dining

I believe that the animal’s last word was “moo,” rather than “meow.” The lady outside ATLAPA did, after all, have her Ministry of Health food handling carnet, and she did say “carne de res.”

The tourist guides tend to have these standard warnings about street food, and once in Costa Rica I paid no heed, lunching on a hot dog with everything. The “everything” included some microbes that gave me a couple of very uncomfortable days. There, and in other places where the water tends to be bad, the germs that make your life visible are most likely to come from the rinsing of the lettuce or tomato, or from the ice cubes in your cold drink. Here our surface water is becoming increasingly polluted, our purification systems and city water mains need a lot of work and we sometimes get this cloudy stuff out of Panama City taps, but basically the water is safe to drink, wash vegetables and make ice cubes.

The Ministry of Health makes a worthy effort to oversee the sanitary conditions under which food is stored, processed, handled and served. Over at the Casa de Enfermeras in Marbella you can frequently see little crowds coming, going or taking their breaks from the ministry’s food handling seminars that are part of the process of getting the carnet (official food handling ID card) that the meat on a stick lady displayed. They even conduct some of the seminars in Mandarin for the benefit of recent immigrants from China.

So I was thinking of lunch, not of horrible diseases, that mid-day outside ATLAPA. As in three skewers, at a quarter each. As in “la salsa picante, por favor.”

I got what I paid for: skewers of thin-sliced, grilled beef, mildly spicy, neither raw nor cooked dry, without the stomach-upsetting microbes.

To me, the classic isthmian street lunch is a michi filled with such strips of grilled beef and a hunk of Panamanian-style white cheese, with a big, juicy Boquete orange on the side. On this day, however, I just did the meat on a stick.

Meat on a stick - -- palitos de carne --- is one of the highlights of this country’s popular culture. You will have less than a full appreciation of Panamanian culture if you never try it.

Our public health authorities and food vendors are doing a reasonably good job of keeping meat on a stick safe. Be aware of the manner and circumstances in which the meat is being stored, cooked and handled, and look for the Ministry of Health permit. If everything checks out, feel free to partake and enjoy.

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