Tibetan Foothold by Dervla Murphy

American Government, hard-boiled eggs and moo-moo – which is steamed, grey-brown Tibetan bread, served in the shape of little dumplings. The lunch and dinner menus are very varied – potatoes (a favourite vegetable in Tibet) cooked in many strange and palatable ways, ordinary vegetables like carrots, cabbage, peas and egg-plant, noodles with unidentifiable little things chopped through them, vegetable salads mysteriously concocted, marvellous goat’s meat fritters, curious objects like sour-milk pancakes which I absolutely adore, rice pilaus and savoury dumplings made like swiss rolls filled with meat and onions and unknown herbs. Soup is served, in Tibetan fashion, at the end of the meal and no puddings are provided. But Chumba bakes several different types of delicious bread, on which we spread tinned jam or the excellent local honey. The Tibetans don’t normally use curries, I’m thankful to say, and on the whole their food is much more European than anything I’ve tasted since leaving Bulgaria.
    Of course in Tibet itself the average peasant did not have such luxurious meals. His staple foods were meat, milk, tsampa (barley flour) and the very nourishing salted butter-tea – a monotonous but healthy diet. Many people express disapproving astonishment when they hear of Buddhists eating meat, but vegetarianism was never a practical possibility in Tibet, where few crops can be grown; so the herds of yak and sheep have always been the chief source of Tibetan food – which may partly explain why they were such a renownedly healthy race. Some of the lamas and monks did abstain from meat, but most people were content to salve their consciences by somewhat illogically considering butchers as social outcasts and never ordering an animal to be killed. If you went to your local butcher’s tent and saw a dead sheepand bought it for your supper you remained innocent, but if you went along and told the butcher you wanted a sheep killed for tomorrow’s supper you were guilty of causing life to be taken. The blatant irrationality of this is childish – yet you could match it in some Christian teachings without having to think too hard.
    The diet of the children here is very different from ours – too different, I felt at first. Then, on reflection, I realised that although we might feel more at ease if living nearer their level, it wouldn’t help to have us falling sick. Yet I’m not satisfied that their menu need be quite so bad, considering the various money-allowances and per capita donations of foodstuffs that are supposed to come to the camp from the Indian Government and other sources. This is a situation that might profitably be investigated.
    At the moment they get for breakfast half a moo-moo (about three ounces), which contains very little of food value, and a small mug of slightly sweetened tea. That is at seven o’clock and the next meal is at noon, when they get a mug of rice and dahl, or a half-mug of watery soup containing about an ounce of meat, with half a moo-moo. Tea at three o’clock is the same as breakfast, and supper at six o’clock the same as lunch. However, Juliet has just obtained a special allowance from SCF to provide the Dispensary cases with one piece of fruit each per day, and she herself will be in sole charge of this fund, so that is one concrete improvement.
7 AUGUST
    Today Herr Albert Eggler, Honorary Secretary to the Swiss Association for Tibetan Homesteads, came to Dharamsala, and Oliver, Juliet and I were invited to the ritual luncheon party which Mrs Tsiring Dolma holds at the Upper Nursery whenever VIPs visit the camp. Herr Eggler is in India to choose a third batch of thirty-three Tibetans (mostly adults) for permanent resettlement in Switzerland; the first two batches were chosen mainly from refugees in Nepal.
    This being Wednesday Juliet has her ‘day off’, which she spends working at the Kangra Schools, so she declined the invitation and Oliver and I set off together up the