Stage 6: Hungry
The whiff of challah bread or bite into roasted corn can transport you back to journeys you had long ago. Nothing like food can stir a deep hunger within us to trek thousands of miles to find the perfect spring roll.
It not only motivates our travels but helps us understand where we are and who we are with. Invisible lines portion Moroccan tagine dishes, slurping noodles loudly is a high complement in Japan, while Mexicans are unable to eat anything without salsa on it. When we sit down at someone else's kitchen, we aren’t just enjoying their food we are enjoying their perspective on how to nourish our bodies.
Food is an essential ingredient to having a rich experience abroad. It expands more than our waistlines. It expands how we understand each other and the cosmic soup we are all simmering in.
In this episode we discuss:
Why food is essential in traveling.
How to find the best food while traveling.
Why food is important to culture.
Why food is good for traveling.
How to set low expectations while traveling.
Where to find the best food while traveling.
How you can find good food anywhere in the world.
Why food is a medicine.
Why food unites us all.
How food helps you talk to locals.
How food helps you understand others better.
Food podcasts
Beer podcasts
Culinary podcasts
The Sporkful
Dan Pashman is an inquisitive eater. But he isn’t one to analyze the intricate process of making a perfect brioche, but more on why we eat it in the first place. Dan has noticed that there are particular human behaviors that spring up around food. We get more than protective and prideful, we get downright weird. And his award winning show podcast, the Sporkful, he talks to all types of people, from comics like Marc Maron to TV chefs like Jamie Oliver, to dissect their relationships with food. On our episode, Dan talks about food’s roll ( sorry role) as a traveler and a time he too got a little weird over a meal.
Master Chef
Jonathan Berg is a man who recognizes good food. Only because he had it screamed at him by Gordon Ramsay as he scrambled around the set Master Chef. His hard earned cooking badges awarded by cuts and burns has given him a skill to recognize true craftsmanship.
Which is why Japan was a complete delight. Jonathan found that at every eating experience- from 7/11 to three star, 24 course Michelin restaurants- he was able to find good cuisine everywhere. Which surprised him to no end. However, he learned more than how to properly eat sushi, he started to see that cooking was more than just good food, it reveals the collective psyche of a culture. He now has his own travel blog, The Royal Tour.
Nothing alleviates the stress of travel like rifling through your hotel room’s mini fridge and downing the local spirits. That is a ritual Chris Lueke practices every time he gets off the plane and decided to record his inebriated adventures. Chris’s podcast Pubcast World Wide, follows Chris’s exploration of beer and spirits as he travels the world. He knows that nothing pairs better with his local brews than unfiltered conversations with interesting locals. Chris holds the keys to bonding with others, because nothing coalesces connections faster than a cold one.
Now, the idea of being food and travel writers seems like a dream job, which is what Daryl and Mindi have crafted for themselves. They are the writers of 2 Food Trippers and threw away their 9-5 jobs and travel around the world hunting for the next great meal.
But because they follow the food trends for a living, they have experienced all of it, from the sour stomachs to the food highs. Together, we talk about how food has always made them feel at home, no matter what country they are in.
Cultura Nacional
Ubish Yaren, a trained chef and host of Cultura National, has always wanted to be in the kitchen. His mother was unfortunately a terrible cook, so he crawled up on the counter early in life. And he is lucky to live in one of the countries with the most complex cuisines: Mexico.
Mexican cuisine is fascinating. Locals have taken mold grown on corn and turned it into a taco. They can have made grasshoppers a crunchy protein packed snack, and know that sweat and skin cells are the secret ingredient to perfect handmade tortillas.
It is possibly one of the most resourceful cuisine cultures and has found ways to make anything edible delicious ( just drown it in salsa, right?). And although they have modern tools today, locals are still extremely old school.
My fascination with traditional Mexican practices led Ubish and I down a strange path one night. Listen to us hunt down a roving street vendor with no clues of his location other than the screeching of his mobile oven.
If you want to know more about Ubish and have the best meals of your life in Mexico City, you can book tours with him on his website, and you can check him out in the Taco Chronicles on Netflix as well. You can also listen to our podcast episode on his show here!
Strangers Abroad is a travel podcast hosted by solo female traveler and storyteller, Adrien Behn. Strangers Abroad is ‘ This American Life’ for travel. Each show we bring you a theme and multiple perspectives on that theme. Each theme is a stage we experience when we travel and dissect it from every angle to make our listeners travel richer.