I spend a lot of time thinking about food. Eating, cooking, buying, finding, it’s all about food. When I get distracted during meditation, I usually find myself planning a meal or thinking of a recipe.
I travel for food. I will schlep to the other side of town to find an ingredient I need. I only buy specific ingredients from specific shops. I’m not a foodie, I’m a snob.
When I moved to the UK a relative I met at some family celebration asked all concerned: “can you find good food in London?”. Apparently they had visited years earlier and ended up eating some horrible Italian food in the wrong hotel.
Needless to say, London might be one of the best places on the planet to eat well: any kind of food from any corner of the planet is available in London. Maybe not cheap, but available.
But there are some small differences between here and back home that still baffle me.
For example, in any Italian supermarket there’s a wide range of frozen soups. Mixed vegetables for any type of minestrone you can think, just add water, boil a bit, and you are done. You can get them with beans, with mushrooms, with chestnuts, with barley… you name it. But here? Nothing. No such thing as frozen soups that I could find.
But here I can find frozen puff pastry made with butter. No such thing exist in Italy: they always replace butter with some horrid vegetable oil I don’t even want to consider (snob, remember?).
Or even something as simple as fresh herbs, which are available in every single supermarket here (probably imported from warmer climates) is a rarity in Italy. I remember trying unsuccessfully to find some fresh mint a couple of Christmases ago, and not finding it. And don’t even get me started with fresh coriander… no way to find it in Italy (but I did find it a couple of times hopping to the other side of the border in Slovenia).
Buon appetito.
