Food and Culture: An Interview with Chef Mervyn Richards

It’s no secret that what we eat and how eat are

the patchwerk of our cultures. Our sacred

cookbooks preserve and record the blueprints

of the traditions and histories of our land and

people. Consider crab and callaloo, the national

dish of Trinidad and Tobago. While crab was a

common food among Amerindians of Trinidad

and Tobago from various ethnic backgrounds,

callaloo’s African origin reflects post-Columbian

interactions. Needless to say, food is often

connected to memory, the main ingredient in

cultural storytelling. So here with us today is Mervyn, a self-proclaimed Trinidadian chef, to talk about his connection to food and ways we can tweak popular recipes to offer more nutritious substitutions while still preserving the sacred relationship between food and culture.

Please note the following is not a replica of the work; rather, it’s a brief summary of the questions and responses in the interview. 

How old were you when you first started cooking?

 I was about 9 or 10 years old.

Were you self-taught, did someone teach you or a bit of both?

Both. I was self-taught. I liked to experiment at first. Sometimes when I thought I was going wrong, I would just call my mom who was in foreign at the time for advice. But, most of time it was my creativity. 

Why do you enjoy it? What’s your favorite thing to prepare?

I like diverse dishes, but my favorite thing to prepare are the more traditional dishes. What we do here in Trinidad are pelau and the cook-ups. That’s when you mix beans and rice with coconut milk. You can even add in meat if you want. I prefer those types of traditional dishes like callaloo as well. 

Is there a particular reason why you enjoy cooking? How does it make you feel?

I feel empowered when I cook because it’s an ability to create. I can make people happy. I see the joy in people’s faces when they taste my food. This moves me to want to cook more. Plus, it’s nutritious. Think about what you are putting into your system right now. We need to eat healthy. We are what we eat. I anticipate cooking healthy food, so I cook my food to eat rather than eating outside. 

If you were to choose a dish that reflects or exemplifies the personality of Trinidad and Tobago which would it be and why?

I would cook dasheen and saltfish. Here’s why. The dasheen shows the earth, where we come from as a people. The crops are what we used in Africa before we came here. So, I find it symbolizes us. Now, in the saltfish you will see the diverse colors. You’d see the pimentos, the sweet peppers and different colored onions. This shows a mixture, a collaboration of diverse cultures in one dish. I think this would reflect our country. 

How do you see the relationship between food and culture on the island?

Our island is culturally diverse. We tend to originate certain food types with certain cultures. For example, roti comes from Indian culture as black-eye peas pelau with pigtail is attributed to African cultures. We have oil down, which is breadfruit, potato, green fig and any provisions (meats) you want to add into it with coconut milk. Some people use smoke bone, pigtail, or saltfish. Some don’t use meat at all. You let the breadfruit and coconut steam down. It’s a real irie pot; a lick your finger pot. To me that’s a real nice diverse menu. 

I hear you’ve been experimenting with your personal dietary plan. What have you been eating lately or not eating?

Presently, I’m on a fast. You caught me at a bad time because I just ate a piece of fish. So, I actually broke my fast to eat some fried fish my mom prepared for me. Originally, I was fasting from alcohol and meat, including eggs. We, as a people, need to fast. We need to watch what we are putting into our bodies, our stomach content. Right now we are getting a lot foreign based foods. It’s not fresh; it’s not good. Most of it has been stored for real long. We are getting it here and we are using it. I don’t think it is very wise for us to being buying stuff just to be eating. We need to take into account what we’re putting into our stomach. I prefer to cook because then you’re sure what you’re cooking. You have some cultures who serve their meats medium rare. We down here don’t know anything about that. We know about cook, well done, overdone and bun (burnt). We don’t know about when it’s cut, it’s still moving and still red inside. We don’t know about those colors. When we see it running red, we don’t even want to taste it. So, you have to be careful what you’re taking in. Plus, you have to consider the pathogens and sicknesses associated with cooking meats medium rare. It’s really not that healthy. I personally don’t want to go into those fancy named restaurants to eat. I don’t want to be a critic to anyone’s livelihood. I just don’t eat raw things.

