Bon Appetit!

Ahhh, Mongolia, where fat drips freely and the vegetable soup is mostly meat.  Mongolia’s five vegetables are carrots, cabbage, white radishes, onions, and potatoes, and the average Mongolian gets about two servings of these fancy foods per day.  My class is convinced that this statistic is only possible because of the potato’s veggie designation.  Usually, when my host family wants to include vegetables in our food, we peel one carrot, slice it, and put it in our meat and noodle soup to share between the four of us.  So, at the rate of a quarter of a carrot every day or so, I get about two servings of vegetables a week from my  UB host family.  However, if I include potatoes in my calculations, the number probably jumps to one serving of vegetables every day.  In the countryside, one serving of vegetables every day would be a godsend and an unlikely miracle (even counting potatoes).
The lack of vegetables is offset by a huge amount of rice, bread, meat, and of course fat. Although it has been an arduously long personal journey, I am proud to say that I can pretty casually pop a quarter-sized helping of fat (specific sizes depend on the type of fat and how much it has been cooked) into my mouth and even consider it delicious.  Unfortunately, I have not been as successful at actually reading the menus the fat comes from. In the past two months, I have grown able to recognize some key words: meat, fried, soup, dumpling soup, meat, rice, potato, buuz, khoshuur, tsuivan, and kimchi (Mongolians eat a lot of Korean food).  Thus, my already restricted diet is further limited by Mongolian Cyrillic and occasionally salvaged by random pointing, whether to the menu or other people’s food.
When I am feeling risk adverse, I eat buuz and khoshuur, slightly different versions of fatty meat encased in dough. Buuz are steamed dumplings and khoshuur, (traditionally made with horse meat) are like fried hot pockets, and both are filled only with meat.  Both require either some aggressive slurping or clandestine draining of the fat trapped inside, and both are delicious. Tsuivan is a less delicious traditional Mongolian fall-back made with fried noodles, a few small pieces of vegetable (for color mostly), meat, and fat.  In the countryside, my family would eat tsuivan for dinner and then heat it up the next morning with some suu te tse, or milk tea, for breakfast.
City and country eating differ slightly; mostly, the countryside diet has less variety, less vegetables, more organs, and more dairy products.  I ate the freshest goat stomach lining of my life in the countryside, and I ate more than I ever thought possible.  I also ate the freshest yogurt of my life in the countryside, and again, I ate more than I ever thought possible.  The yogurt is quite tart and tangy, but Mongolians whip in at least two heaping tablespoons of sugar to sweeten the snack.  While the Mongolian diet places little emphasis on sweets, both city and countryside people are quick to add sugar to anything with dairy.  Additionally, both areas have a ready supply of highly processed, bland pastries (a welcome tea-time addition) which all taste the same but come in different shapes (to offset the lack of vegetable variety).
Mongolian people, in general, do not suffer from hunger, but nutrition is (unsurprisingly) a large issue.  As Mongolians abandon their traditional nomadic way of life in favor of sedentary city living, the Mongolian diet will become an even greater problem.  But for now, Mongolians will continue to chow down on their meat, fat, and breads, and I will continue to dream of spinach, extra-sharp cheddar cheese, and American breakfast foods.