The food for the field staff is arranged by a survey company we've hired to take care of logistics. It's really good, if monotonous, and they're incredibly eager to serve "Madam" (yeah, that's me). We had originally arranged for breakfast, lunch and dinner, but it turns out that the full meal plan at no additional cost is this:
1.) Bed tea: 6am
This is a small cup of tea given around 6am to people as they are getting ready for work.
2.) Breakfast: 6:30-7:30am
This varies somewhat, but generally consists of a sweet vegetable (e.g. grated carrots with milk, sugar and butter), a sweet treat (e.g. tiny balls of butter, flour and sugar fried), puri (like roti but deep fried), and leftover vegetables from the previous night. You can see why I'm sticking to oranges and bananas in the morning.
3.) Morning tea: 11am
Another small cup of tea. The tea here is EXCELLENT, definitely the best I've had in Bihar and I eagerly await 11am-ish and 4:30pm-ish when tea is served.
4.) Lunch: 1-2pm
This also varies a bit, but generally there's mountains of plain white rice, daal (poured from a bucket), two different kinds of subjee (vegetables, sometimes dry and sometimes with gravy), and "salad" (cucumbers and onions). How far I have come, that I now enthusiastically snarf down the salad rather than laughing about the fact that it's not actually salad.
5.) Afternoon tea: 4:30pm
Third cup of tea of the day. The cups are about the size of your thumb, so it's a tantalizingly small amount of tea...
6.) Afternoon snack: 5:30pm
Either pakoras (deep fried onions and potatoes, I think?), or deep-fried bread. Yes, you heard me. They take a piece of white bread and just deep fry it, and serve it with some spicy sauce. I prefer the pakoras.
7.) Dinner: 9-10pm
Rice, roti, daal, and two more kinds of subjee. I wish they served roti with lunch, but that's just not how it's done.
I honestly feel like I'm eating with Hobbits, since we have the same # of meals, although the ingredients may be somewhat different (breakfast, second breakfast, elevenses, luncheon, afternoon tea, dinner, supper).
The only reason I'm ever hungry is that I don't have breakfast with the field staff and a few days I've left the training venue to return to our office around 8:30pm and skipped dinner (chocolate cookies ≠ thali).
This is like my Sharples meal plan, where I would go into Sharples at 8am, eat, read, eat at 9:15am, read, eat at 10:45am, check email, then eat at 1:15pm, check ESPN, eat ice cream at 3:00pm, stare out into space, eat ice cream again at 3:15pm, write Mark Wallace's essay in 45 minutes, then eat dinner at 5:00pm, and then get made fun of by Weaver at 6:00pm.
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