Part Three: I Eat Some Stuff

All right, confession time: before I got over here, one of my biggest concerns of being several thousand miles away from home was not culture shock, classes, homesickness, or deportation: it was the food.  England has a universal reputation for having bad food.  Not just bad food, but terrifying food, the stuff of legend, the stuff that Stephen King would write about if he were making a cookbook.  Or something.

People offered to send me provisions.  My grandparents, in particular, declared that they were in the process of locating packets of peanut butter to send to me.  To which I thought:

1.  I don't even like peanut butter. 
2. What kind of a place is this that I need to take dry provisions?
3.  Why does peanut butter come in packets?

I don't understand.

Horror stories abounded.  By the time I stepped on the plane, I was left with the vague idea that I would be stuck at a pub every night getting a biology lesson via the fish and chips, or making a lot of instant pasta.  And the first week, I did cook for myself, convinced that I was fending for myself in a hostile environment.  I marvelled in passing what kinds of things I saw in the aisles of Sainsburies.

However, although I did spend an inapropriate amount of time in the confit aisle trying to figure out what was happening, I obviously did not go on eating pasta and chicken and potatoes every single night, or else I wouldn't have chosen to write about it--I would have chosen something else, like how it's hard not to smile when you're riding the top level of a double-decker bus or that the squirrels here don't have rabies and you can hand-feed them. 

I have to credit my bosses and coworkers for finally breaking me out of my food phobia.  Not only does the entire company (all four of us) go downstairs for coffee at an Italian bar every day, but the youngest employee after me, who is 26, is something of a food guru.  Or so he claims.

On the third day on the job, we had this conversation:

I haven't drawn a non-caffeinated breath since.  Then, we tried a Vietnamese restaurant.  From then on, I was hooked.  Since then, we've done Korean, Greek, Indian, and Italian (which the boss maintains is hard to come by "authentic"--he's from Italy, so I guess he would know). 

And oh, how the tables have turned. It feels like everything I try here is the best meal I've had, ever. I've been to a restarant that has "press for champagne" buttons on the wall. I've had a scone that made me feel like every pastry before that one was a crime of existence and calories.  The bacon here is so good that it makes me fall to the floor weeping.  I've tried buffalo mozarella, goat cheese, chili pepper fudge, banana bread beer, strawberry beer, crumpets, an absurd amount of tea. 

Last Saturday, we got several kinds of fruit I had never seen or heard of and we made a game out of trying them in succession before looking up how to actually eat them.  Fact: most things that appear to have an inedible outside, actually have an inedible outside.  Also, if it looks like a pit, it's a pit.  Not a tiny bonus fruit inside of the first one.

Of course, this doesn't change a thing about my picky eater status--if anything, it's just a testament to how much is delicious here if even I can find things to eat.  For everything I've fallen in love with, there's also something that I still can't bring myself to touch with a ten-foot pole.  For example, the Harrods meat room (yes, it has one, although I'm sure it has a nicer name than Harrods Meat Room) has every meat imaginable, from veal to venison, and also several which I cannot pronounce and appear to be from a Dr. Seuss book.

 As far as cat, I'm not a fan.  I do not like it, Sam I Am.



Hopefully though, as my time here continues, I'll get a little bit more adventurous with my food choices.  For now, I may not need peanut butter packets, but I'm satisfied taking my crumpets with preserves. Hold the duck compote.