much of Central America tacos, rice, fruits, peppers, and spicy foods are very common among Belizean kitchens.  Belizean food works as representation of the population and culture.  When I visited Belize I didn’t get a very good chance to experience the cuisine.  I had a plate of chicken nachos but they tasted the same as they do here.  I know next time I will try something new for sure.          

Sources:

http://www.belize.com/belize-cuisine.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belizean_cuisine

http://www.belizeanjourneys.com/features/bzefood/newsletter.html