It’s
officially fall in Galway—as evidenced by the crunchy leaves, the lab being on
a horrible hot/cold/hot/cold cycle as the radiator gets too excited and you
crack open a window only to let in a torrent of cold, rain, and sadness, and
the fact that as I write this in my room, I keep making typos because my
fingers are so cold. (Sleeping in a blanket burrito and a wool hat is actually
kind of nice, though—up until you have to roll out of bed in the morning.)
A couple
of weeks ago I wrote about getting sick—the first common fear that people
talked about at my Dialogue orientation session. The second fear was food.
Specifically, these worries came from people who were traveling with food
restrictions, everything from not eating meat to gluten intolerance to
life-threatening allergies.
I’ve
wondered if I subconsciously chose Ireland just for the food. I’ve been
vegetarian since I was eight, which makes a few regions pretty implausible; my
face swells up about 20% of the times I eat tomato sauce (I still haven’t
figured this one out), so the Mediterranean area seems ill-advised; and I’ve
always been interested in the Middle East, but the slightest trace of chickpeas
sends my body into apocalypse mode, and spending a semester in the Middle East
avoiding hummus and falafel just seems unrealistic. Ireland, on the other hand,
heavily features potatoes, carrots, and cows. This is good. Root vegetables and
dairy, I can work with.
I actually
know several people who’ve come to Ireland with multiple food allergies and
survived. When people think about eating in a foreign country, I think what
comes to mind is food carts and restaurants—when the reality is that if you’re
staying for an extended period of time, you’ll be spending less time ordering
off a menu where you can’t pronounce anything and more time wandering the
aisles of the grocery store, trying to find the flour and figure out whether
green vegetables exist. (Spoiler alert: they don’t. Ireland is an island filled
with sheep. There is no room to grow lettuce here.) My diet here is pretty much
the same as it is in Boston. It’s called muesli and not granola; I eat less
fruit because it’s crazy expensive (see: this isle is full of sheep—shoutout to
anyone who gets the literary reference); I eat carrots every day instead of
broccoli every day, because they cost next to nothing. But on an extended trip
like study-abroad or co-op, you have a lot of control over what you eat. The
only thing I can’t accept here is the baked beans. They come canned in tomato sauce. What is that?
You also
have the option of finding at least one thing you can eat that’s easily
available where you are, and eating exclusively that—functional, if not ideal. During
the week we lived in a hostel on my Dialogue before moving into our dorm
apartments, we ate most of our meals at restaurants, and I pretty much ate potatoes,
bread, and soup three times a day. (If you’re looking to crash-diet, this would
be an awesome approach, because I lost five pounds that week; otherwise, you
might want to diversify.)
tl;dr (I
don’t blame you—I really never shut up)? If you’re letting concerns about food
hold you back from going abroad, don’t.
Except for
the baked beans. I will never understand the baked beans.
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