The jaba is an ingenious little invention of which you probably have a whole pile unused and stuffed in a cabinet somewhere. However, in Cuba you would be lost without them. It is probably the most important tool for food and cooking because you put everything into it… bread, sliced fruit, rice, sugar, pineapple, raw meat, your lunch, beans, cooked spaghetti, loose salt, grated cheese… not to mention its various other uses in all manner of shopping and portaging. In fact, you could just about name anything, and it goes right into the jaba, which you know as… the generic plastic grocery bag.
Now when I say you put your bread in the bag I don’t mean that you put in the nicely packaged bag of bread, I mean that you bring your own previously used bag and the lady in the bakery takes your money with the same hand that she grabs your unpackaged “flautin de pan” off the shelf like a can soup and than shoves it straight into your bag. I won’t pretend I wasn’t shocked the first time I watched a line of people do this, but when none of them seemed the least bit surprised nor appalled that this lady was handing their bread like a fishmonger, I got in line, opened my jaba, and made like a Cuban. I have now seen just about everything put directly into a jaba, last week I even saw a woman stuff 6 stacked slices of pizza into one. And although there is Tupperware here in Cuba, there is no cardboard to-go boxes, plastic wrap, wax paper, ziplock bags, or aluminum foil…and so as you can imagine the jaba stands in for practically all of the uses we have for these things. And at the end of the day, the jaba is your trash bag too. To me the most surprising part of food in a plastic grocery bag is the lack of concern for germs and or contamination – a fear which controls a lot of US habits. BUT the Cubans don’t seem to be suffering any jaba health problems and so… Viva la jaba extraordinaria!
No comments:
Post a Comment