It’s resolution season, folks! Time to get out your Moleskine and make lists of all the things you swear you won’t do in 2013…or, well, at least not before February 10.
When it comes to food-related resolutions, the possibilities are endless. I resolve to cook complicated things! I resolve to participate in Meatless Monday! I resolve to only eat bacon six days a week instead of seven!
I had a moment where I was going to make some food-related resolutions, and maybe some garden ones, too (more on that in a future post…’cause I’m a tease like that…), but then I realized that was the only moment I had available to me, so I’m just rolling with the year.
But if I were making resolutions, they would include something along the lines of this one: Eat something scary.
I know this sort of thing is not for everyone. I understand that many people are unwilling to walk up to a random street vendor in any part of the world and point at something that very well might contain a sheep’s eye and then shell out incomprehensible money for it. That’s OK. But I’d posit those people are missing out.
I still crave the questionable chicken tacos (griddled corn tortillas and chopped who-knows-what-part-of-the-chicken in some kind of hotter-than-hell salsa) I bought in Belize City from an as-clean-as-it-was-going-to-get roadside vendor for $.10/taco. I still would cut someone for just one skewer of beef suya sold from stands outside the Ikoyi Club in Lagos.
Granted, on the scale of scary, those don’t even rank at the tiny spider level. I mean, seriously, the biggest thing I had to worry about in those cases was the lack of U.S.-style food safety regulations (And honestly, U.S. readers, have you looked at your local health department reports lately? Because I bet you’ve eaten somewhere alongside roaches, whether you knew it or not…).
But they were delicious. And if I had gotten sick, it would have been worth every minute of, um, discomfort. Besides, that’s why they make Immodium (don’t leave home without it).
If you really can’t get your stomach around the truly scary, just try something new to you. Pick up that Asian pear in the store that you’ve always eyed but rejected—the fact that it’s wearing a funny little crocheted sweater just makes it all that much more delicious. Try fresh lychee rather than the canned kind. Braise some beef tongue (
At worst, you won’t like what you try, and because most of us get to choose what goes in our mouths, you won’t have to eat it again. But at best, you’ll discover something new about the food around you, your palate, and, if you’re in a far-away spot, the world at large. And that’s worth that little bit of resolve as we fork into the first bite.
Check out these other food resolution posts, and share your resolutions (or links to where you’ve written about them) in the comments below!
- A Handful of Food, Wine and Spirits Resolutions for 2013 from New York Cork Report
- 6 Fabulous Food Resolutions for 2013 from Big Girls Small Kitchen
- My 2013 Food Resolutions from Green and Ginger
- Eat This List: Food Resolutions for 2013 from Eatocracy, which I include not because they need the traffic, but because I harbor a (now-not-so-)secret irritation with Pinterest, as, apparently, do they.
