Week #14 Food
By coming to the US I was prepared to face the worst.
Eating habits People in general not only eat junk food, but they do not have close to healhy attitude for food.
People drink a loots of coffee here. Long lines in the Starbucks waiting for their 0,5 liter iced (!) coffee (!) with various sugary spice sirops (!). Each of which by itself considered unhealthy. But the combination in huge amounts and always always?!?! When you are in the US do as americans do. So did I increase my coffee consumption during our stay in the US. However usually I went for espresso. Sometimetimes the barista was looking at me surprised and with and embarassed looked explained to me that the espresso will be a very tiny little thing. Well, not always. Many times I asked for an espresso and I got a small cup full of dense coffee usually containing 2 or 3 espresso shots.
As well as they eat tons of ice-cream
Somehow it is part of the culture. The supermarkets has a huge compartment where long queus of fridges selling only ice cream.
Unfortunately this habit I also took over and ate far more ice cream than what I would have otherwise.
Oh and those mochi-s!
Or what about coce with ice cream?
Water with ice is the thing, always and everywhere. The colder the better! In the restaurants people looked at me weird when I asked my complimentary water without ice. I did not even dare to ask for warm water…
Restaurants
We have tried to avoid eating out as much as possible. Partly because we have found very few restaurants where the athmosphere was nice. Somehow they seem not to care too much about it. What we like though was that food always always arrived very quick.
I also had some nice experience for expample the jackfruit wrap in Portland or the black pizza in Santa Barbara.
Office food
Another reason of avoiding restaurants was that Facebook not only provided breakfast-lunch and dinner to employees, but also to their visitors.
We tried not to abuse this too much so usually I have joined Moritz for dinner two times a week. The office food was surprisingly good with plenty of vegan/vegetarian options.
It was like our little celebration to meet in the office for dinners. Yummy.
MOD’s pizza
We might not forget to mention our after hike party place: MOD pizza. This is a live order and prepare pizza place. All (order pay eat) in done in 25 minutes. Perfect place to drop in while you are almost starving.
Supermarkets:
You are not forced to buy junk food at the low cost supermarkets. Initially I was devastated by the vast amount of processed food, meat and ice cream the supermarkets are selling.
On the first day I have already found The Whole Foods Market. They are an “organic” supermarket chain.
They sell rather wide selection of fruits and vegetable, although they still have hardly any taste
at least some of them is organically grown. The chain is a bit tricky though as of about 35% of their choices are not organic.
My kitchen
I came to love the american type kitchen: huge fridge and the sink pig, woah these people know how to do it!
Mountaineering We spent quite some time in the wild. We had to be creative as I did not really like what people usually do: buy freeze dried meals. They are both expensive and full of stuff you do not really want to eat.
I got a Thermos for Moritz too and when we went hiking I tried to pack as much home made stuff as I could. We have also discovered that the fine dry durum pasta or rice noodles cooks well in the thermos. So pasta with pesto became to be our best seller.
“Overall my conclusion is that you do not need to eat the junk if you do not want to.” In fact the eating habits (or at least parths of it) as well as keeping my dietary needs turned out to be rather easy in this counrty.
