Sustainable Snacking - The Thai Street Food We Can Never Say No To!

Snacking. Some zealous purists claim they never do it. How very sad! To be able to simply pause for no reason and pop a pleasure-explosion into your mouth?? Something which delights, sustains and nourishes? Life is all the richer for wonderful snacking. And yet soooo much of the convenient snack food isn't sustainable. Au contraire. It's chemical laden, factory produced, palm oil fried, GMO and plastic packed, along with its various preservatives, flavours and miscellaneous chemicals.

And so here I am in Thailand. 'All that street food!', our visitors gasp. Surely you eat & snack out all the time? Actually, no, we don't. Because a LOT of street food is deep fried in dodgy re-used GMO, palm or soy cooking oils, which we avoid like the plague. Or stored-cooked in such a way as to regularly give mild doses of food poisoning. I love to cook and I love to eat healthy, so I'm very choosy about where we eat. And that means our street food snack options are a lot less than most Thai visitors first imagine. There are some awesome sustainable street-fast-food options though, and one we ALMOST NEVER pass up. :)

Last night she saw me before I saw her. She knows a good regular customer when she sees one.

"Aow mai?" (Do you want?)
"Aow! Luuk saow chop maak. Song tii, noi kha." (Want! My daughter really likes. Two servings, please.")

And so by the time I came out of the pharmacy by Tapae Gate (yes - doing my Pure Thai Naturals product deliveries yet again, after the evening school pick up) it was ready.

Locally grown sticky rice, from her cousin's farm. Steamed northern Thai style with coconut milk and pandanus leaf, which gives it an amazing flavour and aroma. And the blue rice? She adds Anchan flowers - the blue butterfly pea. And fresh local mango. Of course. With the rich fragrant coconut milk sauce over the top, and sprinkled with some crunchy mung bean kernels. Amazing.

The mangoes are EVERYWHERE at the moment, and the anchan flowers too. Botanically Anchan is named Clitoria ternatea and yes, named for it beautiful likeness to a woman's magical place. It is prolific, here in Chiang Mai. In fact, after the heavy rain last night, I have a whole new batch of anchan flowers this morning at the back of my kitchen-herbal garden:

Thai people will rave to you about the value of anchan flowers for beautiful hair and that is PARTLY TRUE. Specifically for black, Thai hair. It definitely is NOT an option for blondes. Haha, but another story!

Anchan flowers ARE well known for their rich antioxidants and their anti-inflammatory properties. Like so many blue foods, they are incredibly rich in trace nutrients and are completely edible. I like adorning my rocket-tomato-fetta salads with them, too.

And so in the course of our dinner-might-be-late-again snack, we supported our local farmers and our entrepreneurial street vendor. We ate it off the banana leaf and made a tiny crusade against big corporations taking over our world. We added some herbal magic to our tired bodies after a long day. But mostly, we added a simple, enjoyable pleasure that made it good to be alive.

I love it when great choices WORK on so many levels.

Sustainable snacking matters, cos we actually mostly all snack far more than we admit to. :) And why not? Life is for the Living.

Happy sustainable snacking! :)

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