It’s common for us to hear friends going on diets to lose weight or as I like to say, “getting my life together.” However, a part from loved ones, Jethro Greene, the chief coordinator of the Caribbean Agricultural Farmers Network, explained that 60% of the diseases which Caribbean people die from are preventable and are caused by unhealthy eating habits, much like the ones you just mentioned, and the consumption of processed foods or perhaps uncooked meats. He went on to identify white rice, white sugar and white flour as the main killers. After hearing that, me personally, I’m thinking what am I going to eat with my curry goat or how am I going prepare my dumpling for my ackee and saltfish? Does it really have to be wheat dumpling because I really don’t like that. So help me understand. Truthfully, in your mind what would this look like if as a country, Trinidad and Tobago started to encourage more healthy eating habits, meaning less doubles and bake but more yam and dasheen bush?

Well, that’s a big question. First, I want to start with the flour, sugar and the rice. They sound like the police in foreign. They really are the killers. But on a serious note, we have to start encouraging people to eat more healthy because we have a lot of lifestyle disorders in Trinidad and Tobago. It’s what you would call a feeding ground for pharmaceuticals because a lot of people are just putting junk into their stomachs, so they are suffering with diabetes, hypertension, high blood pressure, heart failure and kidney failure. All of this is a result of what they are eating. The government needs to be more cognizant to wisening up the general public as what is healthy foods rather than having these large markets of fast foods, Chinese foods and fried foods all over the place. I mean you can eat everything, but in rations. However, people have a tendency to make this their alternative food rather than looking for something healthy to eat. And it happens on a daily basis. We need to watch what we are eating and the government can do that by showing you the benefits of eating healthy and how it effects you. For example, they should show you how putting in too much starches in your diet effects you oppose to having more veggies, greens and herbs. We need to watch the sugars and dietary fats and all that we consume. 

In order to do that we need to be aware. The government can use their hand to alert the general public on what food has in it and how our bodies will react when we eat it. I remember when I saw this Honduran guy, Dr. Sebi. He’s well known for his knowledge of food, how it effects your body and its importance. We have good food in Trinidad; we’re just preparing it wrong. We cook our vegetables until they have no life in them. Vegetables must have a little bit of life in them when you bite them. There should be a burst of freshness, a crunch. We also like to peel off the skin of many ingredients that we use. We could just wash it throughly and use it with the skin to get some of the strength and the substance. There are many medicinal purposes in the foods we eat. If we use them properly, they can be more beneficial to us. The government can make more global health programs available on the radio and television, so people can see how eating healthy is more beneficial for them. They can learn how it improves how they sleep and energizes their bodies. They will no longer need to run to holistic shops to get the waste out of their stomachs or even worse have doctors cut out their fat because they will have a more healthy diet. We just need to think. We don’t need anyone us telling us what we are doing is wrong. We know what we’re doing is wrong when we’re gulping down sugar and junk. Sometimes when you eat a piece of chocolate or suck on a mint, your teeth start to hurt you. Obviously, that’s telling you something: this is not good for me. Eat these things in rations; don’t try to over do it. That’s my take on what I would like to see in our country moving forward. 

The government encourages us to plant, go green and use the farmer’s market. Now, if that’s the case, show us the benefits of eating healthy. So you’re not forcing us to buy in the market. People will just want to buy in the market because it’s a more suitable means to get by. You can get two full market bags for your $100 dollars (TTD) compared to what can be bought at a grocery. That’s how we view the market. It’s a cheaper buy. We’re not thinking of the market as a healthier place to buy food. People are buying pigeon peas in a can rather than buying the dry pigeon peas. People are looking to buy all different types of processed foods in the grocery rather than going to the market to buy fresh carrots. Instead, they will buy baby carrots in the can. So, we are putting ourselves through this. Sometimes we can be lazy. They’re even looking for eggs in cans but not in the shells. 

So, you’ve been working hard all day and you come home to make corned beef and rice. There are ways you can make simple foods like that healthy. You can mix in peas and carrots. Of course then we’re back to the peas and carrots people buy in cans, which of course are substitutes if you don’t have the real thing. But, you can even use corn or celery stocks to make it more interesting and to liven it up a bit. You can do all of this, so it’s not just corned beef and rice. 

