Day 67. Greed.

The black soil of the tropics, oft trampled by invaders and defended by warriors has given rise to conflicts that have ended empires and given birth to empires anew. From that black soil of "The Other America" the "Latin America" comes the one thing of any value the region will ever be remembered for. The plantain. (OK, I know the hearth of plantains is actually Southeast Asia, but South America really needs a win, and I think we should just accept this new "fact".)

Whatever nature's god has given to us, from the Andes rippling with llamas and alpacas like wind across grass, or the rainforest where caiman dip their feet in the amazon to escape the gaze of the jaguar, the most valued of all this bounty is the plantain. Man has often attempted to tame this great land. There have been endeavors to slow the wild blood of rivers like the Orinoco, and bring life to the dry skeleton bones of the the Atacama, but in the end the land remains as wild as the people that choose to live in this land of great appetites', a land where the only craving that is ever satiated is the craving for life lived fully.

This land has given us this bounty of plantains and man has seen that although the land and the people cannot be tamed, the plantain can be. And like all things great we in our infinite quest to become like nature's god himself, have reduced the plantain to it's greatest form the chip. There may never be a llama chip, nor an alpaca chip, there will be no jaguar chips nor caiman chips, but the plantain in it's inability to fight back has been reduced without humiliation but with pride into the greatest of all Latin America's bounty, the plantain chip.

And it is this land made edible, the winds of the highlands, the mud of the lakes and the snows of the glaciers all embodied into chip form that allows any of us to eat a small part of the land to our south that has eluded classification or conquest for generations.

So when I offer them for sale for a mere $1.50, the question should not be why $1.50, it should "be why not more, and can I pay in stolen Aztec, or Incan gold?" Of course you can.