10 Breakfast with Phuntshok Tashi

People in the rich countries have such a surfeit of choice before them whenever they enter a grocery shop or sit down to eat that they can’t possibly enjoy any of it. By definition a feast is something special. It can’t be a feast if it’s there every day.

I sit down to a modest family breakfast with my in-laws in Oslo, Norway, together with our monk friend Khenpo Phuntshok Tashi who is on a month long study tour in Europe.

In place of the traditional Bhutanese diet of rice-with-something, Norwegians have bread-with-something; in front of us this morning are two different breads, as well as crisp rye crackers. There is good awareness about health here: one of the loaves of bread is organically produced, the rye crackers provide high fibre content, and we can choose from butter or vegetable margarine. There are three kinds of milk on the table, as well as yoghourt, the low-fat kind which is probably healthiest. A glass of fruit juice to start off with. Oh, and if we want, a bowl of muesli with a variety of nuts and grains. The muesli may be ecological, too, or it may be a product of chemical agriculture, cleverly packaged to look like healthy organic food. That will depend on good shopping!

All of this is just basics off the shelf of any local shop. “It is so easy to shop here”, Khenpo exclaims. In his village of Bartsham in the far east of Bhutan, the nearest shop is two hours’ walk down the mountainside, and has nothing but rice, tinned sardines, rum and Indian sweets anyway. His traditional heap of breakfast rice might be accompanied by a meagre curry with chillies, maybe a few vegetables, maybe an egg, depending on the season and the fortunes of the household that year. Plus maybe a bowl of the thin lentil soup which the Bhutanese call by its Nepalese name of dal. In late winter, often there will be only a couple of twisted turnip leaves to accompany the inevitable heap of red ema, chillies. The Bhutanese eat everything with chillies, though without the variety of hot tastes one can find in Indian or Nepalese cooking, let alone the many exquisite ways the Thais have of blowing your palate off.

Not a very varied diet, for supper will be more of the same; and to the foreign guest, the blast of the chillies, especially at seven in the morning, may at first seem more like a punishment than a meal.

Oh, but let me not forget to praise the one cheese that was occasion-

ally available – the great Bumthang cheese, a product developed by Swiss Fritz Maurer who had settled in Bumthang.

Where I grew up we used to have what is described in Asia as an ”American” breakfast - with fried eggs, bacon or ham or sausages, as well as all the bread stuff. More protein than many Asians will eat in a week. Feeding people on such a rich meat diet requires up to four times more agricultural land than a vegetarian diet. So much for the shortage of food and land in the world; the truth is that there is enough agricultural land, if only we rich folk would stop stuffing ourselves. And, as in many countries, throwing about one third of it away.

“There is suffering”, said the Buddha. From the suffering of hunger in the Buddha’s time we have evolved, if that is the word, to the suffering of obesity.

Mai was just eighteen months old when we arrived in Bhutan. Her little brother Lucian arrived a couple of years later. Bhutan is a wonderful environment for children; safe, friendly, and fascinating, and without many of the security or health risks associated with expat life in many other developing countries. But most Bhutanese live a tough life with only basic necessities. Our children thus had the benefit of growing up without television and without peer pressures to fill their playrooms with all the stuff most kids in the West seem to “need”. Bhutan gave our kids the blessing of experiencing other, and much more difficult, worlds than the rich and in my view (I shall return to this) overdeveloped world of Europe.

We spent our first years in a very simple cottage built of rammed earth; our next house was larger but had just as little heating and the same hopeless plumbing. Despite the lack of amenities, expatriate life was relatively privileged. But during our ten years in Bhutan our life encompassed everything from sleeping on village floors to ministerial dinners. So we perhaps came closer to the realities of life in Bhutan than many “expats” who lived in gated compounds, had limited contacts with ordinary folk, and moved on as soon as they could to more comfortable and career-enhancing postings somewhere like Bangkok or Geneva.

But back to our family breakfast in Oslo, where we are fast moving beyond food overload to overloads of desire. Having got through the starters we go for the bread, and are confronted with an agony of choice. How many slices of bread can I get through? Probably four, or five. So, what to

have? Start with a delicious liver paste topped with gherkins, then a slice of that irresistible ham on the second. Then the sweet brown Norwegian goat cheese; and a slice of grandma’s home-made strawberry jam to finish off.

And, ah! - given my Anglo-Saxon upbringing, there is even a jar of Marmite, that strange black protein-rich goo which my family watch me devour with a mixture of incomprehension and disgust. (In Denmark, for a while it was classified as industrial waste). But then, what about the peanut butter and the Jarlsberg cheese and the Edam? No salami this morning? Can I put off the apple jelly, the honey and the smoked fish until tomorrow?

I surrender to a fifth slice, with honey, and settle back in my chair, stuffed, overnourished and with my belt definitely reproaching me. Khenpo, whose inner discipline is not yet entirely corrupted after three weeks in Europe, lays down his napkin after three slices, and laughingly reminds me of the Buddha’s advice to his disciples: fill only a quarter of your stomach with food, and two quarters with liquids, and always keep at least one quarter empty ...

