A la Carte

“Well, where would you want to live?”

“I couldn’t live somewhere where the main food was pickled fish.”

What a weird thing to say.

My friend and I were talking about not living in the US for a time, which I enthusiastically said I needed to do. Of course, living “outside of the US” is a little too broad to be meaningful, so when pressed for details I gave as my parameters: no pickled fish. Hello? This is the best I could do? That’s not a first response to a question like “where do you want to live?” Maybe 37th, maybe even 15th given my love of food, but first? C’mon. What have I got against overly salted, preserved marine creatures that it would dictate where I live or don’t live? My gut level (pardon the pun) response tells me a lot about myself. Apparently I am so completely food obsessed, so mono-focused that I have become an unromantic, apolitical, apathetic, stagnant human being.

Were I romantic, I would have said Paris or Tahiti. Were I a less trite, predictable romantic I could have said the windswept outer Hebrides or the expansive Australian Outback. Were my urgings more geo-political, I could have said Egypt to learn Arabic and about Islam. I could have said somewhere where I could work to save an ecosystem, say the Miraflor Reserve in Nicaragua. I could have simply said I wanted to go where I could hone my French, perhaps Dakar or Lyon, or where I could really establish my Spanish, such as Montevideo or Barcelona.

But I said none of these.

My only criteria seemed to involve avoiding countries that love lutefisk and matjes herring (I guess I need to avoid Minnesota as well). How sad. My geographic food determinism shows that I have narrowed my criteria for life experience to the width of a strand of bucatini.

Or, perhaps not.

Maybe the pickled fish criteria, because it really leaves out only Scandinavia and Inuit lands, shows that I am open to living almost anywhere in the world. Maybe, my immediate, off-the-cuff answer wasn’t really about establishing geographic boundaries through food. (If it were, then where was the mention of nixing locales where the populace regularly dines on tree grubs, springbok anus, or raw seal blubber?) Truly, I want to live where I can learn new things about language, culture, politics-- both of the place I visit and the place I call home. And that’s just about anywhere.

Dang it: I am romantic, engaged, open. Just not about pickled fish.