What foods power a walk around the globe?

Paul Salopek: It’s just fantastic. It’s a Mediterranean diet. Basically, falafels, hummus, lots of fresh vegetables … often coming out of people’s gardens, in the backyard. And, meats also. Mostly mutton, right, sheep going with a side of rice. So yeah, going through the Middle East was fantastic. I remember walking through Saudi Arabia … If I wanted to, Marco, I could have had mutton breakfast, lunch and dinner.

On this project, I would have to say again, you know, something like eyeballs, sheep’s eyes, that is kind of a delicacy in places like the Arabian Peninsula. It takes a little getting used to, to kind of chew into that kind of gelatinous orb. 

I don’t know, it’s probably the same thing you do. It’s a gift. And as you say, you can’t really turn it away. It can be an offense. This is the delicacy of the house. In this case, it was in a seaside community on the Red Sea in Saudi Arabia. This guy had gone and pulled out all the stops to have a big dinner. And these eyeballs are staring up at you from the plate. So you have to give it kind of a, you know, a few symbolic chews and swallow. And then the other thing about hospitality, some of it is so much — including in China — just volumes of food, that it’s okay if you don’t eat everything; so, maybe you can cover the remaining eyeballs with a bit of rice and say, “Hey, I’m full.” … geographically moving things around the plate. *chuckles*

You know, it’s people who know me, my friends and family, who laugh at my palate. I pretty much eat everything that is put on my plate. So, no, I’ve kind of eaten everything. You know one other, maybe challenging cuisine for me, and don’t get me wrong, it is lovely in its own right, but again, there’s the question of repetition, right? This is kind of a factor of how many times you eat your favorite comfort food; you start losing your taste for it, or whatever your favorite comfort food is. In Central Asia, it is mutton again. It’s kind of like boiled mutton, which can be pretty tough. In some cases, it might even bounce off the plate, with a side of very thick, gelatinous noodles. And yeah, a few times, that’s perfectly fine. But Marco, it took me two and a half years to walk through Central Asia. By then, I was ready for a little bit of a change of cuisine. 

This is such an embarrassing interview because, you know, my cooking skills, kind of the apex is throwing a can of beans in the campfire when it explodes, it’s ready. So, no, the short answer is sort of no. I mean, I can make a basic omelet. But I do raise my hand in self-defense, in my own kind of pathetic way, by saying I don’t have too many cooking utensils. I carry a rucksack. It has maybe eight to 11 items in it. And cooking materials aren’t really a big priority. If I can get a little bag of chilies, chili flakes or chili peppers, because I grew up in Mexico, I like spice. I’ll go for it. But otherwise, no. 

It’s the street food. And it’s one of these societies where people eat outside, in a communal setting. It could be the local mercado, it could be comida callejera, it could be something just in the park, where somebody set up like a tacos al pastor. Something that’s just delicious, and you eat standing up. I mean, that’s what I’m really looking forward to. I grew up with that. That’s the comfort food of my childhood. 

You basically endure, because again, walking, maybe it’s just part of this ascetic discipline of walking, it stirs the imagination. You can yearn for something, you know. You basically wait for the next meal and count yourself lucky for it, whatever it is.

I would say in highly developed post-industrial economies, the common comfort food is pre-packaged and pre-prepared, right? You stop in at a fast-food joint. The big gift of this journey, part of the reason I’m still healthy and still going, is that I’ve walked through places where the food that was on my plate was probably grown locally. Everything has to be eaten quickly before it spoils. I was able to take in nutritious food that was pretty much freshly grown in the ground or coming from animal protein that was kind of local. And that’s been a huge gift. It makes me wonder, when the project’s over, what am I gonna do? You know, if I settle into a city, I can’t raise chickens in my backyard.