Vacation Around the World

Our planet is quite incredible, many scientists, specialists, and even regular people say. And it is in fact incredible in so many different ways, while everyone's reason of it being such a lovely home is different. All the different plants and living organisms make our planet a self sufficient home. Sights make it pretty, so arguably it's a great place to be within our reach.

We live and spend most of our lives within a few miles of our home, apartment or whatever dwelling we choose to inhabit. In a country, a state, neighborhood of a city or town, down the street on the left. Quite local compared to the size of our real home - earth. Yet we still get to experience the vastness of our world without even thinking about it day after day. The food we consume is grown across different continents in all kinds of different soils, involves work done by local people of various cultures and prepared by you in your little kitchen.

Imagine a dish of as little as three ingredients, all of which could have been grown on 3 different continents. That is typically out of our reach, yet we manage to bring those ingredients into one dinner. Rice could have been grown in Asia, lets say in India. If you haven't been to India, just imagine yourself there to spend a day with a farmer who works all year long and hopes that there is enough rain to sustain his crops. There is a lot of work involved to grow rice, you have to have a field, seeds, machinery and most importantly people who love to do it. Without them, there might be no rice an ingredient in your dinner tonight.

Onto our second ingredient - which could be local, from a few miles away, lets say its chicken. It could have been raised a thousand miles away, somewhere in North America. We're not going to get into all the different methods, organic, pasture-raised, and how it was fed, but lets just say it is a real chicken from an actual farm, where someone takes care of it. This chicken walks around the farm and lives a life a chicken should - under the sky, walking on grass and eating whatever chicken should eat. Takes about two months to raise a chicken, not to mention all the work our North American farmer has to put into it.

Our third ingredient will be carrots - imported from South America, Peru. Carrots we brought home from supermarket today were pulled out from the earth in Peru. It could have been from close to machu picchu, who knows, but imagine that - people speak different languages, observe different holidays, live different lives. We pay thousands of dollars to take vacations to these places.

Tonight however, our few dollar dinner has taken us to a vacation around the world. Three ingredients above usually are not enough though to make a tasty dinner. We will likely use olive oil, grown in Europe, Italy or Spain. European vacations may take you to both countries if you're lucky. Olive trees require at least 6 hours of sunlight a day, and surely have other climate and nutrient requirements, which is why they don't just grow anywhere. People take care of these trees and it takes at least a few years for it to produce olives. The olives that hung on that tree have been grown by italian soil, sunlight and people who cultivated it, picked it, expressed the oil, bottled it, shipped it, etc.

We'll most definitely have to use some spices in our dish. Lets begin with himalayan salt. Totally different landscapes and culture worth writing a book about. This ingredient is easily found in our spice drawer. Take a tour to Places Unknown and explore the country where this ingredient came from.  I will also add Hungarian Paprika - with its instantly recognizable flavor and color, it's a welcome addition to this dish. Paprika is made from dried peppers grown in southern Hungary, near Szeged and Kalocsa. Take a tour and see endless fields of sunflowers, millions of them pointing at the sun.  

Our dinner vacation is delicious, ingredients from all over the world have concentrated happily in a pot made in france. Glass of Argentinian wine next to it. Think about all these places when you're enjoying a dinner at home, your friend's house or at your favorite restaurant. The origins of ingredients - landscape it grows in, sunshine over it and rain that falls upon it, not to mention all the work that goes into the whole process, all from our own planet's different corners.

Enjoy your vacation every day, go different places, explore.