Experience A Country Through Its Food

Experience A Country through its food. Hey everyone, I hope you are well. In today’s post, I will be sharing a guest post from Mark Bibby Jackson, a travel expert, journalist/publisher.  He is also the founder of TravelBeginsAt40. He will be sharing the exciting topic of experience a country through its food. I am very excited to share this post today because I love travelling and eating food from different cultures.

Experience A Country Through Its Food

When I reflect upon the moments when I feel I have started to understand different cultures, invariably, they revolve around food. My most memorable meal in Vietnam. Where I worked for two years, was a fish meal our team shared in a restaurant in Hanoi. When I say fish, I mean fish. One fish between the dozen or so of us, served over numerous courses, leaving nothing to waste – even the innards. This fish must have been related to Moby Dick.

I believe I understood more about my colleagues in that one meal than I did from weeks of working with them. I also realised how much we have in common. After all, some of my strongest childhood memories are going to my Nana’s house to have our Christmas lunch. The food might have been different – I don’t think my grandmother could have fed the whole family on a solitary cod. But the importance of food and the turkey ceremony being presented to all assembled before carving was an essential part of our family life.

Leave Your Comfort Zone

Eating like the locals do involve an element of risk. I soon realised the best way to avoid nasty surprises in Vietnam was to explain that I did not eat the insides of animals. Not that this always helped me as I discovered when I tucked it into a piece of pasta that turned out to be part of some animal’s stomach.

However, to really understand a culture and get to know the people better, you should be prepared to leave your culinary comfort zone. Whether it is eating fried spiders in Cambodia, snake blood in Vietnam or guinea pigs in Peru. You will begin to understand more about what makes your host community tick if you join in too.

Eat Local Food

Wherever I am, I always ask to eat and drink whatever is local. Putting aside the environmental benefits of ordering locally sourced food. Sampling what your host community eats provides you with an insight into their culture, environment and history.

Cambodians eat a lot of prahok or fermented fish. The pungent dish is not to everyone’s taste, but it makes you realise how the local people used to preserve food through the dry season when the waters of the Tonle Sap Lake in the middle of the country receded, and there were fewer fish to preserve. The Faroe Islands also traditionally fermented food to preserve it and smoke fish, as we have in the UK. You see, there are so many similarities despite the apparent differences.

Nepal is one of my favourite countries to visit. As soon as I touch the ground, I want to try some dal bhat. A simple thali dish consisting of rice, dal, vegetable curry, poppadum and pickle. It is cheap, voluminous and really nutritious. Waiters will willingly top you up all day if you like. I would eat it happily for lunch and dinner every day and did so often while trekking. In Kathmandu, they sell t-shirts announcing that dal bhat will give you power for 24 hours, which is good to keep in mind if attempting the Everest Base Camp.

Avoid Cookery Classes and Tourist Traps

Many tourists opt to go on cookery courses or cookery tours. Personally, I am rather sceptical of these, having gone on a few disappointing ones in the past. Essentially, they are designed for tourists, and as such, they can easily fall into the trap of providing travellers with what the host thinks they want. Not what the locals actually eat. However, I did once have a great time in El Salvador trying to prepare some pupasas, the natural dish made of flatbreads stuffed with a combination of cheese, pork and refried beans. My effort tasted great, despite not quite looking like my instructor’s prototype.

Thailand

On one of my recent trips to Thailand, a country I have visited for three decades. Including establishing a lifestyle magazine in Bangkok, I found myself in a tourist resort town surrounded by fellow travellers. Hard as I tried, I couldn’t find a local place to sit and try the local fish washed down with a bottle of Leo beer with ice. Eventually, I chose one touristy restaurant and sat next to a table of European tourists who asked for their food to be without heat.

Now asking for Thai food, which is based upon the principle of balancing spice with sugar to be “without heat”, is a bit like ordering fish without chips. You might like it, but it is not authentic. Hard as I tried to explain that I wanted Thai food like Thai people, my blond hair, blue eyes and paltry Thai betrayed me. So I settled down to an average meal, surrounded by a cacophony of approving ‘delicious’ from my neighbours.

You can hardly blame the locals for providing the food that they assume travellers prefer. However, it can result in people getting the wrong impression of a country’s food completely and their culture. Back in London, I have had chefs apologising for not serving proper Thai and Cambodian food, explaining that nobody would eat it if they had prepared it authentically.

Embrace Slow Food

As with all travel, there is no quick fix. If you want to have a cursory understanding of a country’s culture and food, you can go on a tour or a cookery class and emerge with a stage-managed understanding. However, to really start to understand how the country’s food has emerged, you have to spend some time with the local people visiting the local markets with them, preparing food with them and then dining together.

And the slower you do it, the better the understanding you will get of the local community hosting you, and the more enriching your experience will be.

Food, Like Cultures, Evolves

Cultures are constantly evolving, and to experience food as local populations currently eat it provides insight into the nature of this evolution. Some you might approve of, some you might not, but to get a better understanding of a country’s culture, you really should embrace its living cuisine in all that entails.

I hope you enjoyed that.

Talk soon

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Mark Bibby Jackson is passionate about travel and sharing the joys of visiting new places and people. He is the founder and group editor of Travel Begins at 40 and London Begins at 40 and the award-winning author of three thrillers set in Cambodia. He is the former editor of AsiaLIFE Cambodia, ASEAN Forum and Horizon Thailand magazines.

Web: https://www.travelbeginsat40.com/

https://www.markbibbyjackson.co.uk/

https://www.londonbeginsat40.com/

Twitter: @TravelBegins40

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LinkedIn:  https://www.linkedin.com/in/mark-bibby-jackson-aa541613/