Over the past few days here at Huckleberry’s parents’ house, much of the family conversation has centered around our upcoming trip to Vietnam. Huckleberry and her family are from Vietnam, and they’ve all been back for several visits in recent years. Her parents and siblings and nephews are leaving tomorrow, and we’ll be joining up with them in a week and a half or so. We’ll travel with them for the first 2.5-3 weeks, and then we’ll be on our own for the last part of the trip.
Anyway. I’ve been surprised to learn how much American food they’re taking with them. Mostly it’s breakfast food–small cereal boxes for the kids and instant oatmeal packets for the grown ups–and snacks for the kids, but still: what’s up with that? Isn’t that a very American touristy thing to do: travel around the world with your own food?
Granted, I typically take a jar of peanut butter with me on long trips. It comes in handy when you’re unexpectedly stuck somewhere without access to food. Last summer, when we were waiting for our bus to leave for the long ride back from Palenque to San Cristobal de las Casas (oh my god, the speedbumps on that road!) and there weren’t any food options for us, I made a meal for us out of the peanut butter we’d brought with us and the rice cakes and dried apple bits that I bought in the bus station in Mexico City. I also typically bring some almonds and clif bars with me whenever I travel (and usually in my daily life, too, actually), but that’s more of a low-blood-sugar-melt-down-avoidance move than a don’t-wanna-eat-the-local-food move. And while I’ve bought both the peanut butter and clif bars for the Vietnam trip already, I hadn’t planned on eating either on a daily basis: they’re back-up provisions only.
I broached the subject with Huckleberry and her brother-in-law at lunch today: why don’t we just eat Vietnamese food for breakfast? Turns out there are two main reasons for the instant oatmeal:
Reason one is that sometimes there’s not any breakfast food readily available. Or, more often, they don’t like the breakfast options. Huckleberry and her bro-in-law both agreed that they don’t like eating pho for breakfast, a common Vietnamese breakfast meal, because it’s too heavy. But then the bro-in-law described a variety of other breakfast foods–sticky rice, sweet corn, sweet potatoes, and a hominy-like food–that all sounded yummy to me. Why not just eat that instead of pho?
Which leads me to reason two: When we’re traveling with Huckleberry’s parents, they probably won’t give us enough time in the mornings to go out and get breakfast. They prefer to eat instant oatmeal in the hotel room and get a move on. This makes a certain kind of sense: when traveling with a horde of people (at its largest, our group will number ~14 or 15), eating in the hotel room instead of going out to eat is much easier to manage.
Given all of that, I agreed that we should bring some instant breakfasts with us as well. Of course, being the picky eater that I am, I can only stomach steel cut oatmeal. That means that, instead of instant oatmeal packets, I’ll be buying a box or two of this before we leave the south on our cross-country drive (I can find grits in California, but I can’t reliably find packets of instant cheese grits). We won’t eat our instant breakfasts everyday, but we will have some on hand for those times when there simply aren’t other options or we aren’t given time to seek out local breakfast fare.
Huckleberry admited that she’d only feel comfortable bringing American food with her to Vietnam. As a Vietnamese-American, she feels comfortable saying, “I’ll stick with my instant oatmeal, thanks.” When we travel elsewhere in the world, she wouldn’t think of bringing anything more than peanut butter and clif bars. Funny how that works.
