Eating at the Forest Edge in Nepal
Text and photos by Rachel Hellman
Potatoes and Chili
Jampa carefully scoops the still steaming potatoes onto the metal plates, placing a dollop of red-hot chili next to them. She looks up and smiles.
“You know, these are very fresh potatoes, they are not shipped in or anything,” she says matter of fact, as if it is important to know this before we bite in. Jampa makes a go on, motion with her hands. The food is still hot, after all.
I find them surprisingly sweet for plain potatoes. I realize that my idea of a potato, up until this point, has been pretty sad. What was once a bland starch now clearly deserves to be the nucleus of the meal, for all other flavors to revolve around. The potatoes have just been harvested, Jampa explains. Here in Kanjim, it is potato season.
Kanjim, Nepal, is nestled between forests. The village is part of the Langtang Buffer Zone of the Rasuwa District of Nepal, a Himalayan region that shares a northern border with the Tibet Autonomous Region. Its buildings, like many Himalayan ones, face away from the village center as if greeting the village across from us, Thaman, which sits mirroring its sister village on the other side of the valley. The journey from the valley below up to the mountaintop town is marked by terraced hills of sprouting garlic, ripe cabbage, potatoes and the occasional cow. Nettle-lined paths crisscross a stream that runs through the village. Toward the east of the village is a gompa (monastery) with prayer flags entwining the sky. This is where people meet. The town is an amalgamate of land and house, animal and human. Only in the early morning can you see the towering kangri topo (snow mountains) directly across from Kanjim, where international trekkers come while traveling on the Tamang Heritage Circuit.
I am staying in Jampa’s guesthouse along with two other American college students, our Nepali instructor, Nyima Dorjee, and our friend from the area, Dawa Gyaltsen, who is helping us translate during our stay. I have been in Nepal for four months as part of an exchange program for college students focusing on Tibetan and Nepali language, history and cultural studies. As part of our stay in Rasuwa, we have been encouraged by villagers to learn more about the food systems of the area, especially about the frustrating national forest designation of the Langtang Buffer Zone, which encapsulates the region.
The five of us sit shoulder-to-shoulder on the earthen floor, quietly eating the potatoes and occasionally calling out our satisfaction with a deep grunt of delight. And just like that, they are gone. Devoured, as she knew they would be. Jampa smiles and brings around the pot of potatoes again, insisting that we have more.
Jampa tells us that she grows, “wheat, corn, barley, potato, grain, cabbage and garlic,” in the terraced fields neighboring her guesthouse. But in recent years, she has had to supplement her agricultural pursuits with other forms of income. During our time in Kanjim, Jampa’s husband is off leading tourists on a trek to nearby Langtang, and along with the guesthouse they both run, she also owns a small corner store that sells cigarettes, traditional scarves that her friend weaves and Snickers candy bars.
As the second round of potatoes are passed around, Jampa tells us about her children, all currently in grade school in the Kathmandu Valley.
“I think my children have become better people since attending school in Kathmandu,” she tells us. “They help when they come home, they are more disciplined.” But she also reminds us that “it is very expensive to send your children to school. I am in so much debt, that is why I started this guesthouse, to generate more revenue to meet the education expenses.”
When I ask her about how the last agricultural season has been, she stops stirring the warming black tea over the stove and proclaims, “monkeys come so often and destroy the crops!”
This is only one of the many dilemmas facing those who live on the east side of the Gandaki River, whose home falls within the jurisdiction of the Langtang Buffer Zone. The national park extends over the districts of Nuwakot, Rasuwa and Sinhupalchok and was established in 1976 to conserve the biodiversity of the area. In 1998, according to the park’s website,an area of 420 kilometers in and around the park was declared a buffer zone.
Nepal is regularly applauded for its conservation efforts and has received accolades for the growing number of animals that it has successfully repopulated from near extinction. However, its success often shadows a disparate reality for those living within buffer zones—the peripheral area national park and wildlife reserves where residents have a right to the natural resources—that do not have community forestry infrastructures in place. “The rhetoric of conservation is sometimes used to enclose land, forest and water for the wealthy and push the poor further into the margins,” writes Shradha Ghale, a writer for The Record: Nepal, in “The Dark Side of Nepal’s National Parks.”
On top of these regulatory frustrations, residents of Kanjim are facing a multitude of threats to their ability to live as they have for generations, largely in harmony with the land and the harvest cycle. While many of the changes have been well received and have resulted in an increased quality of life, particularly the building of roads and other infrastructure, others have made it harder to make a livelihood from agriculture alone and have forced locals to leave or seek employment in the Kathmandu valley.
Lama Dorjee is the head of the National Park Buffer Committee. When we join him at his traditional home, nestled into a quiet corner of Briddam, he removes his yellow wool hat and insists we drink some of the tea his wife has prepared. He sighs, “the National Park has rules to conserve wildlife, but what about people?”
