We’re currently ending the University of Sussex leg of the trip: Kat’s conference. She should probably be writing about that since it’s her party, but since I’m the one with my feet up all day in a residence room, I have more time to actually do it.
I’m actually enjoying what feels like a vacation from the vacation. I walked around Brighton and the university. Read a bunch. Surfed the web. Good stuff.
But as I near in on my third day at the university, I’m starting to feel like a hunter-gatherer: most of my time is being spent trying to ensure an adequate food supply.
I was prepared to come to England and learn that everything I had heard about British food was exaggerated. I really was.
But, the food options available to me (here and London) seem to fall roughly into three categories: (1) pub food, (2) pre-wrapped sandwiches, and (3) restaurants that are too expensive for an average meal. There is also a minor fourth category: (4) food from elsewhere on the planet, adapted to British tastes.
(1) The pub food is good, for what it is: unseasoned meat and starch. For example, pies (meat filling and crust) and fish and chips (right there in the name). I’ll also throw into this category the full breakfast and while there is a certain awesomeness to it, it’s still fundamentally meat and starch. This can only sustain one for so long: barely a vegetable to be seen.
(2) Douglas Adams was certainly exaggerating somewhat, but this quote rings true:
There is a feeling which persists in England that making a sandwich interesting, attractive, or in any way pleasant to eat is something sinful that only foreigners do.
‘Make ’em dry,’ is the instruction buried somewhere in the collective national consciousness, ‘make ’em rubbery. If you have to keep the buggers fresh, do it by washing ’em once a week.’
Marks and Spencer seem to have been able to step cautiously away from this advice, but one store can only stray so far outside the norm.
(3) We did have a very nice meal in London at a place that was a little too expensive to go to regularly. Oddly, it was still full of men standing around, drinking beer, but not eating.
(4) In an effort to break into option 4, I just bought a “mexican bean wrap”. Much to my dismay, it was actually a cleverly-disguised option 2 sandwich. It was a pita (!) containing about a tablespoon of bean-like substance (with the volume of the thing being made up by pita, not filling). The pita was stale enough that the term “steel reinforced” came to mind.
Really, Marks and Spencer has been keeping me alive. A few days ago, Kat and I got a couple of cornish pasties (pub-style meat + dough) and some prepared food from M&S to round out a meal. I took one bite of some pasta salad and realized that the parsley on it was both green and uncooked. I was so happy to have a vegetable (small though it was) that I turned to Kat and said words to the effect of “this is mine and you can’t have any!” I did eventually share.
September 7th, 2010 at 2:11 pm
Funnily enough though, the vegetable-starved Greg did not purchase a salad to eat from Marks and Spencer, but pasta with a little bit of parsley on it! We did get fruit though – to ward away the scurvy! 🙂
Oh, and for all that want to know, the conference went well. My talk went okay. It was the only data-type talk in the bunch, and it was to a bunch of plant researchers, but it was received well, so I can’t really ask for anything more!