Something I Ate

You are a stranger on the road, passing within sight of a dwelling. The people who live there invite you to come and share their meal. It doesn’t sound that remarkable. It might almost be Biblical. And in a way, it was – because this happened in the Land of the Bible. But it was modern Israel, and I, in my late teens, was the traveler – hitchhiking at that time in the north of the country, only five years after it had become a State. What made that meal particularly memorable for me was that my unexpected hosts were Bedouin Arabs, and at the time of its birth, this country had had to fight for survival against all the surrounding Arab countries, from which came armies of invaders.

But Israel still had a large Arab population (which indeed is proportionately even larger today) and the peace which prevailed was a very uneasy one, with “terrorist” incidents disturbingly frequent. But these people were inviting me to be a guest in their hillside tent, under the legendary Arab code of hospitality. So, since I was hungry anyway, I happily accepted, glad to have this new experience. Our communication had to be through the children, who had learned a little English in school. There was no furniture in the tent, so we were all sitting on cushions on the ground. Our simple repast was, of course, based on the type of Arab bread with which people today have become more familiar.

What I remember even more than the meal itself was that, when I was leaving, the children ran after me offering coins (which of course I didn’t accept); apparently another part of the hospitality code that I hadn’t heard about before.

Another meal that haunts my memory – for very different reasons – was partaken of as part of my professorship on board a “floating university” sailing around the world. We were visiting Japan, and I was a guest teacher at a High School English class there. It was winter, and quite cold, but there appeared to be no heating system in the school, yet all the classroom windows were open. I naturally was hoping for some opportunity to get warm. When lunch time finally came, I was taken to the “faculty lounge,” and they did indeed have some kind of wood or coal-burning stove in the center of the room. I was told that lunch was on the way, and of course what I longed for was a good hot meal. Maybe you can guess what it turned out to be. That’s right – the least appetizing to me that it could possibly be: COLD FISH. I had never been fond of “sushi,” but under those circumstances I found it absolutely revolting.

Of course, I had to avoid offending my hosts, so I made a pretense of eating, and even enjoying, what was served. But this was one of the most ghastly eating experiences of my life.

As the setting of one of my least likely, or most surprising, gastronomic memories, I would nominate Lhasa, the capital of Tibet. Within living memory, along with Timbuktu, Lhasa has long been considered a byword for strangeness, remoteness, and inaccessibility. None of these supposed features discouraged my wife Dorothy, however, who specialized in traveling to the hitherto virtually unknown. And sure enough, since the demise of “Red China,” it had indeed become much easier, purely for the purposes of tourism, to reach that fabled objective. I accompanied my spouse on this adventure, and I was quite prepared for all kinds of hardship, particularly in such matters as accommodation and eateries. I was therefore astonished to find that among the facilities now offered to Lhasa visitors was a purely western-style Holiday Inn, with its own cafeteria! 

But for an eating surprise in reverse, I offer you a delectable fruit I was delighted to discover on a first visit to Costa Rica. It had many large seeds buried in the pulp, but, once these were removed, what was left was extraordinarily juicy and flavorful. It was called a cherimoya, and when we came home to Sana Barbara I lost no time in announcing my discovery – only to find that what to me was something new and exciting was, in fact, well-known, and was actually grown and sold locally! The only way of dealing with my chagrin was to start growing cherimoyas, quite successfully, in my own garden.