Nettle Soup
The stinging nettles are everywhere; They creep through the crevices of stones and snake closely along the paths that braid their way through Kanjim. We are warned not to touch the plant, for as the name implies, the leaves sting like a burn on contact.
One afternoon, however, Jampa asks us to gather nettle for our supper. We weave our way through the cobbled steps of Kanjim, bamboo pliers in hand, eyes on the prowl for the small, spiky plants. It is surprisingly difficult to find the ripe leaves among the immature, to twist the pliers just right as to get the whole body of the plant and not just the tip. Dawa observes each leaf carefully, furrowing his brow in concentration as he considers its soup potential, more often than not proclaiming the stalk as “no good.”
The soup has a delightful tang, especially when paired with the tongue-numbing pepper rampant in Rasuwa. Still, stinging nettle is considered as a “poor man’s food” in Nepal.
Whenever we ask villagers about the last harvest or their agricultural endeavors, they tell us about livestock lost to a myriad of causes, especially heavy snowfall. Nepal is a country especially heavy hit by changes in temperature due to climate change, with those living immediately downstream from glaciers, like in Kanjim, at the highest risk of being affected by glacial changes, that might have ramifications for local water resources, according to a 2018 article by Douglas James Merrey titled “Evolving high altitude livelihoods and climate change: a study from Rasuwa District, Nepal,” for the journal Food Insecurity . Or villagers tell us with exasperation of their inability to grow enough food to eat with the constant threat, and reality, of wild animals consuming the fruits of their labor.
“Young people work in the fields, but when the animals eat their crops, they don’t feel like working anymore, so they just stop,” says Pema, a 64-year-old woman from Thuman. “There is nowhere to grow rice. There is water but not as much as there used to be. Everyone still works together, but not as much as they used to, and the land is not as fertile as before the [2015] earthquake. The old cannot work and the young leave to go to Timure to work.”
In Kanjim, we see very few, if any, villagers between the ages of 8 and 25. When we ask Jampa about the phenomenon, she says that “early on people used to study here, but after the last couple of years, people almost always go to Kathmandu after class five. Only the poor people, like me, stay back in the village.”
And it’s not just children. Entire families, swaths of people, are literally abandoning their homes and migrating to Kathmandu. In a recent study of demographic changes in Rasuwa, researchers reported that some villages near Kanjim had upwards of 50 percent of their households containing at least one individual who had migrated out either permanently or temporarily, Merrey writes. Another common phenomenon observed is for families to keep their home in Kanjim, but for the father of the household to stay for months at a time in Kathmandu working.
The pressure to move out of Rasuwa comes at a cost. Karma, a farmer in Briddim, exclaims to us, “my head is too heavy with loans!” Karma took out a huge sum of money to send her three daughters to Sweden, France and Kathmandu. She tells us that it is “difficult here, so it is better to send them off. It was my daughter’s decision to leave, I just provided the money. The problem is I have no education, and I have to make money, but I have no income farming.”
Chinese Custard Cake
On the day of our arrival in Kanjim there is a puja (devotional practice in Tibetan Buddhism) for a man who had passed away three weeks prior at the age of 67. We walk to where the community is gathered, at a central square surrounded by prayer wheels and flags. Dozens of women sit on the ground facing the prayer wheels, and in front of them sit the men of the village, cards with prayers written on them on the floor in front of their feet. I stand on the fringes of the square, along with the elderly and some running children. The rounded, pronounced sound of voices in unison fills the air. The puja has already been taking place for hours, but the voices are still strong. A man next to me named Lhakpa tells us more about the man who has passed away. “He worked in Kathmandu, but his hometown is here, and he was married here, so we do puja for him here.”
Two men come around with little plastic-wrapped snacks. They insist I take one, not leaving until the silver packaging sits safely in my hands. Inside is a Chinese custard cake, which tastes much like the child of a corn cake and a mound of butter. Lhakpa tells us that there is no practice of bringing offerings for death, but the family of the deceased does pool some money to give to the people who help them recite prayers during puja. As I investigate the empty wrapper in my hand, I realize that all of the writing is in Chinese.
These cakes, Lhakpa reveals, are from the border outside of Kerang. With a car-sized road built less than a year ago, villagers are still getting used to the steady supply of consumer goods, mostly Chinese, now more widely available. Lhakpa tells us that “it was still good here without the road, I would just use a porter, but I was happy when the road came, it made life a little easier.”
This sentiment was echoed by many. Temba tells us that “it’s only been a year since the road came to Kanjim. It’s overall good, but it will take away certain jobs and drive away tourism. There is no need for porters anymore with the road, but at least now we don’t have to carry our essentials on our back.”
One herder says it made moving cattle from place to place a less daunting task. Another woman tells us that if someone gets sick, they can now bring them to help much faster.
