Where to Eat in Dodgy Places: Advice from a Real World Traveller
Joel Putnam is a world traveller in his early 20's. He recently reached Africa, his seventh continent in his travels around the world. As is typical of his generation (he is, in the interests of full disclosure, a friend of my son), he is blogging about it. His blog is very well-written, and the captions on his photographs are always witty and often downright hilarious.
Joel has apparently been reflecting more broadly on his experiences, and he penned an entry entitled "Travel Tip: Street Food Primer" that includes some excellent advice on how to select a place to eat anywhere in the world.
Here are some excerpts:
- Lesson number one: In the developing world, street food is often safer than restaurant food. Yes, you read that correctly. Street food. The food that has made me the most sick while traveling has almost all come from restaurants. The reason why, is that with street food, you see it get cooked right in front of you, and you see who is cooking it. In restaurants, you see neither.
This is an important insight, although as readers of this blog know, you can get sick at the most sanitary of street stalls, or in the best restaurant on earth.
- Lesson number two: usually, if the tap water isn't safe, neither is the ice. This is seems obvious when written, but it's one a lot of of people forget in practice. There are a few countries, mostly in Asia, where ice is actually factory made from safe water. But please take the extra step and check that that's the kind of ice floating in your drink.
- Lesson number three: what's safe for the locals isn't necessarily safe for you, yet. . . . We all have little local beneficial bacteria running around our digestive tracts that helps us handle the local food. This differs from place to place. So take it easy for the first few days in a new place to develop your own. Legend has it local yogurt helps with this (though beware, yogurt that hasn't been refrigerated properly or that has expired is a fast way to making you sick). After you've been eating tame food (like vegetarian dishes) in a place for a bit, then try moving on to the more interesting stuff.
- Lesson number four (this one is important): if the place is crowded, the food is probably good, and it's almost definitely being cooked fresh. This is an excellent way to pick street food vendors and restaurants. We'll call it the sheep method. The reason is that deserted restaurants and vendors are much more likely to leave things like meat lying around in temperatures that let nasty things start growing in it. Then when you order it, it'll get quickly reheated and served. Popular vendors, on the other hand, are having to constantly cook fresh batches to meet demand. And if it's in that much demand from the locals, it's probably because the food is especially good.
From the introduction to his blog entry, I might add a lesson number five: avoid hubris. He recounts the tale where he bragged to some fellow travellers that he had eaten so many different things in China that he should have no trouble in Mongolia. The natural result of that was that he had 12 hours of indigestion from his first Mongolian street food. But fortune follows the brave, since one of those fellow travellers from Wales was a doctor.
Joel's common sense advice can be used anywhere. We all have internal sensors that tell us when it's good to eat or drink something--our eyes, our noses, our taste buds, our ears. This is good supplementary information for how to deploy them in unfamiliar places.
I commend Joel's blog to you and not just for the travel insights. If you care to do so, vote for his blog as Travel Blog of the Year in the Blogger's Choice Awards. I also thank him for the delicious photograph accompanying this entry. I think we may safely assume he didn't get sick from that meal.
The Best Restaurant on Earth Closed Due to Food Poisoning
The Fat Duck, Heston Blumenthal's three-Michelin star restaurant which was once named the best restaurant in the world (it is currently second), was closed temporarily because of reports of food poisoning. Nothing has been found in a thorough search, leading to speculation that there may have been some form of sabotage, or simply a non-specific virus passed along not by the food but by a contagious member of the staff.
In an interview in the Guardian, Blumenthal detailed all the efforts that had been made to isolate the problems, which appeared as stomach ailments in customers, which--unusually for food poisoning--appeared four to five days after diners ate at the restauarant. The closure was voluntary and he plans to reopen Wednesday and compensate not only those who were affected with free meals, but give those whose bookings were cancelled something special upon their return.
UPDATE: It appears now more and more that the cause of the customers' illnesses was an unspecified airborne virus, and neither sabotage nor food poisoning. Restaurants are, after all, gathering places, and the lessons of winter viruses apply as much to a restaurant, for all the efforts a place like the Fat Duck may take to remain clean, as to any other indoor place.
Two Stories from China on the Same Day (with an update)
The curious juxtaposition of these two stories from China on the same day is striking.
In the first story, two men were sentenced to death for purposely poisoning the food in a snack bar in Shenzhen City with sodium nitrite. It appears that a deal to develop a skating rink was contingent on removing a popular marketplace, and the ringleaders decided the best way to do that was to poison people at the marketplace, which they did in February 2008. Two people died and 61 others were poisoned. Those sentenced to die were the ones who administered the poison. The manager who masterminded the plan was sentenced to life in prison and the developer of the skating rink was sentenced to fifteen years in prison.
Meanwhile, just yesterday, in Harbin, 57 people at a shopping center got food poisoning from eating a popular Chinese snack food called malatang. The verdict: poisoning from nitrite. It makes you wonder if someone wanted to put a skating rink in there, too.
UPDATE 2/26/09: Make that three stories. Today CNN is reporting that 14 people in Guangzhou were poisoned from a dish of stir-fried pig's liver.
