Organic food counter at Marcat de la Boqueria - Barcelona, Spain

Sunday, July 6: It’s 4:08 am from what I can read on the DVD player’s digital clock display across my bedroom out of a squinted eyeball. Being awake right now must be a product of jet-lag, because after nearly 24 hours of trains, planes, and automobiles yet retiring for the night just 4 hours ago, I shouldn’t even be conscious. And I am not going back to sleep.

Like a Viewmaster on rapid slide-show mode, thousands of images from my trip around the Med over the past 3 weeks flicker frenzily behind my eyelids. My mind and spirit being is not yet home. I’m still abroad, feeding the ducks while fused in my cafe chair in Portofino, or getting excited for the evening’s tapas and pica-pica in Barcelona. And I don’t really want to be back home. Between each image frame, my brain is also trying to figure out how to hold on to it all, how to hold all I’ve learned and loved close to me and apply it back to the home base here in Orlando. I shouldn’t be surprised. I make no bones about my certain loathing of Orlando, especially within the restaurant and food supply departments. So this phenomenon tends to occur after every significant, longer term trip, especially if it involves Europe. However, this time it seems to be a little more potent, a bit more significant.

There is some slight conflict. Let’s call it a mid-life gastro-crisis. Although, a crisis it should not be, because according to the places I came from, the answers seem so simple. Most tellingly, my body also was submissively and instinctively in agreement. There was no reason at all for me to worry when I was without a magic bullet or dried seaweed or raw nuts, lost in my checked luggage for nine days. It quickly occurred to me that these were items that, perhaps, I had become a little too unnecessarily dependent upon. The mind has some very tricky ways of playing “psyche!” on you, especially when you’ve become accustomed to control freakish measures to protect your own health.

Unlike America, a very nouveau nation of very new traditions, Europe is deeply rooted in thousands of years of history, lifestyle, and customs. This of course, includes the rituals of diet, dining, fresh and local foods, socializing, enjoying life, all of which are synonymous. Food and drink and the philosophies by which it is consumed result in a means to truly savour it all and be healthy. This is European lifestyle (not to mention same for many other cultures), particularly when you’re talking France, Spain, and Italy - notoriously gastronomic kingdoms.

The United States, by contrast, has her own very lovely traditions in food and its importance in social and familial bonding that were born long before fast food chains, factory farms, and manufactured food. It is a downright tragedy to sit front row witnessing the retardation of this nation’s quality of life and food and inadvertently, our health. I was blessed to have been born to a family that well understood the joys and importance of home cooking, family meals, and culinary tradition as we had our own, and there’s no doubt that these instillations are largely responsible for my fond obsession with gastronomy and foodie-ism today.

Growing up both on the west and southeast coasts of Florida, I learned to bait a hook practically as soon as I learned to walk, thanks to my father. At the ripe ol’ age of three, I remember him bringing home coolers of fresh oysters that he and his friends had just collected from Tampa Bay, and I would eat them as fast as they could shuck ‘em into my mouth, gaped open like a little bird. My parents always had dinner parties, always with the best food and ingredients and company. I loved being in the kitchen in the middle of it all coming together. The cooking phase was just as important of a social event as the sit down part.

My grandparents on my father’s side, Me-ma and Pe-pa, had deep southern roots (my Grandmother had an uncanny resemblance to Paula Deen) and again, the practice of dining was not just sitting down to eat, it was an event. This is still the case when I have visits with Dad. My Pe-pa, a World War II vet, had a gig as a chef at a popular spot on MacDill Air Force Base where servicemen would congregate for home cooked meals and a cold beer in the evenings. And when he’d come home from his day shifts just in time for dinner, he’d put on his tall white chef’s hat just for me. I thought it was the neatest thing. I miss Me-ma and Pe-pa. They were like my surrogate parents and they taught me so much.

This kind of reflecting seems to always happen more intensely as you lie awake in the night, the room dark and still. Such a rapid trip of memories, questions, projections….analyzations! My mind is a flood. But I love it. I feel like I’ve been fed a great big exciting spoon of life candy and I’m slowly chewing, savouring all kinds of flavors and sensations. At the end of every trip and every travel, something in me changes. And I always want more. It’s insatiable. Traveling is food. Food for my soul. . .and I can never predict exactly what it will taste like. But most of the time it’s the best thing I’ve ever tried and always gets better.

<3, JMK

Filed under: Travel & Galavanting