Apart from the healthy point of drinking lots of liquids, the Buddhist gives three reasons for this, and all of them make sense: overeating will hinder prayer and contemplation, it will deprive others of food, and it will lead you to want more and more. I think of our life as expatriates in Thimphu, where once a week we might treat ourselves to a tin of Norwegian fish paste from our little hoard in the storeroom. Or a Danish salami from the ”dollar shop” downtown, which has a few things imported for foreigners and royalty. That will be to add to our regular choice of ”only” the following: good Bhutanese honey, colourful but additive-stuffed Indian jams, mediocre Indian peanut butter, and the one kind of Bhutanese cheese usually available. We live quite modestly: some expats ship in whole consignments of European delicacies.

But does that once-a-week fish paste or salami taste good! So I tell Khenpo of my life in south France, many years ago, where I was really poor, and of the richness which can only come through the experience of having been poor even if only for a couple of years. Of course he knows only too well. I lived in the French countryside then, we grew our own veg-

etables, we had a few goats and chickens but virtually no cash, no running water either; and for over a year the south wall of my “house” consisted of an ancient ragged carpet. The other three walls were made of straw bales. (I slept under about ten kilos of blankets. Finding a girlfriend was really important in winter). Once we had nothing to eat for three weeks but a sack of organic rice and a few eggs from our chickens. It is amazing how many different ways one can find to eat rice and eggs. And I remember a supper where all we had left was our own home grown potatoes with salt and a little olive oil. But what potatoes! We sat in the semi-darkness and it tasted like heaven.

Most of us have so much now, in the material sense, that there is nothing special in our lives any more. Perhaps this loss of the pleasure that is to be found in ordinary, small things is why some people can only get their kicks watching chain saw massacres on video or those ridiculous “extreme” programs on TV. As in the latter days of the Roman Empire, when the people were kept entertained and docile with subsidised food and gory gladiatorial contests, panem et circenses – bread and circuses.

Simple things are no longer enough. Surely this too is the modern version of what the Buddha described as the suffering of humans.

For too much can be just as meaningless as too little.

It is remarkable in so-called underdeveloped countries like Bhutan how the poor - the peasants, the road gangs, the construction labourers I’ve supervised - seem to laugh at least as much as any of the rich people I’ve ever known. In the Buddha’s native Indian subcontinent, millions still live today with the same kind of basic material sufferings that led him to his wish to help humankind: the sufferings of no food, no warmth, no shelter, no safety. In our societies, instead, suffering is the surfeit of those basic things, replaced by modern diseases such as stress and a great emptiness inside. Our richness brings another, inner kind of poverty.

So, grabbing a final piece of salami in my fingers, I ask Khenpo what he thinks of the European food. “Oh, too much!” he says, raising his hands and letting out that big chuckle of his. He means it in both ways, both that it is delicious, and that it is, literally, far too much. “So many tastes ... every meal here, it is like a feast!” he exclaims.

I think of the Bhutanese feasts one is served on important occasions; where even in the villages they will manage to conjure up several kinds

of meat dish - beef, pork, chicken, maybe dried yak meat - and fish, and some egg and vegetable curries too. Custom says there should be a certain number of dishes, depending on the occasion. Plus other specialities, like the thick buckwheat pancakes of Bumthang, roasted corn in the East; and in most cases lots of home brewed alcohol. But that only happens a few times in a year. And what a joy of eating there is then! The belt of the gho, the Bhutanese male dress which I seldom wear but which is always worn extremely tight, just groans afterwards. That is a real feast, because it is really rare.

Here, after all these breakfast tastes, what have I enjoyed most? Nothing, really. For it is there every day. Ultimately one feels as bored as if it were just plain old rice. So we end up sort of as poor as Khenpo’s family on their threadbare mountainside at Bartsham. Khenpo, who is a monk and also a highly trained scholar, explains to me how the practitioner of Vajrayana Buddhism always takes food as a religious offering - tshok - comparable to the Christian eucharist with its wine and bread which are transformed into the body of Christ. In theory at least, every Buddhist mouthful should be considered in this way. Everyday consumerism doesn’t encourage Mindfulness.

Khenpo follows my bad example and pops a piece of salami into his mouth. He says, “It’s all so tasty. But I still miss the chillies”.

“Yes, and I wish there was some dal”, I say. Missing the simple things already? It’s easy enough for me to talk, I know that at least once a year I’ll be able to get all this European stuff. But if I return to live in Europe permanently, will my breakfast experience be just like everyone else’s after a few weeks; or will I be able to hold on to some of these lessons, these blessings from the other side of the world? I don’t know.

I don’t know … something my friends here tell me I say a lot, these days. I don’t feel European anymore; I’m not Bhutanese either. And I’ve certainly eaten too much again.