Humor can change the world

My host dad has become vegetarian — mas o menos.

Before I got here, he said he was eating all kinds of meat and fried foods. He has eliminated most of that from his diet. Although he says there are obvious health benefits to the vegetarian diet, I think his lifestyle change is mostly motivated by humor.

Let me explain.

When I meet someone here, there are a few topics that we cover almost immediately.

The first would be what I’m doing here. I should have kept a count of this, but I think I have refined the 20-second, I’m-in-the-Peace-Corps-and-here-to-help-you-by-working-with-natural-resources-and-conservation-with-the-municipality pitch. I’m constantly fine-tuning it, but the fundamentals of the pitch of constant and very strong.

So then the conversation will continue for a few minutes about the work I’m doing. Then the person will ask I am willing to teach them English, as if that could happen in ten minutes. I explain this to them and tell them that if they want to learn English, they have to work as hard as I am at learning Spanish.

Four minutes later, we come to the topic of food. I like to keep the conversation about food focused on produce and the availability of so many outstanding fruits at the local market. Inevitably, the conversation shifts to meat and seafood. They are such staples of the local diet that the people here want to know my take on it. This is when I drop the v-word.

I tell them that I am vegetarian and don’t eat meat (“No como carne”). Then they reply “what about carne cruda?” (literally “raw meat” but that phrase is full of innuendo). I get this reply about eighty percent of the time that my vegetarian diet comes up.

Now, just as I have a well-crafted response to other staple conversation, I have refined, with hilarity, how I answer this question. I like to say that I don’t have to kill the carne cruda. This typically evokes boisterous laughter, and everyone wins.

This is where my hos dad comes in. He has seen me give this shpiel numerous times and loves the opportunity to chime in with the joke every time. He likes the joke so much that he wants to be able to use it himself.

So he has become a vegetarian, purely for the jokes.

Maybe I’ve been watching too much Seinfeld.