I Wouldn’t Know What to Do With the Banana Either
A hilarious story came out earlier this week, Matt Pearce, a writer for the Los Angeles Times tweeted about his first Somali meal and the banana that was served as an appetizer.
Staring down an extremely formidable dinner in Little Mogadishu. pic.twitter.com/30pyOt3A7g
— Matt Pearce (@mattdpearce) May 12, 2016
@BrentNYT a huge thing of lamb and basmati rice. the banana was brought as an appetizer
— Matt Pearce (@mattdpearce) May 12, 2016
Twitter turned out in force to school him about the banana’s purpose and Matt subsequently described himself as a “food idiot.”
Let me be clear about something upfront: Unlike my acclaimed colleague Jonathan Gold, our resident food critic, who meticulously researches cuisines before writing about them, I am a food idiot.
I am too! I’m usually up to try almost any cuisine but, good or bad, I don’t research it in advance. I probably should, Â I don’t. I typically don’t start the day thinking, today is the day I’ll try X, but when the opportunity presents itself, I go with it.
Kind of like trying Bangladeshi, where apparently I should have known ordering goat usually involves lots of little bone fragments.
Or when I didn’t know how to eat the chicken in the whole-chicken ginseng soup I’d ordered in Korean First.
It leads to embarrassment, though fortunately not to Matt’s scale, but also great new experiences. The flight attendants took pity on me and tried to help instruct me on how to eat it, in between laughs.
What’s your most hilarious new food moment?
Pray tell, how should you eat the whole chicken?
Apparently I should have peeled off strips and dipped them in the salt and pepper. Or just focused entirely on the broth. That’s what I love about travel — learn something new every day, even if I look like a fool sometimes. 🙂