Zero Latitude Foodie

Hi!
So, I'm new to the whole blogging thing. Well, I tried it once and it didn't quite pan out very well mostly because I started right before I went to a really intensive language program in Qingdao, China in the summer of 2008 and the program kinda left me with no free time and then I forgot altogether because of the amount of work I had to do junior year of college. But now that I graduated, and am sort of on my own schedule (I'm self-employed), I figure that I should at least try. I recently was told that a good friend of mine had also started a blog to keep in touch with friends that were sort of scattered around the globe. And I also found out that another friend of mine also had a blog and so I thought that might be a good idea to start one too since (1) I travel a lot anyways, (2) Quito is kind of an exciting place overall, (3) I'm doing really exciting work right now.
So what's with the title? Well, the word Multichronotropic is one of my favorite words ever (right after quixotic). I found it in a film theory essay I came across while writing my Latin American Cinema final paper two years ago. It is an adjective and it describes something that has multiple times and spaces. Besides describing some of the more edgy productions of Latin American Cinema that boast intransitivity and the artistic acknowledgment of multiple diegesis, I think it describes the process and the experience of traveling and living...having experienced different places at different times.
If you haven't already guessed, I majored in Film and Chinese while in college.
As for avocados...well, my friends' blogs both have a fruit in the title: Mangoes Off the Balcony, and Pineapple Tacos, and keeping in that same line I thought avocados might do the trick.
Yes, avocados are fruits. They're actually technically very large berries. And I like them very much, which is good because we eat them a lot in Ecuador...with salad, with soup, with chips, by themselves...and also one of the houses I used to live in (we moved around a lot in Quito when I was growing up) had a really great avocado tree that had these fantastic avocados year-round. My dogs had problems with it though! They ate too many of the ones that fell off of the tree and got really fat, but on the plus side, their fur was really beautiful while they ate them. But in the end, avocados are just a really versatile food overall. My favorite recipe involving them is Avocado-Pineapple juice. It sounds a little gross, but it's actually really good and really healthy for you.
I'm a bit of a foodie I guess. Not my fault. My dad is one too. He was the head of the Culinary Institute at an important university here like ten years ago. He didn't have any sort of professional culinary training, but he fought really hard to gain everybody's respect there and now he's good friends with a lot of chefs in the city and a lot of other foodies. He left the post long ago, but he's still a big foodie and hangs out with a lot of foodie friends. This usually results in the family eating a lot of good food regularly. I guess I couldn't avoid it.
My foodie-ness was also cemented in my being during my last year of college. You see, I lived with a group of 5 absolutely wonderful people who all shared the same goal: eating well, eating healthy, eating together, eating sustainably, and eating cheap. We also ate vegetarian, but mostly because 2 of us were free-range vegetarians (and free-range meat is even more expensive than regular meat), 2 of us (M and Me) couldn't eat pork (for different reasons), and we all thought meat was too expensive for our budget. We occasionally splurged for fish, but that went to my friend J's epic fish tacos on select Fridays throughout the semester. So we got really creative. I'm actually surprised at how well we ate for our budget. Whoever says that you are destined to eat badly as a college student is dead wrong. The six of us ate like kings for $220 per week altogether (and that included some wine (boxed, but not bad!) and beer and a few other little luxuries we allowed ourselves - like goat cheese). All of it was seasonal, and we never got any sort of processed food (only canned tomatoes, beans, and tuna) and if we ate junk food, we made it ourselves and tried to keep it as healthy as we could. We made our own bread every now and then (J decided to make it his goal to learn how to make good bread...we did not mind him using us as experimental tasters, not one bit...that stuff was fantastic), we tapped the trees behind our house in the spring and made our own maple syrup, and towards the end of the year, we had a meal that had been entirely foraged from the surrounding areas (it included some really fantastic morels that my best friend N had found lurking in the forest during one of his walks). So being a foodie is kind of in my blood by now.
Food in general has been a troubling subject for me throughout my life. I've always been a bit on the chubbier side and so I've been on every diet imaginable. Going to college and really taking control of what I eat has really helped me amend my relationship with food in general. I found that eating a healthy meal and regular exercise is really the key to being fit and energetic. I know everyone tells you that, but it really is true. I became a free-range vegetarian halfway through my freshman year and that helped me rethink the way I think about food and what I put into my body. I suddenly had to worry about getting enough protein, and not overcompensating with carbohydrates. I actually think that my biggest accomplishment was ending my war against carbohydrates in general. I learned how to eat healthy. Having to cook my own food senior year made me think about what to buy, what was worth spending money on, what was healthy for me and for the environment. But being a vegetarian also taught me how to make healthy food taste good. Why should being a vegetarian mean that I have to eat tasteless rabbit food? So I learned how to enjoy food and how to still have it be healthy.
Other than a foodie, I'm also a filmmaker. An independent one. I'm in the process of establishing my own production company (with two friends of mine: one from college, one from high school) and right now I'm working on producing a few projects that I'm planning to shoot within the next 8 months. Eventually I want to direct my own film.
I also like to travel and I like to travel a lot. I have an app on my facebook page that shows where I've been. It tells me that I've been to like 8% of the world. I think that's quite an accomplishment considering I'm only 21 years old. However, I feel that there's still so much more that I want to see and so many more places that I want to go to. My next few big trips involve going back to China, to visit a friend of mine who will be in Xi'an in the spring. The problem is, I only have enough airline miles to get there but not to come back. That might be a problem...hehe. After that, I'm taking a road trip down South America next year with my best friend N and maybe my cousin. We'll be driving from Quito, Ecuador to Ushuaia, Argentina in my car. I'm really looking forward to that because we've been planning that trip basically since N and I met Freshman year. But that's still a year away.
But now I should really get back to work. Self-employment is hard...
Until next time!
Many greetings from Zero Degrees Latitude!

(okay, I'm a few seconds to the north if you want to be exact...geez)

Categories: avocados, China, foodie, multichronotropic, Quito, vegetarian