I'm not much of a world traveler. Outside
of a dinner in Juarez and a week of giving speeches in Alberta, the
only other country I've been to is Australia. The only thing foreign to
me there was vegemite, a salty, bitter, wood putty-like substance they
slathered on everything they ate. It smelled like a pair of gym socks
that hadn't been washed in a month and tasted like what gets in your
mouth when you work cattle with your mouth wide open.
On the opposite side of the
world-traveling spectrum we have some friends who are always bragging
about how adventurous they are, as if Scotland is the New Frontier and
they are Davy Crockett or something. I've heard their story numerous
times about how they survived a week in Croatia, surviving on nothing
but food and water.
My friends are always off gallivanting
all over the world, trying to eat a bigger slice of life than us
homebodies. They have scrapbooks documenting how they had their stomachs
pumped on three continents. The cosmopolitan couple brag about having
eating zebra, fried cockroaches, lutefisk soaked in lye, boiled sheep
eyeballs and stewed pig intestines all while trying to make me feel
small because the most gutsy and dangerous foods I've ever consumed were
my mom's leftovers.
I have no desire to travel abroad or to
eat the food the natives do. No thank you. I'll stick to my good old
mononitrate, monosodium glutamates right here in the U.S. of A. I'm not
going anywhere, especially with all the terrorism going on around the
world.
But my friends shrug it off and say, "But
Lee you should have tasted the fried scorpions and grasshoppers we had
in Thailand, the stink bugs we ate in Africa, the tuna eyeballs, wasp
crackers and fried spiders in Japan, the witchery grubs in Australia,
the silkworms in Korea, the congealed blood in Europe, the birds-nest
soup in Vietnam and the deep-dish haggis in Scotland."
"That sounds like real throat ticklin'
grub all right. I've never met anyone who enjoyed bad food as much as
you two. But was any of that stuff any good?"
"Heck no," admitted my friend. "It was
the most god-awful stuff I've ever tasted. But those dishes paled in
comparison to how bad the camel hump and sweet and sour yak was."
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