FORGOTTEN TREES
THE EXCITING LIFE AND
UNNOTICED DEATH OF INDIGENOUS FOODS
©2018 Kajsa Alger
Tamang Translation and Cultural Guide: Bhimsen Tamang
Journal 1, Damsing
Close your eyes and picture a small
village in Nepal. What do you see? Probably, like most of us, you are imagining
some version of what looks like a National Geographic spread. Prayer flags flapping in the wind, the
sweeping Himalayas as a landscape, maybe with a Buddhist Temple in the far-off
distance. Pots of chai tea and dumpling street
stands dot your city and the people, a “Sherpa” like takeaway from photos of
Kathmandu and an Everest film you saw once.
What’s interesting is that you’re not too far off. There is magic in this place and nature has
blessed it too much. Butting up against
the backdrop of this beauty though, is the shift of hard lives trying to make
an easier go of things, and the exodus and modernization of some of the oldest
indigenous tribes.
Let’s take a trip there, in our
minds. Picture a map of Nepal. You don’t actually have to know what this
looks like, you can simply picture a circle over a place. The circle gets smaller and smaller until it
is just the pinprick of the place we’re going.
You see the circle? That’s Nepal.
There are 14 zones in Nepal. The big city of Kathmandu is in the Bakmati
zone. There are 8 districts in Bakmati, the
smaller district of Kavre being one of them.
Getting even more localized, within the districts, there are
divisions. One of the divisions of Kavre
is Mechchhe (pronounced Met-Chey). Mechchhe is the 6th division, so
it is called Mechchhe 6.[1] Within Mechchhe 6 there are 9 villages. One of those villages, Tekanpur, is where
we’re going. This small village is made
up of 115 homes, with many doubling as storefronts. They had no water (that was not carried in by
hand) until 1997, and at that point they still had no motorway in or out of
town. It’s a 2 day walk to the big city
of Kathmandu. In 2018, they now have
pipes that bring water to them and a roadway that makes the trip to the city a
much shorter and easier 3-hour journey. These
are only a few of the small ways they move towards modernization. We’ll find my friend, Bhimsen Tamang, here ….and
the Tamang people of Tekanpur.
The Tamang people are the largest
indigenous group in Nepal and claim the Kathmandu Valley, Yambu, as their land
and home. There are over 50 indigenous
peoples in Nepal: Tamang, Gurung, Magar, Sherpa, Limbu… the list goes on, but
most likely when people speak of “Sherpas” in Nepal, they are actually
referring to Tamang, or possibly one of the other many indigenous peoples.
With the Tamang people comes a culture
and history, rich with indigenous foods.
These ingredients lead a life of mysterious seclusion right out in the
open. Although the dishes they help
create may be sighted in the food paparazzi of a Facebook page, a shift is
happening that will push these invisible ingredients to the brink of extinction. We’re on our way to find one of these
ingredients, because I heard that outside Tekampur, there is a tree. A single tree, called by locals “the Damsing
tree”, that is visited by the Tamang and used as a leavening ingredient in
their doughs and batters. It is not used
outside of this village and the numbers of elders are growing fewer as the
younger generations move away to seek prosperity.
The Tamang, traditionally, are a
farming community. They eat simple
meals, perfected over the centuries. Dheedo
is one of the staple foods of the Tamang diet, made from ground corn
flour. A copper pot with water is put on
the fire to boil.[2] Then, very slowly, the cornmeal is added a
little at a time. There is a special
wooden paddle used only for Dheedo (pronounced “dedo”). The technique is a skilled one. If you stir too fast, the Dheedo will be
gummy. Too slow and it will be too firm. The cornmeal is added until it is thick and
an almost dough-like consistency. It is
served in a small bowl and is eaten with the fingers in a type of swirl and
pinch motion. I learned with a chuckling
audience that you can’t just pinch and eat the Dheedo, as we would a torn piece
of bread dipped in olive oil. Dheedo is
eaten by pinching and swirling with your thumb tucked under. You can dip it into something like gundrook, curry,
or milk before bringing to your mouth.
Then, as you draw it to your mouth, your thumb moves forward and pushes,
bulldozer-style, the food into your mouth.
This technique, as opposed to sticking your fingers in your mouth and
eating the food off of your fingers, is a finesse that I haven’t mastered
yet.
The Tibetan version, called Tsamba,
is made from toasted barley flour and often is eaten with butter tea, a strong
tea mixed with churned yak butter and salt.
Although Dheedo and Tsamba aren’t in any danger of disappearing from the
Himalayan diet, they are a good example of how easily tradition and the food of
indigenous peoples is lost, much in the way dialects are lost to the language
of the masses. The way in which the
butter tea is made has already started to shift. Traditionally made in a small, narrow churn
that can be carried with a strap to fit the nomadic lifestyle. It is now often made in a blender, and
sometimes cow’s milk butter is used because of the ease and availability. It’s easy to see how, in an effort to make
the tasks of a difficult life more bearable, within a few generations you can
lose the nuances of a meal that have been a part of the culture since the
Mongolian Stone Age. When will the
Dheedo paddle be replaced by a common house spoon? It can be argued that if we can forget the
essence of Tsamba, then very easily can we forget a lone tree in a small
village in Nepal. This shift is one I’m
curious about. You see, the death of the
Damsing tree won’t come about because of anything as dramatic as deforestation
or famine or war, but rather from the unassuming little devil of a western
product called “baking powder”.
[1]
At the
time this story was started, Mechchhe was in the 6th division. It has since been changed to the 8th.
[2]
At times,
a fermented drink called Brama is added to the Dheedo, which will give it a
grayish color. Similar to the Tongba
millet drink of the Limbu people, Brama is specifically Tamang. The photos of
Dheedo shown in these journals are made with Brama.
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