Natural Foods and Creepy Inka Kola

First off, ignore the fact that the "Kola" in Inka Kola starts with a "K." Which is vaguely white separatist and kind of creepy in and of itself.

So, I was in the market in Huaraz yesterday, and I bought two bottles of Inka Kola "light". As many of you know, I'm a fan of the diet soda, when I can get it.

Anyways, one bottle was fine. The other one had a strange odor that kind of smelled like some combination of the butcher section of your average developing-world market and the chicha (home-brewed corn beer) that you can buy on the street here. It also had some kind of purple or red substance in the threads under the cap.

I hope this was because it had been dropped in a bucket of chicha. I'm afraid it's because it was dropped into a pile of cow stomachs. I really afraid it's because it was manufactured from a pile of cow stomachs.

Long story short, I took a drink before I noticed the smell etc. So far, I'm okay. Hope I stay that way. Especially hope I don't wind up with any Mike Touchton-esque diseases like liver fluke, cholera, or tapeworm.

Which brings me to my second point.

Peruvians (and Estadounidenses) that I meet in Peru often seem to have the idea that the food consumed in Peru is healthier than the food we get in the states--"It's natural," they say. Well, first off, those people haven't walked down the main street in Carhuaz (or any other Latin American agricultural town) on market day, when all the locals come into town, sell their goods, then use the proceeds to buy pesticides and chemical fertilizers. There is probably some organic farming going down here, but there's no way to know what products are organic and what products arent (I suppose that technically, since they're all carbon-based, their all organic, but you know what I mean.)

Also, there isn't a lot of regulation in terms of health and sanitation. So the endshot is, nobody can really justify any assumptions about how healthy the food is here, because there isn't any system to verify anything.

One example:

Before I left Cusco, there was a major story in the news about how some counterfeit bottling company in Lima was putting tap water in bottles and slapping a label on. This, of course, defeats the purpose of bottled water down here, which isn't because it tastes better or because you get to show off your pricey fiji water, but because the water out of the tap can make you sick with Giardiasis, Cryptosporidium, Amoebic Dysentery, etc...

But because the water going on the market isn't regulated in any significant way, there's no way to stop this funny business.

Just another example of how the market fundamentalists--who believe that regulation can never work--are wrong. We don't have these problems in the states, and it isn't because our "market" for bottled water works so well. It's because of regulation. It's also difficult to argue that these regulations aren't more efficient than the alternative (cholera outbreaks are not efficient), and it's hard to argue that the market finds solutions for these problems (it clearly has not.)

That is all.