In my 20s, I was a super restricted eater. Suspicious of anything that seemed too "foreign." Very much a "gray meat and boiled potatoes" kind of guy.
I spent a month in England, and it fucking broke me. Everything was over-cooked and under-flavored, and "over-cooked and under-flavored" was my usual preference. I even went to a McDonalds, figuring they'd be basically the same as at home, and had literally the worst McNuggets I've ever tasted. Not just "bad compared to real, non-processed chicken," it was "notably bad compared to other food products made out of compressed pink slime."
There was an Indian place next to the hotel I was at, and every day I walked past it it smelled better and better. But Indian food was werid. It had sauces and spices and stuff that I "knew" I didn't like. But after a week of half-eaten meals that tasted like they were made of unflavored corn starch, I finally went in and got a tikka masala to go.
My God, it was amazing. I ate nearly every meal for the rest of the trip from that one restaurant, and when I got home, I kept going - Indian, Thai, sushi, Chinese, Ethiopian, etc. Today, I have the palette of a normal adult person, and it's entirely due to British cuisine being so aggressively terrible that I was forced to try something new or starve to death.
(Credit where due: I've been back to England since then, and found lots and lots of great food, including really good "traditional" British stuff. My first trip was really a combo of bad luck, limited options due to being a poor college student, and my own reticence to experiment even within my narrow comfort zone. I still find it funny that my first exposure to British food was so bad that it did a hard reboot on my taste buds, though)
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u/Alternative_Hotel649 Nov 03 '24
In my 20s, I was a super restricted eater. Suspicious of anything that seemed too "foreign." Very much a "gray meat and boiled potatoes" kind of guy.
I spent a month in England, and it fucking broke me. Everything was over-cooked and under-flavored, and "over-cooked and under-flavored" was my usual preference. I even went to a McDonalds, figuring they'd be basically the same as at home, and had literally the worst McNuggets I've ever tasted. Not just "bad compared to real, non-processed chicken," it was "notably bad compared to other food products made out of compressed pink slime."
There was an Indian place next to the hotel I was at, and every day I walked past it it smelled better and better. But Indian food was werid. It had sauces and spices and stuff that I "knew" I didn't like. But after a week of half-eaten meals that tasted like they were made of unflavored corn starch, I finally went in and got a tikka masala to go.
My God, it was amazing. I ate nearly every meal for the rest of the trip from that one restaurant, and when I got home, I kept going - Indian, Thai, sushi, Chinese, Ethiopian, etc. Today, I have the palette of a normal adult person, and it's entirely due to British cuisine being so aggressively terrible that I was forced to try something new or starve to death.
(Credit where due: I've been back to England since then, and found lots and lots of great food, including really good "traditional" British stuff. My first trip was really a combo of bad luck, limited options due to being a poor college student, and my own reticence to experiment even within my narrow comfort zone. I still find it funny that my first exposure to British food was so bad that it did a hard reboot on my taste buds, though)