Perhaps the most impressive aspect of the new road is that its creation was only due to the pooling of resources by locals of Kanjim, Briddim and Sulkit.
“After the earthquake it would not have been possible to build houses without a road, but the government did not give us enough money to fully fund the road,” says Lhakpa, the chairman downstream who are part of our community.”
“After the earthquake the government gave each person Rs15,000 ($125 USD), and the community decided that we should each deduct Rs500 ($4.16 USD) from that amount towards building the road,” says Karma, the farmer from Briddim. “The road construction committee was elected by the local people.”
The new ease in transport has resulted in a flow of consumer goods, mostly from China but also from Kathmandu. Further down from Kanjim, villages in the Rasuwan valley depend upon the regular business of truck drivers and others involved in trade with China. Meals that otherwise would be served without rice are now supplemented with the grain which would otherwise be too expensive to regularly consume. The result is a new sort-of cuisine, made up mostly of traditional Himalayan meals that are rooted in the seasonal cycle of dishes, but also influenced by the plethora of Chinese consumer goods now more easily available. Not all change in Kanjim is met with a shake of the head.
Rhododendron
On our way to Briddam, a village just a 45-minute walk away from Kanjim, Dawa stops and disappears into the forest. He emerges with three bright red flowers in his hands, a gift. We accept them, flattered by the kind gesture. “Eat it,” he beckons on. I stare at my flower, confused, until Dawa demonstrates masterfully how to remove the sweet stem of the flower, sucking the nectar from the inside. He peels off each sticky petal, chewing on the velvety rounds as a smile creeps onto his face. I mimic his behavior and find the combination of sweet nectar with sour petal to taste something like the candy Sour Patch Watermelon.
For the next 25-minute stretch of forest leading to Briddam, I dance between the rhododendron trees, plucking flowers and sucking the sugary nectar before biting into the bitter petals, savoring the candylike combination. The road connecting Kanjim to Briddam is only a few months old, and the ground is still textured with the imprints of the machinery used to carve out the road. Locals of Kanjim have an intimate relationship with the plethora of herbs, flowers, trees, and fauna of the region. This rapport between the land and the people is made tangible in the cuisine which is so particularly attuned to the seasons, and a knowledge of the high-altitude forests. Herb-gathering is a regular practice for villagers, an activity that bears supplies for both cooking and traditional medicine. However, with restricted access to the forest as a result of regulations, many find it difficult to gather the herbs – and therefore continue age-old healing techniques – they once did.
Some locals tell us that they will gather herbs secretly in the forest and then go to Thokeman, where there are no regulations, and sell them to villagers there, who then resell the herbs at a higher price. Temba tells us that “we used to have a system where you could collect medicinal herbs and sell them, but now it isn’t allowed. Some have a system where they collect herbs here and then sell them elsewhere, but now that the National Park is stationed outside the forest that is no longer possible.” Temba sighs, and continues, “my grandfather used to collect Pangpeu, it was a popular herb.”
“A lot has changed here,” says Lhakpa, the chairman of Ward No.3, the Gosai Kunga Village Municipality matter-of-factly. “The land has not been cultivated. The land and the homes are being abandoned.”
Lhakpa tells us that it is not just that there are dwindling numbers of people living year-round in Kanjim, but that more and more are moving out permanently.
“The village has no big income opportunities,” Lhakpa continues. “People have just started to reopen their guesthouses [after earthquake damage]. Otherwise, there is only agriculture, and there is always a problem having your ward situated in a national park. When you get sick you will take the medicine”
Butter Tea
I sit inside the kitchen of our guesthouse, a ramshackle metal building with an earthen floor and a grounded oven on the side facing the mountains. The oven is flat, and the wood is fed in horizontally, slowly consumed by the black pulsing embers of the orange flame. Small wooden floor stools circle the fire, and as soon as the sun dips behind the snow-capped peaks, the room fills fast. Elbow to elbow sit guests, family members, and friends. A kitten is pushed away by one and then grabbed for warmth by someone else. The smell of tea sits in the air, wafting up from the kettle sitting above the stove.
I am mesmerized by Jampa’s dancing hands as she moves butter to kettle, kettle to blender, blender to mug. She tells us she bought the blender in the valley because it makes mixing the ingredients necessary for butter tea easier. She didn't always use the blender, but it lightens the load.
Things are getting easier in Kanjim, but they are also getting more difficult; there isn’t enough wood for the fire, enough herbs for the medicine, or stones for the home. What were once manageable predators, such as wild boar, are now guarantors of destruction.
Cooking is always communal here, for practical reasons. There isn’t much room in the kitchen, so whoever is lucky enough to obtain a seat by the fire also has an obligation to help. Right now, however, is that magical moment before the cooking begins, when the butter tea is being warmed by the growing flame, and there is a weighty stillness, a digestion of the day.
*The names of all individuals interviewed (excluding those with a governmental position) have been changed to ensure their safety.
