Frumpy Mom: I will travel for cheap food

I know that many people right now would rather eat ground glass than travel outside of our wonderful, extremely safe United States of America.

But I’m addicted, so I’ll take their places visiting our friendly neighboring countries with their favorable exchange rates. I’ll be eating their $35 lobster dinners at upscale restaurants, drinking their $5 margaritas and buying their $7 real maple syrup. It’s my patriotic duty.

Hey, to get in the mood for this column, I’m looking right now at a photo of the $35 complete dinner I had on my recent birthday near Rosarito Beach, Baja, with grilled lobster tails, fresh flour tortillas still warm from the oven, rice and beans. Yum.

 

Truthfully, I’ll do pretty much anything for cheap food, which just proves I’m a typical journalist. If you walked into a room filled with boxes of cold pizza that is clearly four days old, while another box holds sad-looking, dried-up doughnuts, and scruffy-looking people are still stopping and grabbing them to eat, you’d obviously wandered into a working newsroom.

In our defense, I will say that we are all paid peanuts, so we live by the motto that bad food is still good food if it’s free. My frequent international travels are all clustered around one theme: Where can Marla eat good food for cheap? In the past, the answer has been Cambodia, Mexico, South Africa, Guatemala, Greece, El Salvador and Morocco. And don’t get me started on Thailand, where we took photos of every meal, so we could remember it to our graves.

People often ask me how to avoid getting sick on foreign travels, and I have a few tips. Be aware that your stomach is not hardened yet to the common foreign bugs, so there is a chance that you’ll get tourist tummy, which is always fun. Nowadays, my insides are cast iron,  so I almost never get sick, although I still take precautions.

A 2020 scientific analysis found that people who took Pepto Bismol daily – morning, noon and night – as a preventative were 3.5 times less likely to get sick – but a new study that just came out contradicted it. I guess you’re on your own with that one.

If I’m in an unfamiliar country, I only eat cooked food. You never know what kind of possibly hinky water was used to wash that lettuce, although fruit that you peel yourself is okay. I cut back on the meat consumption, too. When I’m watching ladies wash their clothes in a river, maybe I don’t want to eat the fish caught there.

But there’s no reason to turn into a paranoid nut job. European countries have a high standard of sanitation. You don’t need to skip the salad in Paris, and you can drink the water just fine, although they want to sell you those expensive water bottles instead.

In any country, if you’re in a nice restaurant surrounded by tourists, just relax. If they routinely killed their diners, they wouldn’t have a business left. A place like that almost certainly has filters on its kitchen water taps, making it safe. In fact, many nicer houses have water filters in the kitchens as well. And, yes, you can put an ice cube in your cocktail.

If your tummy does get upset, here’s what I do: My acupuncturist taught me something he learned while studying Traditional Chinese Medicine in China. Po Chai Pills from Hong Kong. I carry them everywhere I go, and pop a tiny bottle when I start feeling even a little queasy. Obviously, I’m not a doctor, so you can take my personal experience for what it’s worth. Although I will point out, it has been used by doctors in China for a long time.

I seldom eat at street stands, even when my friends are munching away. If I do, I make sure the food is cooked right in front of me, and there’s a long line of diners attesting to its freshness. And I wonder about refrigeration.

Food in Canada, our neighbor to the north, isn’t necessarily cheap, but that favorable exchange rate is our friend. And there’s one thing I always buy: Maple syrup. If you’ve never had pure Canadian maple syrup from Quebec, get up and go immediately to the grocery store. Yes, you’ll be shocked at the price, but then you’ll taste it and go into a swoon. You’ll never think about our maple-flavored corn syrup the same way again.

I’m going to visit friends in Toronto in August, and guess what I’ll be bringing home? Yup. Maple syrup. And then I’ll hide it from my kids.