Mi historias de viajes 4: Bad food and even worse food

Hola guys! I've talked about some of the most exciting aspects of my trip so far and some of the great experiences I've had, but let me warn you about the worst aspect of traveling in South America - the food. Oh the food is so shockingly bad. Now there are a few countries where the food can be terrible and there are two main factors that affect the quality of food: the first one is poverty. If the majority of the people are very poor, then the local cuisine would be mostly focused on trying to make the best of what is available most cheaply rather than focus on using more expensive ingredients. The second factor is weather: cold countries like Sweden and Russia tend to have extremely bland cuisine and it is very rare for them to use spices in their cooking whereas it is almost compulsory to use a huge amount of spices in places like Thailand or India where the weather is always so hot and the spices are used to kill some of the bacteria that can develop on raw meat in the days before refrigeration. So if like me you've been brought up on strong flavours and quite used to seeing a wide range of ingredients from seafood to exotic fruits on your dinner table, then you're probably going to be disappointed with South America.The irony of course is that I spent the entire trip speaking mostly Spanish with the locals but food in Spain is absolutely amazing: but that's because you have a combination of two factors: Spain is relatively rich and right on the Mediterranean, where it has shockingly hot summers - hence Spanish food is so stunning.

Now just to be clear, on this trip I went to Uruguay, Argentina and Chile - the northern most town I visited on this trip was Upsallata in Argentina and that was still a pretty cold place with snow on the ground when I was there. If you were to venture a bit further north into Peru and Brazil, then sure you will encounter a very different kind of climate and with it, a far bigger variety of tropical fruits and vegetables that have made it into the local cuisine, but I'm talking about the colder parts of South America here, not the warmer parts. In fact, it was so freaking cold one morning we had -15 degrees and with windchill that was way below -20. And besides, whilst undoubtedly there are some rich people in the big cities, there are plenty of poor people as well there so you do have the double whammy of cold weather + poverty = really bad food in that part of South America. But wait, I hear you protest: what about the steaks I have heard so much about? Well it is true, the rich people do eat some fine steaks but whether or not your steak is properly cook seems pretty random. All too often, I have witnessed nice cuts of meats being mercilessly overcooked despite the fact that I told them "jugoso, muy muy jugoso por favor!" (Rare, extremely rare please!) Okay "jugoso" actually translates as 'juicy' but that's the term the locals use for 'rare' in this context when describing how well you want your steak cooked. I did go to a great steak house in the trendy neighbourhood of Palermo in Buenos Aires and probably had the best steak I had there in the entire trip mostly because they didn't overcook the steak, but after that it was all downhill and I'm not sure if I should blame my inability to instruct them in Spanish not to overcook my steak but it was so unreal the amount of overcooked meat I had.

But look, you can't have steak for every meat but somehow the steak will come back and haunt you to the point where you can't bear to look at beef for a few days. Take something like the Lomito Sandwich - it is essentially a steak sandwich, that's not bad per se but probably not what you want for lunch if you've been having steak day after day after day. How about an empanada you may ask? Well that's a staple food in that part of the world, it is essentially a savory pastry not unlike the Cornish pasty in England or the curry puff in Singapore except of course, the filling is usually bland and tasteless. It can be anything from cheese to beef to bits of vegetable, all merely vaguely salty and devoid of any kind of herbs or spices. I'm not exaggerating I swear, I did speak to a New Zealander who had been living in Argentina for 20 years because he is married to a local woman - he told me that when he is cooking for his Argentinian in-laws, they cannot put anything more than salt into the cooking because any hint of any kind of spice in the cooking (even something as mild as cinnamon or nutmeg) would make them choke and convulse in horror, like, "¡Qué veneno pusiste en ese guiso, qué me has hecho en la boca!" (What poison have you put in the stew, what have you down to my mouth!) Yeah, you might be able to find a some foreign restaurants in the big cities, but the locals seem to subsist on a painfully bland diet of pizzas, french fries, hamburgers, hot dogs, sandwiches, milanesas (a piece of meat - pork, beef or chicken - coated in breadcrumbs and deep fried) and pasta, all made with virtually no spices or any hint of flavour beyond just salt.

