Situational Starvation - Holy cow I looked good!

(Before I begin, I would like to apologize for the delay in my posts.  Its been somewhere around a few weeks and I have not posted, so I am terribly sorry.)

So you know when people say that they are starving.  I happen to do this all the time.  I say I'm starving and then I look into my cupboard (which happens to be full of food) and state the fact that I have absolutely nothing to eat (all lies).  Well, I have been in a situation where I had no food - literally!

So Utrik is super far north of the capital (about 250 miles) and because it is that far north, boats/ships/yachts don't come very often.  And that means the lagoon stays fairly empty.  And when the plane breaks down, and the food ship stays in the Majuro harbor because it keeps breaking down/people keep adding more food to it - the island will run out of food.  Just saying...

So around the month of December, food on island began running low.  Everyone was low on rice, low on flour, there was absolutely no sugar (which I guess was a good thing).  But there was still food around.  We ate this stuff (I'm forgetting the name - my bad) made out of fermented breadfruit.  Sounds gross, and it was.  yum....  So I left Utrik for midservice in Majuro (the land of dairy!!!!  AND VEGGIES!!!!).  WorldTeach required us to come in and discuss what was going well and what was not going so well on island, with our host family, and inside the classroom.  Holy cow, cheese and yogurt never tasted so good.  But alas, it was time to go back on island.  And what a surprise awaited me there...

So I get back to island, and all the food is gone.  There is no rice, no four, no fermented breadfruit, and all the local produce was out of season/not ripe.  And because Baba (host dad) was on the capital island, we had no steady supply of fish.  And fishing wasn't too good either.  Max (the other WT volunteer with me on island) said that his host dad (who is a great fisherman by the way) wasn't doing too good either.  It was like all the fish banned together and decided not to get caught (either by spear or   fish trap).  There was one neighbor who feed us.  His fish was super tiny and extremely deep-fried - like black deep fried - like I could literally eat the whole fish (bones and all) and it tasted like burnt grease fish.  Well, now that the island was out of imported/ tree based food/ sea based food, it was time to dig.

We now got to eat this stuff called muk-a-muk.  The finished product looks like a clear jello/jelly combo rolled in coconut shavings.  It tasted like magic in my mouth (okay, well, super bad magic, or maybe like fecal magic)

Here it is folks!  The main attraction! Lets give a hand for - MUK-A-MUK!!!!!

It takes some work to make the muk-a-muk.  When you dig it up, it looks like a potato.  I sure wish it tasted like a potato.  So after grinding the potato looking thing into a puke color puke texture mush (the same stuff Carbit made a penis out of - please see one of the previous posts for the reference), you grate it with water and let it sit.  The end product is this white powder/chalk looking stuff.  Well, just heat that stuff up and *bam* (pretend a magic poof just showed up), you have muk-a-muk.  So yeah, I ate this stuff for about a month for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.  At one point, I was thinking about a hunger strike until and then I realized, I already was on one (partially).

Max eating some wonderfully tasting muk-a-muk.
Don't gag it up now.

YUMMY!  YUMMY!  YUMMY!

 So when that food ship came, man, that was amazing!  I'm pretty sure I ate more calories in the one day the ship came back then the past 4 days combined.  And then we all had a shit show (literally - like massive pooping all over island because people were over eating/holy cow - fiber!!)  And so I took this picture of my situational starvation results.  I thought I looked pretty good.  Maybe that should be my new diet book that will make me famous - locational situational starvation.

I thought I looked pretty good from eating only muk-a-muk.