Growing up, all I ever wanted to do was get OUT of where I was. I hated small town, country life, and I still do. I had always thought my love of travel and food started with want, or a lack of something. Digging deeper as I age, I discovered I was only partially right.
As I think back, I can trace my love of both food and travel back to a single classroom. Sixth grade, Mrs. Zant’s class. Mrs. Zant had traveled everywhere I had ever wanted to go and I thought she was the MOST glamorous teacher EVER. She used geography to mold her curriculum. We made passports which were stamped when we completed all of the assignments for each country. In that classroom, I never dreamt I would ever have a passport or get to go to any of those places. How delightfully wrong I was!
I don’t remember specific lessons. What I remember is the way she made the world feel edible. A country wasn’t just a shape on a map or a list of exports to memorize. It was a market smell, a spice, a dish with a story behind it. When Mrs. Zant was talking about a place, the room suddenly smelled like somewhere else entirely, at least in my imagination. She had a way of describing the world that made geography feel less like homework and more like an invitation. I think that’s the real gift good teachers give you, not information, but appetite. In my case, literally.
That has stuck with me. Food and travel have never felt like two separate interests to me – they’re the same interest, just approached from different directions.
Why Food and Travel Are the Same Journey
Listen to people describe their most recent trip. They don’t lead with the museums or the hotel sheets’ thread count. They tell you about the cool restaurants they found. “We tried Bangladeshi food for the first time in Brick Lane.” “What the Egyptians don’t know about bread, I don’t need to know!” Food is how we share our travels, because it’s often the most vivid, memorable, and sensory part of the trip.
A photo can show you what a place looks like. A description can tell you what it’s like to walk through it. Food is the one part of travel that gets to live inside you, quite literally. You try a new dish, and something about that experience roots itself differently than sightseeing does. Maybe it’s because taste is tied to memory in general. I can still taste the fesikh I ate at the souk in Aswan. It’s what I call “food memories” – the way a single bite can transport you back to a specific table, afternoon, or event.
Eating Like a Local vs. Eating Like a Tourist
Anyone who travels seriously develops opinions about this quickly. The tourist-trap joint near the famous landmark, a laminated menu in six languages and the host out front, like a carnival barker begging you to enter. Fuck that! The best experiences happen down a side street, at outdoor markets surrounded by locals, the family-run spot that’s been making the same three dishes forever and sees no reason to add another.
That’s not snobbery, it’s just fact. A restaurant that needs to impress tourists once, versus one that needs to impress the same neighborhood every single day, are playing different games. The neighborhood spot wins on flavor almost every time, because they are in the business of getting it right. Don’t get me wrong, there is nothing wrong with sitting at a tourist trap so you can have the perfect view of the Eiffel Tower or the Colosseum in Rome, but do get off the beaten path!
Seeking out local restaurants often takes you places you wouldn’t have gone otherwise. It pulls you off the tourist strip, into neighborhoods and side streets, where people want to explain their menu because they’re proud of it. Food has been responsible for some of the best Happy Accidents of my trips. Following a smell down an alley, asking a stranger where they’d go for lunch, ending up somewhere far more memorable than whatever I’d originally planned.
The Souvenir You Can’t Pack
The thing about material souvenirs is most of them end up in a drawer. Food memories turn a single trip into an ongoing relationship. You don’t visit once; you visit every time you recreate that meal at home.
When we travel, either domestically or internationally, we eat local and support local. For me that’s the deepest connection between food and travel – both expand my world view. Great travel experiences make me feel more connected to the world, making me want MORE. A good meal from somewhere new does the same thing. Both are exercises in curiosity. Choosing to try something you haven’t experienced before and trusting that unfamiliar can be wonderful instead of just uncomfortable. Getting uncomfortable is part of the adventure.
Passing Travel On
I think about Mrs. Zant sometimes when I’m standing in a market somewhere far from home, or trying to describe a dish to a friend. I’m sure she has no idea the impact she had. Teachers rarely get to see how far their lessons travel, but in a sixth-grade classroom, she planted a seed that turned into a lifelong pursuit of chasing both new places and new flavors, and treating the two as inseparable. Now, I work as a travel agent (yes, we still exist) and help people find their own food memories.
If you’re lucky, you had a Mrs. Zant – someone who made the world feel worth exploring, one way or another. If you’re really lucky, that curiosity is still with you, still sending you down unfamiliar streets in search of your next favorite bite.
