Greenlandic food is an acquired taste. Our son discovered this the hard way at kindergarten. Like most Greenlandic kindergartens, his had a kitchen with a full time cook, a wiry, severe Greenlandic woman, not to be messed with. She dished up all sorts of Greenlandic fare including seal soup, fish, sea birds.
For a time our son ate largely rice.
Eventually he started also partaking of some of the more ethnic options. On collecting him in the afternoons, I recognised immediately if he had eaten seal soup during the day. A rancid oily stench filled his hair and oozed from his skin. His clothes would take a few washes before the smell was gone. Seal soup is not a taste that any of us have yet acquired.
One thing we really appreciated about his kindergarten was the focus on local produce and teaching kids where their food comes from. Local fishers and hunters sell their catches outside the nearby supermarket, where the kindergarten cook buys much of the food. One morning I found her in the kitchen with a large pile of dead birds. She had a task ahead, plucking, gutting, and preparing them for lunch. The kids were involved and afterwards they labelled the various bird parts in a kind of death-pose collage.
If kindergarten taught my son one thing, it was ‘make friends with the cook’, an important life lesson. After he had figured this out, I would regularly find him helping out in the kitchen. This little blonde boy found a soft heart in the serious cook. She adored him. In return for his help, he received white bread and the occassional biscuit, keeping the need for acquiring new tastes at bay.
It’s never too early to start thinking strategically.
