I Asked A Venezuelan How To Make Arepas, He Gave Me A 45-Minute Rant About Socialism Instead, And Now I’m The Villain
Look, I’m just trying to make dinner. I’m standing in my Brooklyn kitchen, staring at a bag of masarepa that expired sometime during the Obama administration, and I think: “You know what? I’m gonna be adventurous. I’m gonna make arepas. I’m gonna be a culinary explorer.”
Fast forward to me, an idiot with a spatula, calling my Venezuelan neighbor, Carlos, who lives in 3B and once fixed my garbage disposal for a six-pack of Polar. I figure, hey, he’s from the homeland. He’ll give me some pro-tips. Maybe a secret family recipe. A little cheese, a little butter, boom—dinner.
What I got instead was a 45-minute, unhinged TED Talk on the collapse of the Bolivarian Republic, the “thieving rat-bastards of Chavismo,” and how my precious arepa is actually a “symbol of resistance against the tyranny of state-controlled cornmeal.” I just wanted to know if I should use hot water or room temperature.
Carlos, a man who once cried watching *Encanto*, launched into a dissertation so passionate I’m pretty sure he somehow blamed the CIA for the fact that my apartment’s water pressure is terrible. He started with, “You think you know pain, gringo? You’ve never known pain until you’ve waited in a line for four hours for a bag of flour that’s 90% sawdust.”
And then he did it. He looked me dead in the eye, pointed at my bag of P.A.N. flour, and said, “That? That is the taste of a failed system.”
I made the mistake of asking, “So… like, a lot of salt?”
He didn’t hear me. He was already gone, transported back to Caracas in 2016, probably reliving some trauma about blackouts and the price of a dozen eggs.
For the next three-quarters of an hour, I learned more about Hugo Chávez’s economic policy than I ever did in my “World Politics 101” class that I took as a hangover elective. I learned about the expropriation of the food industry, the price controls that made cheese more expensive than a used Honda, and how the government literally printed money until it was worth less than the paper it was printed on. Carlos described hyperinflation like he was describing a horror movie. “One day, a bolívar fuerte could buy you a bus ticket. The next? You need a wheelbarrow full of them to buy a single Tic Tac.”
All I could think was: Bro, I just want to put cheese inside a pancake.
But here’s where it gets spicy. The real AITA moment. I, being a normal, hungry American, tried to bring it back. I said, “Okay, so… do you think I should use mozzarella or queso fresco? Also, I’m out of oil. Can I use butter?”
And Carlos stopped. Mid-sentence. He was explaining the “Five Pillars of the Bolivarian Revolution” when my simple, butter-based query snapped him out of it. He looked at me, the flames of a thousand dying hopes flickering in his eyes, and said, “You know what, Pablo? (My name is not Pablo. My name is Mark.) You are part of the problem.”
I laughed. I thought he was joking. He was not.
He said I was “chronically online,” “willfully ignorant,” and that by reducing his nation’s complex tragedy to a “fucking appetizer,” I was committing an act of “cultural violence.” He said my “first-world privilege” was dripping off me like the grease from my pan.
He stormed off, muttering about how expats in Miami were “Chavistas with nicer shoes.”
So now I’m standing here, alone, with a bag of flour that apparently has blood on it. I posted this whole saga to r/AITA, figuring it was an obvious NTA (Not The A-hole). I mean, come on, I’m just trying to eat.
The internet, predictably, ate me alive.
Top comment: “YTA. You asked a man who fled a collapsing state for a simple recipe and expected him to not talk about the state that collapsed. Read the room, you absolute potato.”
Another one: “INFO: Did you pay him for the recipe advice with a single US dollar? Because if so, YTA times a million. That’s the equivalent of giving him a gold bar and asking him to change it for bus fare.”
I got called a “cultural tourist,” a “neoliberal ghoul,” and my personal favorite: “A man who would probably ask a Holocaust survivor for a good kugel recipe and then get mad when they mention the trains.”
Fair point. Maybe I was the asshole.
But let’s be real, Reddit: When you’re hungry, you’re just hungry. You don’t want a political science lecture. You want a warm, cheesy circle of corn-based happiness. I wasn’t asking for the history of the proletariat. I was asking for a dinner that doesn’t taste like cardboard.
I get it, Carlos. Your country got absolutely bodied by a mix of socialist incompetence, oil addiction, and corruption so deep you could drown a horse in it. You’ve got trauma. You’ve got receipts. Your people are fleeing by the millions, and the world is watching the slow-motion car crash of a once-prosperous nation.
But also, Carlos? The recipe is literally on the back of the bag. You just add water and salt. You don’t need a revolution to figure that out.
Anyway, I made the arepas myself. They came out terrible. They were dense, dry, and tasted like regret. I threw them in the trash and ordered a pizza.
So now I’m the guy who disrespected a Venezuelan’s national dish,
Final Thoughts
After reading through the reporting on the Venezuelan exodus, one thing is painfully clear: the crisis isn't just a statistic about GDP collapse or oil production, but a slow-motion hemorrhage of human potential. Watching families dismantle their lives for a grueling walk through the Darién Gap or a precarious boat ride to Trinidad, you realize that no political slogan can replace a lost decade of nutrition or medicine for an entire generation. Ultimately, the tragedy of Venezuela is that it proves how quickly a wealthy, educated nation can be hollowed out—not by foreign invasion, but by internal rot and the heartbreaking decision of millions that staying is no longer worth the cost.