I can agree that education and awareness would be the key to people wanting eat healthier not just because its necessarily cheaper or more convenient if a market is closer to home. So, when we think about the 10 years and Trinidad and Tobago’s food culture and consumption, do you think people will start having their own herbal gardens and small farms like yours in your backyard or will food stalls start offering healthier options? Do you think there will be less street food on the street or will roti be made with wheat flour instead? Do you think things will change in the next 10 years or will we need more time?

Well, I always like to be optimistic, but for this question I will need to choose my words wisely because I don’t see us going back to healthy eating anytime soon. I remember when fast food was roti. Now, there are several Chinese food restaurants. You can find about 16 on one street. So it’s easily available and cost efficient. For $20 dollars (TTD) you’re getting rice, chicken and chow mein. There’s only certain people who like roti. Roti used to be a thing. We would could eat it everyday because that’s what we had. Now there’s KFC, but roti has more substance, even compared to Chinese food. I don’t want to discriminate against Chinese food, but I don’t see us moving forward in eating healthy. We are actually going backwards. I can see that before there were only five roti shops on the road, but now there are 16 Chinese food shops. What will happen in the next 10 years? There’s fast food all over the place. They have the chicken legs and thighs coming in from foreign countries in cases. It’s hard to find a chicken breast on a counter. Do chickens still have breasts? They are just fooling you with the fast food and foreign meats. 

I don’t think Trinidad aims to go green anytime soon. I could see us having a lot more markets closer to home not just in the boroughs. We can have more food fairs. People can be innovative. They can show their neighbors, friends and other communities how to prepare dishes. Right in Trinidad there are a variety of menus that can all be prepared differently. You just need to mingle with other people. Recently, I had the benefit of being around a culture of people and watching how they prepared food. We just need to reach out. We can do a food fair in Grande. You do them in the communities: Toco, San Souci, Matelot, Valencia, Grande and Arima. In these food fairs we can learn how to cook an oil down Toco style.  

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I like the idea of putting it on the community to educate within instead of waiting on a government that may be tempted to overpopulate the country with processed foods.  

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I remember a time when I took trip to see a friend in Erin. There was roast fish. As the fish came out the sea, they put it on top of a galvanize and lit a fire underneath it. They left the guts in the fish. They sit there with a bowl of pepper sauce, lime and salt alone.  As you flip the fish for the next side to cook, you start eating it from the top, carefully cutting to avoid the guts. It’s the sweetest fish you could ever eat in your life. I never knew about that. Now, when we’re roasting fish, we don’t want to clean it. We just scale it and take a galvanize. While we have other people who gut fish, stuff the inside and wrap it with foil. We can learn a lot from mingling with other people. Toboggans have ways to prepare dishes too. We can employ them over here to show us.  Consider crab and callaloo. Everyone has there way of cooking the dish. Some people like adding dumpling, while others cook it all together in a pot like an oil down. Some people separate it or fry, boil and even stew the dumpling. This shows us that there are different ways of getting something done. 

For the second part of the question, we don’t really have a lot of people who have their own backyard garden or farm. I personally raise my own chickens and rabbits. I also have my own garden for my food crops. There are several people who have the same thing on a smaller scale. Of course we can’t get away from the chemicals. We still need to spray to protect the crops from pests. To me, it’s still better to eat my vegetables that I spray with a little poison oppose to eating canned food with preservatives. If that food can stay in the can for two to three years, how will it sit in your belly? Those peas might come right back out whole. Just the other day, I had rice and curried egg. I didn’t even know you could curry eggs. You fry it first and then curry it.

Sounds like we have work to do. Let’s plan a food fair. 

I’d like to see a food fair. We can start one right here in our area and bring in people from different communities to see and show us what they going. We could even have a trophy too. We wouldn’t award it to the best dish. Instead the trophy goes to the most innovative dish. Just the other day I learned how you can fry the flowers from a fig. 

Well, thank you so much. This was awesome. You shared a lot of great points on how we can change our food culture here and abroad. I think a lot of what you said is transferable to a lot of places. 

I feel we need to take a serious move to improve on the things that we eat and how they effect our life. I can’t wait until a food fair. I’m opening my appetite now.