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Richard Humpheries (Black and White) Jason Miller Shwe Koako, Karen State Sylvia Murcfeld Photographs Jean de La Tour Richard Humphries _______________ Version Date June 2004 12/01/2005 Website: Designed, Built and written by Paul Keenan |
Food
All kinds of meat and fish are eaten a and the jungle provides most of the ingredients for the Karen diet with a variety of plants and vegetable also providing a main part of the meal. Possibly the most famous Karen dish that is relished by Karens throughout the world is a pungent dish of fermented fish pounded into a fishpaste (known in Karen as 'nya u' or in Burmese as 'ngape') which is then served with rice and vegetables.
Glutinous
rice, similar to that found in Thailand, is Eating is normally done communally, and it is a strong Karen tradition that should a guest come to one's house that the person be asked to eat rice.
The toddy-palm and glutinous rice provides popular alcoholic beverages which are often drank at many of the traditional Karen ceremonies. Karen diet has varied very little over the centuries with many of the traditional foods still being eaten and enjoyed both by the Karen in Burma and abroad.
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Most
Karen meals consist of rice with a number of
other dishes including a variety of
meats and vegetables.
Karens
like to have their meals highly spiced and large quantity of chilies and other
spices flavour their dishes. Tumeric, ginger, cardamon, garlic, tamarind and
lime juice are often added to the curries giving them a distinctive, if not
Indian, flavour.
also eaten often mixed with sessimum
and pounded in a mortar until it becomes a sticky paste know as 'to me to pi'.
Other types of rice are often cooked in hollow bamboo tubes which is then placed
over a fire until the rice is cooked.
Food
is normally placed on a mat on the floor with the dishes in bowls, or in more
traditional families on plantain leaves, and the curry and fishpaste is
added to rice which is then kneaded into small balls and placed in the mouth.
