European Food Culture...and More

One of the things Carla and I notice almost immediately when we spend time in Europe is how differently food seems to fit into everyday life. I don’t mean that everything in Europe is healthier, every farmer is small and local, or every meal is somehow superior to what we eat in the United States. Europe is far too large and complicated for those kinds of sweeping statements. But as we ate our way around Portugal - and we took that responsibility rather seriously - we kept coming back to the same observation: so much of the food tasted wonderfully fresh, simple, and unmistakably like what it was supposed to be.

A tomato tasted like a tomato. A peach could perfume the kitchen before you cut into it. Fish displayed at the market might have been swimming that morning. The bread didn’t need much help, the olive oil actually tasted of olives, and meals often seemed less interested in showing off than in beginning with good ingredients and allowing them to speak for themselves. There’s something refreshing about food that doesn’t appear to be having an identity crisis.

Part of what we were experiencing was seasonality. At markets in Lisbon and throughout the Algarve, what was abundant often reflected what was growing or being harvested at that particular time of year. That seems like such an obvious way to eat, yet in the United States we’ve become accustomed to walking into a supermarket in January and expecting much the same produce we would find in July. There’s an undeniable convenience to that, but convenience occasionally comes at the expense of flavor.

A tomato picked before it is fully ripe so that it can survive harvesting, packing, shipping, warehousing, and another truck ride has quite a journey ahead of it before reaching our salad. By the time it gets there, it may look exactly like a tomato while having only a passing acquaintance with one.

Eating more seasonally changes the expectation. Instead of demanding everything all the time, you wait. Then, when strawberries or figs or tomatoes are actually at their best, you eat them enthusiastically until nature moves on to something else. There’s a small lesson in that which extends beyond food. Perhaps not having everything whenever we want it can make us appreciate things more when their time finally comes.

We also loved the markets themselves. Food in Portugal often felt closer to its source, particularly in the neighborhood markets and smaller shops we frequented. There were fishmongers, produce stalls, bakeries, cheese shops, butchers, and people who clearly knew what they were selling. Fruits and vegetables didn’t always look as though they had successfully auditioned for a supermarket advertisement. Some were smaller, larger, oddly shaped, or carrying a little dirt with them, which struck me as fairly persuasive evidence that they had recently been acquainted with the earth.

I’ve never understood why we became so convinced that beauty in food requires uniformity. Nature doesn’t seem especially interested in producing identical apples.

What matters is how the thing tastes. And taste seemed to matter enormously in Portugal.

There are also genuine differences between European and American food regulations. The European Union takes a different regulatory approach to certain pesticides, food additives, agricultural chemicals, genetically engineered crops, and the use of hormones in animal agriculture. The details are complicated and change over time, so I wouldn’t reduce the difference to the idea that everything European is safe and everything American isn’t. That would be both unfair and inaccurate. But spending time in Europe does make you aware that societies can make very different choices about what they allow into the food system and how cautiously they approach some of those ingredients and farming practices.

That subject has always been particularly interesting to me because I spent decades working nationally in the organic and natural foods industry. Long before Carla and I began traveling this way, I had watched the American food system become increasingly industrialized. Industrial agriculture has accomplished extraordinary things, including producing enormous quantities of relatively inexpensive food and making an astonishing variety available throughout the year. But there have also been costs - environmental costs, questions about how food is produced, the distance between consumers and farmers, and an increasing dependence on foods that have been heavily processed before they reach us.

Travel has made those questions feel less theoretical.

When you walk through a Portuguese market and watch someone select a fish for dinner, or buy bread from the bakery around the corner, or see a restaurant menu change according to what happens to be fresh, you’re reminded that food is more than fuel being transferred into the human body as efficiently as possible.

It’s culture. It’s geography. It’s agriculture and weather and family and memory. It’s people gathering around a table and taking enough time to notice what they’re eating.

That may be the biggest difference Carla and I keep experiencing in Europe. Food seems to be given more room in the day. A meal isn’t always something to squeeze between obligations or consume while doing something else. People sit. They talk. Courses arrive. Nobody appears particularly distressed that dinner has not yet reached its conclusion.

As Americans, this can initially require some adjustment. We’ve been trained to admire efficiency, and there is almost nothing efficient about lingering over a meal for two hours.

Which may be precisely the point.

Some of my favorite memories from Portugal aren’t attached to famous monuments. They’re attached to meals. Sitting outside with Carla over a simple plate of fish and vegetables. Wandering through a market deciding what we would cook later. Tasting something and wondering why it seemed so much better than the version we were accustomed to eating at home.

Perhaps it was fresher. Perhaps it was the variety. Perhaps the cook knew what to do with it. Or perhaps food simply tastes a little different when you’ve walked five miles, spent the morning beside the ocean, and have nowhere particularly urgent to be.

Travel has a way of seasoning things.

What I do know is that eating our way through Portugal reminded me how little good food actually needs. Fresh ingredients. Thoughtful preparation. A little time. Someone to share it with.

We’ve made food enormously complicated in the modern world, but some of the best meals keep pointing us back toward something much simpler: grow good things, prepare them with care, sit down together, and enjoy them while they’re here.

That seems like a pretty good recipe for more than dinner.