Food – Hell and Heaven

Speaking with my colleagues today, I thought I should write about my experience with food in various places that I travelled to.

It was my first international trip, to France. Saw no vegetarian food there and survived on French fries and bread. But my Indian colleagues, who travelled with me, though they were non-vegetarians, could enjoy the food there. The primary food was meat, be it starter or main course and it was cooked such that it was so close to raw meat.

One day, having nothing to eat on my plate, I asked my colleague, “Sir, what is that you are eating ?”

He proudly replied, “ This is bread and this is a sauce made out of a liquid that is present inside the spinal cord of a cow”. Yuck !!!

And there was a moment when I was totally startled, when the waiter brought in a huge plate, a very big sized raw crab. My French colleagues shared the legs of the crab one each and enjoyed eating its body.

Another day, I saw them having a snail, by scrapping it off from the shell and dumping it into their mouth. This was just the beginning of my developing tolerance to see someone eating raw meat.

My next trip was to Egypt, for a longer duration. So I prepared myself for the survival, took stove, cooker, ingredients to cook rice, noodles etc., Converse to my opinion, Egypt had some food to offer to me. Though their main course was meat, they had options of vegetarian starters and pasta, noodles or rice for the main course. The style of cooking was similar to Indian, since Egypt carries a cooking trend from middle east.

Egyptians were not like other people, who could eat anything and everything. Their meal also constituted fruits, cool drink, pastry. It was quite easy to survive there.

My next two trips were to China, the 2 significant cities, Beijing and Shanghai. There was a total illusion in India about Chinese food, by which I got fooled. In India, there are Chinese restaurants, where they showed us fried rice and noodles as Chinese food. Totally misled by this, I went empty handed to china without any backup food.

The worst place where a vegetarian could not survive is china. The country gave me only Water melon to survive. I was taken to a Chinese restaurant on the day I landed. There came a big fish, just in its original shape, not to be guessed if it is alive or dead, with its mouth open and eyes wide open. It was frightening just to see it, leave alone to cut and eat it.

Then I happened to go to restaurant called Beijing duck. As the name says, they had only ducks and they had the custom of removing its skin and cooking it in front of the customers. It was so annoying to watch the ducks that were killed in front of me and eaten by those heartless people.

Another day my Chinese friend explained me how a prawn that he was eating was cooked. The prawns are dipped in a pot with some kind of alcohol and left in there for 5 mins. Then the prawn dies in the alcohol and the pot is served with that alcohol and dead prawns in it. Wow !! J How could people eat it, knowing that the alcohol has killed the prawn and they are going to have the same.

There is another interesting experience that I had in china. I somehow managed to explain and make a waiter at a restaurant understand that I am a vegetarian and I need some vegetarian food to eat. I was eagerly waiting for him to bring me something edible, since I was starving for a week already. There he came, with a plate of leaves soaked in some syrup. And it was smelling so badly that I could not even get it near my mouth. When we say that we are vegetarian, they think that we are herbivorous. Just leaves!!

And they were so surprised to see me not even wanting to eat the leaves. So they asked me, “You said you are vegetarian, and you got the leaves. But you didn’t eat that. So what exactly do you eat?”

How could I explained them about rice, chapathi, sambar, rasam, poriyal, biryani and so on.. I longed for a simple rasam then, which I always complained to my mom that it is tasteless.

U.S, the land of dreams was my next destination. I heard people in US eat only pizzas and burgers and it was an illusion as well. They were equally good meat eaters like any other European or Chinese, but cooked to some extent.

I could not eat anything for first 3 days when I was there. Though there was a vegetarian option in the menu, I could not eat it since the way it was cooked was not how I would eat. When I am in a new environment, I am very bad at adapting to new food, and very much afraid to try new types of food. I always stick to something I know what it is and something I have eaten before. But later found from an Indian friend that I can have the privilege of customized food cooked for me. The chefs there were very helpful and they cooked roti, rice and channa masala in 5 minutes for me. How lucky I should be, to get this menu in US.

The best part was, when I returned back from US, I go to my home from the airport, hungry to the core, starving and longing for good food. And my husband is there, waiting for me, with hot rice, milagu rasam and appalam. It was heaven that I saw in front of me J.