An unexpected side effect of eating local food is that those things that I eat that come from far away have developed a strange connotation. There is something of the Silk Road about them. Tea, from China! Spices, from India! Chocolate, from South America! The occasional box of macaroni and cheese, from the midwest!

When one cannot speak every language that might, one day, be relevant, and when one does not have command of the finer points of etiquette among every race and class on every continent, I think that one could do worse than amicably and curiously bumbling through the world. Take, for example, the great Giovanni Battista Belzoni: Italian-born circus ( Read more... )