Delightfully Different Tastes

Meanwhile with the foods I was learning about in the kitchen and some of the techniques, I tried to introduce several different dishes at home (once or twice), without great success. If you are used to something, then it is sometimes easier to stick to that. At least that was the opinion of most family members faced with some of the ‘foreign muck’ (my father’s view), which I had tried to make. But for me, I was discovering there is a great variety in the wide, wide, world of food, and the more I experienced, the more I was fascinated. And, in later years, as I traveled and met people from many different cultures and groups, I realized just how varied the world’s diet really was. Even with the simple basics such as bread. The hundreds of amazing variations, way beyond, the sliced white that our lunch sandwiches were made of, and our mother regularly brought. For us as kids, we only generally saw the one type. I have come to experiment with many recipes over the years and today commercial white bread would be one of the rarest forms of bread I eat.
I have enjoyed very different foods. But, do you ever wonder how some of the food that is used today, was first eaten? Taste tested as it were? It’s easy to understand the development of most of the standard meats we consume. But even that has some strange variations. I know I will never eat a mangrove worm* again (no regrets there). Yet, some people actually like them. Though, there I suppose is a simple example of how some food types were discovered, eaten and decided as enjoyable or not. Then in other cases after watching someone consume something, they waited to see if they made it through the night, or, if they were found with their toes curled up after suffering a serious attack of poisoning. Cross that off the list and try the next bit?
And the different vegetables which are consumed around the world. When you look at some of the strange vegetables, their amazing colours, the weird and wonderful shapes. While some significant changes have occurred in the last few decades, to make certain foods look more appealing to purchasers (mainly the Western Cultures). There are many still happily retaining their original appearance (and perhaps for that reason they are ignored by Westerners). But when traveling overseas and seeing some of the enormous variety of types, shapes and colours, not to mention textures, I am always happy to try them out.
And if I had to chose my last meal (as I had been doing when I started with this tangent in the story about awaiting a punishment), I would be choosing some very different choices, to what I had known of, back then and pineapple upside down pudding is still pretty tasty. (Continued tomorrow)
*The Mangrove worm grows inside the  actual mangrove swamp tree below the bark, it can grow to over a metre in length.Eaten live, fresh from the tree. My guides assured me it was delicious. I couldn’t finish a half of one. It tastes just like…… the rotting tree and plant matter of the swamp (and it’s greasy, rubbery and long).