Finding of Bhutan cuisine

I did a presentation about Bhutan cuisine from the book “Hungry Planet”. “Hungry Planet” is a book about what the world eats. It introduces families from different countries and has descriptions of the weekly food purchases, what they eat and there are photos of the family and food. 

This is a picture of Nalim's family and their weekly food consumption from the book "Hungry Planet".

I read the chapter about Bhutan and I learned many things about Bhutan cuisine. Firstly, the book introduced Nalim’s family. Nalim is the family matriarch and it is an extended family. Nalim’s husband is Namgay and there are 3 daughters between Nalim and Namgay and there are 6 children between Sangay Kandu and Sangay. In total there are 13 people in the family. Nalim's family has meals of red rice, chilies, and cheese and the conversation is brisk until the last scrap of food is eaten.

Nextly, I learned what the family consumes in a week. Most of the foods Nalim’s family consumes are home-grown and they only spend 225 Bhutanese ngultrums in a week which is about 5.03 dollars. For grains, they mainly eat red rice and they eat fish and meat normally in a dried form. One thing I was surprised by was that they categorize chilies as fruits and vegetables instead of condiments. They eat a large number of chilies and all kinds of vegetables such as radish, spinach, eggplant, red onions, and so on. 

Also, I learned about the food culture characteristics of Bhutan. The most distinctive characteristic of Bhutanese cuisine is its spiciness. Chillis are an essential part of nearly every dish and are considered so important that most Bhutanese people would not enjoy a meal that was not spicy. Rice forms the main body of most Bhutanese meals. It is served with one or two meat- or vegetable-based side dishes. Pork, beef, and chicken are the most often consumed meats. Spinach, pumpkins, turnips, radishes, tomatoes, river weed, onions, and green beans are all popular vegetables. Rice, buckwheat, and barley are among the grains grown in diverse parts of the country, depending on the environment.

Finally, I thought about the differences and similarities between Bhutan cuisine and Japanese cuisine. The difference is that we do not have chilies every day and we think that chilies are a condiment rather than a vegetable. The similarity is that we usually have meals with a family and have conversations. Also, we eat rice in common and Bhutan cuisine is mainly rice meals.

I would like to introduce one of the popular Bhutan meals. It is called ema datshi, which is chilies and cheese. When you visit Bhutan, you can enjoy ema datshi not only every day but almost every meal. The chilies can be either fresh green chilies or dry red chilies. They are sliced lengthwise and cooked with datshi, which is local Bhutanese cheese, and plenty of butter for good measure.

ema datshi