But wait, it gets worse. Even the coffee is terrible. Yup, two of the world's biggest producers of coffee are South American: Brazil and Colombia; and coffee is also produced in Peru, Ecuador, Bolivia, Venezuala and Paraguay. Whilst the countries I visited did not produce any coffee as they were too cold and dry, they were ex-Spanish colonies and there's a great coffee culture in Spain and they are neighbours to so many coffee-producing countries on the continent. But somehow the coffee is truly disgusting - I can only compare it to Turkish coffee which has a very distinct flavour. Sometimes you will get American style coffee, which brings with it a whole new level of horror given how awful coffee is in America. I tried a vanilla latte in Buenos Aires, only to realize holy fuck, it was an American vanilla latte and it probably contained 10 kilograms of sugar per cup of coffee. It was so sickly sweet it was undrinkable and I had to always insist, "sin azucar" (without sugar) every time I ordered coffee. Part of the reason why coffee is so dreadfully gross in this part of the world is because they are tea drinkers - the preferred drink for Uruguayans and Argentinians is Yerba Mate, which is a form of South American green tea. When I prepare it, it reminds me of most of the green tea I drink at home but the locals usually put a lot more tea into the pot with only a small amount of water, resulting in a far more bitter, potent cup of tea that is usually way too strong for me. Thankfully in the big cities, you would be able to find decent cafes with proper coffee machines and if you speak Spanish well enough, you could persuade them to make you an Italian style coffee instead of a Turkish or American coffee. Oh you take for granted how easy it is to get a good cup of coffee until you travel to a place like Argentina, Georgia or China where the locals simply don't have a coffee drinking tradition!

But wait - I am not done yet, not only is the food bland and boring, it is not cheap either. I had imagined that food in South America would at least be cheaper than in London. Well, it is not actually. I got so sick and tired of all the local food in Santiago that I decided to make a huge salad for dinner (the joys of doing AirBNB meant I had my own kitchen) along with some fresh fruit. But then I decided that I needed some carbs, so I nipped down to the local hamburger shop to buy just a big portion of french fries - so let me be clear, this is just a reasonably large portion of french fries, with nothing more than a sprinkle of salt on top. It came up to 3000 Chilean pesos (about £3.40 or S$5.75) - that seemed rather expensive for just fried potatoes! Compare that to in the UK a portion of large fries costs just £1.39 at McDonald's and even if I got two large fries, that would be £2.78 which was still somewhat cheaper than that £3.40 I paid in a rather nice burger place in downtown Santiago. Of course there are places to cater to all kinds of budget in South America and you can probably get a hot dog from a street vendor for very little money, but if you intend to have a nice meal then be prepared to pay London or New York prices if you walk into a nice restaurant. Perhaps it was a question of expectations - like for some reason, I thought that I could walk into a supermarket in Santiago or Buenos Aires, buy an item like a tub of ice cream and pay less than what I would normally pay in London. Turns out that either food in London is actually extremely cheap or that food in South America is actually really quite expensive and I'm not talking about visiting top-end restaurants here, I'm talking about very ordinary food items like a small tub of ice cream you would buy at a supermarket.

Now, you may arrive in Santiago and think, hey there are loads of Chinese businesses here and I can even spot some Chinese restaurants, surely I can get some decent Chinese food here? I'm not saying it doesn't exist but you'll have to look very hard. Here's the problem with Chinese food in Chile - you have to make sure that the staff in the kitchen are actually from China (or somewhere like Malaysia or Taiwan) rather than from Peru. You see, there's a sizable Chinese community in Peru who have been there for generations and they are very assimilated to the point where they're unlikely to speak any Chinese at all, but their Chinese restaurants known as 'Chifa' are very popular. 'Chifa' is actually a corruption of the words 吃饭 which really should be 'chifan' but as the Peruvian Chinese don't really speak Mandarin, it became 'Chifa' and that really isn't Chinese food. Where do I even begin? Their idea of 'wantan' is no more than dropping a wantan wrapper into hot oil without any filling - when I first encountered it, I was like, "did they forget to wrap the wantan before frying it?" But wait, it gets worse (of course it gets worse) - it was served with what I was told was a tamarind sauce. Now I know what tamarind is, it has a tangy sour taste but this sauce was glow-in-the-dark bright red and was so sickly sweet it must have been 95% white sugar - I found it unreal that they managed to dissolve that much sugar into so little sauce to make it that insanely sweet. It was something that resembled a jam or caramel at best, something you may put on a sweet desert but to serve that hideously sweet sauce as a dipping sauce for your Chinese food? Oh and there's this dish called Aeropuerto (literally "airport") which is essentially fried rice and noodles in the same dish (see video below) - Seriously. I've never ever seen that anywhere in the Chinese speaking world before. Good grief.

