You aren't what you eat

Trust Me, I’Ve Been There

By Zoe Williams

NOBODY, not even the middle classes, can reach total agreement on holidays. Old-guard middle class, for instance, still think Greece is a middleclass option. Middle-aged middle-class fetch up in Tuscany. I wish I could tell you where the young ones go, but they won’t talk to me because I am too old.

However, the entire social bracket, and indeed, all other social brackets apart from two driving instructors from Sydenham, are agreed on one point: while on holiday, wherever you are, you must eat the local food. If you look for food from home, you will be ripped off, you will be considered common, ill-educated and lacking in imagination. You are also guilty of food imperialism – it is your fault, and yours alone, that a hitherto unspoilt beach now has a burger van at one end of it. You give us all a bad name abroad, you probably also look terrible in a bikini, and now the Greeks/Italians won’t ask any of us out. All that, and you only asked for an egg sandwich. It’s not like you asked for a full English.

Can I just point out some flaws in this orthodoxy? I have always – through some sense of duty instilled in childhood by a mother who thought “enjoying yourself” too mainstream an aim – eaten local produce. In Tallinn, I had a sausage so fat-filled that it actually squirted out like a filling when you bit into it. In Cape Town, I had a sausage filled with cheese, like fat only tastier but also hotter, so burnt my tongue and couldn’t eat again for five or six days.

On a French beach I was too English to order anything even remotely English, like a sandwich, and lived for a week on caramelised nuts. In Frankfurt I felt browbeaten by my quest for authenticity into Kaffee und Kuchen, when I really only wanted the Kaffee and could totally take or leave the Kuchen. In Switzerland, and indeed Denmark, and now I come to complaining about it, also Sweden, I feasted on totally tasteless cheese, because I didn’t want to offend anyone by checking to see if they had any other cheese, from any reputable cheesemaking countries.

In Lapland, I had reindeer marrow, and the only thing that reconciles me at all to the end of the ice caps is the idea that, one day, reindeer will no longer exist and nobody will accidentally eat one (I do not mean to be flippant. In every other respect, I deeply fear the end of the ice caps).

It’s over-rated – locals don’t notice you eating their local produce, because they are just thinking “soddinglich touristheiffer” (or whatever the Scandi is for “sodding tourist”). They don’t mind if you eschew it, because it just leaves more for them. They must like it, they invented it. Eat what you want, you uptight holidayer. Have a Pop-Tart.