Earsdropping: on a taste for travel

Whenever Sylvia and I travel, our destination and daily itineraries revolve around food. Earlier this summer on our food-focused honeymoon, we would walk 10-15 miles each day in the Western European cities we explored, burning calories and biding time to our next meal. Our points of interest were foods that called this local region home with the sights and sounds as a soundtrack and an appetizer.

Many people don’t travel with the same intentions. They experience different cultures by looking rather than tasting. Food is a fuel for them, a necessity. When they ask what we are doing in each area, they are confused as we highlight the map to each mini meal we aim to munch. The looky-loos often flock to art museums and archaic architecture as touchstones of a culture, yet these spaces are often saturated with the very tourist groups they pretend to not be a part of. I propose to the visual tourists, that there is just as much rich history in the food stalls, restaurants, and alleyway cafes.

Food culture is often generalized by region or nation, yet within each area there are complex micro-cultures. Just as we stereotype American foods, placing apple pie, hamburgers, and hotdogs at the top of the list, we also do the same for French food, assuming that everything is crepes, frog legs, and bread with every meal. Well, the last one is actually true — bread is a utensil in France. When we think about Spain, we assume that everything is paella, tapas, and jamon. Well, the last one is actually true, so many different preparations of pig. When we think about Portugal — well, we don’t really think about Portugal. Sorry, Portugal.

When we looked deeper to the micro-communities of these nations, we discovered that Provençal France was well known for its bounty of sun-ripened vegetables, Tunisian food (thanks to immigrants, well most of this food is thanks to immigrants), and chickpea-based baked goods. Spain, at a closer glance, had a rich variety of subcultures based on their climates and communities that had often been reduced to one global form. Our realization was that paella did not originally contain any seafood but rather snail, rabbit, duck, and sometimes chicken, as these were most readily available to the farmers that feasted on it. When giving Portugal a first look, we discovered their rich canning industry and art, producing the finest preserved fruits of the sea that rival any other preparation process (served on bread, of course). Delighted by the first bites of stuffed-vegetable farcis niçois in Nice, creamy ajo blanco in Barcelona, or a bifana Portuguese pork sandwich in Porto, the flavors stood strongly for the communities they represented — the locally sourced ingredients picked at peak ripeness, the back-aching all-day process, and the stories that came with them.

What I witnessed partway through the trip felt like an affront to those histories. In Barcelona, we walked by a chalkboard folding sign that had “Fingers de Pollo” (“chicken fingers”, for the uninitiated) scrawled on it. We veered around that bad tourist omen like a restroom user carefully creeps around a wet floor sign. I was alarmed by the fact that “fingers” was culturally untranslatable — as if future anthropologists, who might dig up this sign, will be in hot debate about what defines a food “finger”. Now don’t get me wrong, in my hungriest moments, I could eat whatever I am given in a situation. That being said, when traveling around the world, or even my neighborhoods for that matter, eating fingers is not a temptation.

When we sit down to dine, we find the art and the architecture on the plate. It’s all carefully constructed, full of artistic intention and a symphony of flavors. At our munchable museums, all the artifacts are edible but, unlike at Wonka’s wonderland, they won’t change your size, color, or shape. Well, maybe size and shape, if not for the pedestrian lifestyle enabling our penchant for patisseries. I hope that visual tourists will see what we see, and use their dining spaces, not only as a shady spot to rehydrate and go through the photos of the day, but also a chance to appreciate the art and the artists, as they bring food to your table. Who knows, maybe they will sign your dish with their signature sauce.

Photo by Chris King on Unsplash