Shawarma in Baghdad and Tomato Recalls

Being a Geardo is not the only side effect of the years my husband has spent in the military. 

The man started out the pickiest eater on Earth, but basic training right out of high school changed that.  He doesn't need to identify the food!  Just eat it!  And bugs?  It's a favorite party trick for the neighborhood children to catch grasshoppers and hand them over like some kind of delicacy.

Not only is he no longer the least bit picky, but the man no longer has any fear for health repercussions due to the food he's ingesting.

Take, for example, the story of his favorite shawarma stand in Baghdad.  Often when Air Force Guy was out and about taking care of business, they would stop at varying times of day at a particular shawarma stand.  The owner was very pro-American and loved to serve the guys that stopped there.  AFG raved about the shawarma he was getting - teasing me about it mercilessly because I am such a fan myself and I just wasn't getting the good stuff back at home.

One day, AFG and his team stopped at the place the shawarma stand used to be.  Everything was closed.  As you can imagine, the guys were starving and irritated that they would be stuck with the DFAC food instead of this heavenly shawarma they had grown to love.  They were so irritated, that when they spotted am MP they started vigorous questioning about the closed shawarma stand.

The MP told them, "Oh, THAT place?  We had to close that place down for health violations!"

Well, knock AFG over with a feather!  How bad do the health violations have to be that MPs would shut it down in 2003 Baghdad!  And yet the man was eating there regularly and loving it!

Fast forward to a few weeks ago, when the tomato recall news came out.  If you'll remember, several brands of tomatoes were noticed to have salmonella.   The immediate result of this was a drastic dropping of tomato prices at the store.

AFG took one look at the prices at Safeway and started filling bags with tomatoes. 

Did he get worried that our normal and rather large consumption of tomatoes might cause a health risk?  No.

Did he think that we might need to slow down on our tomato consumption until this issue sorted itself out?  No.

He thought, "Hey!  This is great!  Now we can get a great deal on tomatoes and stock up!"

I guess that to someone who not only regularly ate on the economy in Baghdad and Kabul, but ingested whatever was so awful that it didn't meet local wartime standards of cleanliness, salmonella tomatoes might seem like a small risk.

Comments

[dizzylizzie]

i hear ya. my own DH will put ketchup on just about anything. ham sandwhiches, oatmeal, etc.. its no big wonder i caught our youngest drinking ketchup from the bottle when she was a year old at a 4th of july BBQ last year. there's no way she learned this from dear old dad either. he was on deployment for 15 months then. i guess the apple really doesnt fall far from the tree.. or tomato vine...

[penny]

How funny! .. When I first started reading this I too was getting jealous about the shawarma.. I absolutely love it! There's this incredible place in NOLA to get it and everytime I'm there I try my best to go (try my best only b'c the food is a bit pricy but definitely worth it!) .. then I got to the part of the story where the MP's closed down the stand.. hehe..
Enjoyed the story, thanks for sharing! :)

[Sarah]

I am notorious for not noticing things like expired food, which is how I have eaten eight month old yogurt and stuff. One time I ate a plate of donuts in my house, and then my dad came in and said, "What did you do with those moldy donuts?" Oops!

[Erin]

So, for those of us less worldly, what is shawarma? Thanks AFW!

[Stormi]

penny, I'm not sure I'd go to a place where shwarma was pricey. That seems to be the antithesis of shwarma/felafel philosophy.

Shifty Mediterraneans.

[LMT]

This is exactly why I don't take hubby grocery shopping - he would do the same darn thing. Well that and the fact that he sneaks items into my cart - which is not good for my thighs nor my grocery budget!

[penny]

Stormi, you know I've thought about too. There are other places to get it that are cheaper but none that good.. I guess in their defense they do give so much food that it always ended up being my lunch and dinner sometimes the next day.. hehe

[army_wife]

Want a non-picky eater? Try my brother.

My brother is in the Army and is also on a deployment. He was telling me the other day that he had eaten something off the local economy and that it wasn't sitting as well as he would like.

What was it, you ask?

Falafel with goat penis meat in it. (I can't believe he ate this knowing what it was...)

I told this to my husband (also deployed) and he was like "yeah, I just never ask what the meat is in that sort of stuff. It's good." And my husband can be a bit picky when he's at home, so this statement came as quite a surprise to me.

Guys are crazy sometimes! ;-)

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