When I was in a Chinese restaurant in Santiago, I asked the waitress for some chili sauce and she didn't seem to understand me - so she brought me the dreaded tamarind sauce and I said no, do you have aji? She still couldn't understand me so she literally dragged one of the Chinese cooks out of the kitchen who spoke a little Mandarin - enough to understand the word 辣椒 in Mandarin. She then explained in a mix of Spanish and Mandarin to me that the locals don't like 辣椒 or aji - in fact the dishes would be rejected and sent back to the kitchen by really unhappy customers if they detected even a hint of spice in the food so none of the food on the menu contained any spices. Thankfully, the cook said that she had just a little bit of chili stashed away somewhere in the freezer but that was for personal use - she offered to dig it out of the freezer, defrost it in the microwave and then chop it up for me as that was the closest thing she could offer. And I was like yes, yes - muchas gracias, 非常感谢你 - my taste buds have been comatose for weeks after traveling through South America and I am desperate for any kind of spice. So when the waitress brought me the chopped up defrosted chilies, she looked apprehensive as she clearly was unfamiliar with it. But bless, she was so cute: she said to me in Spanish, "Sorry, I am not quite sure what this is but I hope you like it. If you don't like it, don't feel obliged to eat it - just leave it, okay? You won't be charged extra for this, this is a gift from the cook - we just want you to feel at home."

The one food item that Argentinians are obsessed with is caramel - otherwise known as dulce de leche in Spanish. Now this is a form of caramel that is made with milk and sugar (some forms of caramel do not contain milk) and it is sickly sweet. The Argentinians put it on everything - toast, cookies, ice cream, cakes muffins, churros, they even stir it into their coffee. You can even get dulce de leche ice cream at McDonald's in Argentina and Uruguay - as if vanilla ice cream isn't sweet enough, they had to create a dulce de leche flavour ice cream. Oh they like their deserts very sweet - like the sweetness is off the scale by my British standards. You see, at least here in the UK, some of us here are so obsessed with reducing the amount of sugar in our diets and turning to healthier alternatives so we're quite used to everything from coffee to cakes to deserts to chocolates not tasting particularly sweet and we would always choose the options which have less sugar or are totally sugar-free. But in South America, they really don't seem to care at all - there isn't this great fear of white sugar and I see many young people happily drinking normal Coca-Cola and whilst you can get Diet Coke or Coke Zero, it really isn't that popular there. A very popular drink in the Peruvian restaurants is this crazy sweet drink called Inca Kola - I drank a small bottle of it out of curiousity and it reminded me of Ice Cream Soda (or Schweppes Cream Soda). I asked if it was possible to get Inca Kola sin azucar  (without sugar - a diet version of Inca Kola does exist, but it is not commonly consumed) and the waiter looked at me as if I had been speaking to him in Russian or Greek. If you avoid white sugar the way I do, then you'll struggle with that aspect of South American lifestyle on your trip.

I suppose your best bet for a decent meal when in that part of the world is to go for Mexican or Peruvian food - but when going for the latter, opt for Peruvian dishes like Ceviche and grilled meats whilst avoid anything that sounds vaguely like Chinese food because it is not Chinese food. So if you see the words 'chaufan' or chowmien', avoid those dishes. Leave Chinese food for Chinese people to prepare. You will probably have an asado and parrilla (various kinds of barbecue) or two but trust me, you will get sick of that pretty soon. Don't get me wrong, there are plenty of good reasons to visit South America but the food will be something you put up with rather than look forward to. If you visited somewhere like the Mid-West in America, rural Ireland or New Zealand, you're likely to end up with the same boring range of limited food options. At least one good thing I can say about the entire experience was that I never had any problems with food poisoning - I even drank tap water all the way throughout this trip and never once suffered from any kind of stomach problems. But because the food was so bland, I actually lost 4 kilograms on this trip! Okay, it probably had more to do with the fact that I was doing a lot of sightseeing, I went skiing four times and was actually a lot more physically active than I would normally be at home in London, but still I lost 4 kilograms mostly because I wasn't eating that much whilst significantly increasing the amount of physical activity I undertook. So yeah, that's one great benefit you will reap from visiting South America!

So that's it from me on this topic - what do you think? Have there been parts of the world where the local cuisine has left you sorely disappointed and what was the reason for that? Or perhaps you have turned up at a Chinese restaurant somewhere like America or Australia only to find that they have created a hideous version of Chinese food to please the local clientele? Let me know what your experiences have been, do leave a comment below and many thanks for reading.