While traveling recently I was thinking about how people miss foods when they are not in their home culture, but it’s more complicated than that. Sometimes you miss a certain taste (Diet Coke served with a lime slice and a lot of ice) and sometimes it’s a food experience (food + activity, walking around a mall with a Diet Coke in hand).

When I am not in Oman, I don’t miss food – I miss food experiences. I don’t like rice, but I miss white rice with grilled fresh fish served with dates, eaten on a beach with friends next to a campfire. I miss the way of eating: eating with my hands and the knowledge that all food is communal, that I can take something from another person’s plate without worrying that they will be upset and all my food is up for grabs from someone else. I don’t miss hummus, but I miss how hummus (and all appetizers) are shared. There’s no ‘I ordered this, it’s mine, if you want to try you have to ask my permisson’ but you ask for hummus and fatoush, the person you are with gets vine leaves and baba ganoush and you each take as much as you want from any dish.

When I am in Oman, I really miss coffee, the joy of a waiter or waitress walking towards me with a large carafe of coffee that will be put on my table. I have had more than my fill of “espresso-coffee” (espresso with hot water is not really coffee!). And I miss food. I miss pie. I miss raspberries, big salads with 25 ingredients, cheese plates and Mexican food. I miss a real breakfast: eggs, toast, hash browns and all the trimmings. I miss the taste of cranberries: cranberry juice and cranberry/ orange muffins.

Thinking about ‘missing’ reminds me of a great quote from Adam Gopnik’s Paris to the Moon (2001)

The things an American who is abroad for a very long time misses—or at least the things I missed—I was discovering, weren’t the things you were supposed to miss. We are supposed to come to Europe for leisure, sunshine, a more civilized pace, for slowness of various kinds. America we are supposed to miss for its speed, its friendliness, for the independence of its people and the individualism of their lives. Yet these were not the things I missed, and when I speak to Americans who have lived abroad for a long time, those are not the things they seem to miss either. I didn’t miss crosstown traffic, New York taxicabs, talk radio or talk television, or the constant, appalling flow of opinion that spills out like dirty floodwater…

I found, to my surprise, that what I missed and longed for was the comforting loneliness of life in New York, a certain kind of scuffed-up soulfulness. In Paris no relationship, even one with a postman or a dry cleaner, is abstract or anonymous; human relations are carved out in a perpetual present tense. There’s an intricacy of debits and credits. Things have histories…The things Americans miss tend to involve that kind of formlessness, small, casual, and solitary pleasures. A psychoanalyst misses walking up Lafayette Street in her tracksuit, sipping coffee from a Styrofoam cup with the little plastic piece that pops up. My wife, having been sent the carrot cake that she missed from New York, discovered that what she really missed was standing up at the counter and eating carrot cake in the company of strangers at the Bon Vivant coffee shop.