Yenangyaung 5

Burmese culture is diverse and multiethnic, so the food is also diverse, and Burmese I met eat (and often cook) right across the various ethnic cuisines, plus the bordering cuisines of Thailand, China and India.

I think that is part of why the ordinary run of the Burmese population shows no awareness that a Westerner eats different food, or that a Westerner might have a hard time with some of the foods on offer.  After all, when Burmese travel within the country, they tend to hunger for the local specialties cooked where they're going.  So to a guest, they serve up the best, and what they imagine you most want, which is the town's specialties.  When they travel, they want the local specialty, so why wouldn't you?

Fortunately, I'm up for this, but as in any culture, "specialties" tend to be further up the scale of food difficulty.  To take an extreme example, I was served a rat and ate it - at least it was deep fried and not different than any other fried meat.

Now, as you move up the social scale in Burma, you quickly hit families that are aware of Western taste in food, and Western difficulty with some Burmese seasonings, and often they have a taste for Western food themselves.  So they will often serve a Western or Thai meal, or at least a bland one. (Thai cuisine being correctly seen as common ground, foodwise.)

Now, the real point.  Some of the most charming families and hosts in Burma are part of the thin middle class - retired professionals on modest but solid pensions and such.  They sit between those who serve up the local specialty and think nothing of it and those who attempt to serve a western meal.

This charming band of the population is the toast belt.  Without fail, in our trip, when we would visit such a family, I would be offered toast and jelly, along with whatever else was being put out.  These were houses that plainly did not, usually or ever, have sliced bread and jelly in the pantry - they went to buy it special, and I'm not sure how they managed that sometimes - outside Yangon and Mandalay, I never saw toast and jelly in stores.  Either it's in town stores I didn't see, or they asked city relations to buy it and had it transported (probably by bus cargo, which is common in Burma).  I'd bet the latter.

So when a middle class Burmese family asks itself what to serve the visiting Westerner, the answer is: toast!