Balance

I enjoy travelling in the US. It has its disappointments but then that's true of every nation. While I was watching someone tuck into a deep fried cheesecake, I tried to recall some of the things that make me smile about this great lunking galoot of a country.

Curiously, the things that come to mind often come with outragrous missunderstandings about food. We booked a hotel outside of Juneau, Alaska with a folksy name which turned out to be a hit with patrician older men travelling with their attractive young neices. In the restaurant there, I ordered salmon and sent it back because it was white, causing hilarity and uproar among the diners, most of whom had come a long way to eat the local king salmon as it started running. On a trip to Florida I went for a quick Mexican lunch with the team I was visiting and I ended up with seven plates. My inner 'eat it all up' parent was horrified. On the same trip, my host drove us fifty miles to a cuban restaurant where I had something with plantain which I very nearly described as awesome. Nearly. I once had two wonderful meals in the same week in Oakland. The first was after driving around looking for something vegetarian for my travelling companion. Her brilliant instincts found us a tiny Lebanese place where we ate falafel surrounded by the local Indian Bridge Society's annual outing. At the end of the same week, we visited a Thai restaurant where I ordered a simple fish dish. The waitress panicked, trying to explain that it was white fish, poached without fries, or chilli, or a sweet potato filled with caramel and marshmallows. I said that sounded wonderful after a week of wings and burgers, and I was right, it was. In between I had a clam chowder on Fisherman's Wharf which I managed to spread over myself like a four year old. But hey, in San Francisco if you feel you need to wear your food, not one single person would ever be so uncool as to even mention it.

Back in Oakland, we had a morning ritual of visiting churches, the bigger the better, as part of some spiritual quest or other of my companion's. The cathedral in Santa Cruz was a gorgeous confection in latin cream against a perfect, Californian blue sky, but the most awesome revelation of all was the Greek Orthodox Cathedral in Oakland itself, set high on a hillside, Oakland spread below with the sun bleaching all of its horrors and San Francisco cross the bay behind, Alcatraz, Golden Gate and all, sumptuous in the brilliant morning. If anyone tells you that all American cities are soul-less, unplanned and utilitarian, they have somewhat missed the point, they can also be glorious. Washington DC is another grand city, but it's grandeur never quite looses its cellophane wrapping of faux and reminds me somewhat of a themepark built of limestone and marble, complete with gilded political roller coasters. That doesn't make it any less grand and  the Persians were almost certainly exactly as sniffy about the Acropolis.

If I'm on a long trip, I often declare myself vegetarian for health reasons and, in these enlightened times there are places in the US where vegetarian food is entirely legal. In some tolerant corners of California you may even find a competent vegetarian chef. As you go south, things become trickier. It's often easier to have a rational argument about gun control with a random redneck than to convince a waitress that a chicken is an animal. Worse still, try starting an argument about bacon bits. It's true that bacon bits are almost entirely free of actual pig solid matter, but they almost certainly are smothered in bacon fat of some derivation. Of course almost every restaurant in the US will customise any order. This is because every dish contains everything and so almost everyone wants something pulled. Just don't order a simple cheese and ham sandwich with no salad or extras with a queue behind you, because they may not appreciate the wait while the terrified server consults the manual about how to serve that. You may even be arrested. "Just cheese and ham, sir? On wholemeal?"

Something else which I find endearing are the folks running mom and pop outfits out in the woods. I go to a lot of those and the cheese and ham sandwich problem has a different flavour. They hear an English accent and ask if American cheddar is OK in a hushed voice and here is something I don't understand. Why is it so hard for a big chain to deal with someone who doesn't want salad on a sandwich when all of these mom and pop places are connected by a psychic network. I swear I bought lunch three days running in rural North Carolina and two years later the owner of an identical establishment in coastal Maryland recognised me and knew my order.

That takes me to Sitka, Alaska. This was twenty years ago and a certain chain of sandwich shops hadn't made it to the UK. Lady Snoutingdingle and I stood at the counter of what we now like to call Subnormal and ordered subs. By the end of the order the poor baffled teenager behind the counter was on the point of tears. 'Just salad' wasn't in his vocabulary. Someone behind us had to rescue us 'she wants lettuce, tomato, no pickles, no cheese, not bacon-bits, no dressing, no oil.' The next day, we went to the bookshop across the street which had a coffee shop in the back. That was before that caught on in the UK too. Books. Maps. Coffee. I'm surprised we ever left. On that same trip we tried to find wholemeal bread in a supermarket. The shelf-stacker had heard of it, which was a start, and took us to a tiny bottom shelf in a mile-long bread aisle. They made us put that in a brown paper bag before we left, or the cops might take an interest.