Lori Duff Writes

If you’ve ever laid eyes on me in person, you’ll see that it’s obvious I’m not a picky eater.  True picky eaters don’t have this much cushioning.

While I do appreciate fine wine and the subtle flavors of artisanal cheeses, I also like a good Cheeto[1] and a Taco Bell Crunch Wrap Supreme on occasion. All things in moderation, I say.

Some things, though, are only worth doing if you do them well. Coffee is one of them. It’s not hard to get or make decent coffee. I like my coffee like I like my men—bitter and complicated. Ha ha. But seriously. Coffee is not a beverage you should be able to see through. It shouldn’t taste like watered down acid. It should be complex and nutty and layered and not burnt. If you have to cover up the flavor with sugar and syrup, it’s not good coffee, it’s a milkshake with coffee flavoring. It might be tasty in its own right, but stop calling it coffee.

Italy, therefore, was a place that immediately captured my heart. Italy, and the countries that surround it, takes its coffee seriously. It’s served in teeny little cups. It’s thick and has a natural foam on top. It’s slightly oily and not meant to be gulped. If you want the stuff we drink here, you have to ask for an “Americano” and the waiters will give it to you, but they will roll their eyes. They consider it watered-down piss.

It only took me about ten hours before I vowed never to drink “Americano” coffee again.[2]

While on my trip around the Adriatic/Mediterranean, I ate a lot of food. I ate my weight in prosciutto and figs. I consumed gallons of olive oil. I had gelato with fresh berries every afternoon. I ate meals on and off the cruise ship, in fancy restaurants and in little mom and pop shops, from carts and sidewalk vendors.

And granted, I only made it into the areas geared toward tourists. I didn’t do much deep exploring. None of the food was particularly exotic—it wasn’t all familiar, but none of it gave me the what-the-heck-is-this icks, either. You’d think pasta would be pasta. If the ingredients are the same – basically, flour, water, salt—shouldn’t it taste the same? But it doesn’t. Why?

It occurred to me several days in. Everything was fresh. I went two whole weeks eating food that was, essentially, farm to table. The olive oil came from local olives. The tomatoes from local plants. Even the prosciutto was from local pigs. And that mattered. Interesting salads with greens that tasted like something beyond crunchy (or wilted) water and chemical-drenched salad dressing. In-season fruits that ripened on the tree.

I went right from that trip to a conference in which the food was cafeteria-style. I’m not going to say it was bad, just bad by comparison. It was the kind of food that was prepared by dumping large cans of things into large vats of other things and pre-packaged and reheated. The most interesting spice was paprika. The salad was iceberg lettuce with shredded carrots and mealy tomatoes. The cucumbers tasted like pesticide. The chickens did not spend their days scratching for bugs on a Tuscan hillside: they likely spent their days eating industrial food squashed next to their inbred siblings in a cage.

I’ll tell you what: as picky as I am not, having two weeks of steak so good I’m almost sure the cows were proud to give their lives for it, made me eat less of mediocre food. I didn’t feel compelled to eat more than was strictly necessary of food that didn’t interest my taste buds. There weren’t delightful textures or smells. Just basic nutrients. It may just as well have been Soylent Green. Even the coffee was just a tepid brown.

So we’ll see if this sticks. Maybe I’ll have less cushioning, more summer strawberries and winter squash in my life.

If not, there’s always Fritos. You can’t grow those in the wild, so they’re always ripe.

[1] I almost named one of my books “Serving Cheetos in a Tiffany Bowl”.

[2] I have, of course, broken this vow, because finding Italian espresso in my little southern town is darned near impossible. Then again, finding good barbecue in Italy was darned near impossible, too, so….

Lori Duff

Lori B. Duff is an award-winning author who practices law on the side.  Her latest book, “If You Did What I Asked in the First Place” was awarded the Gold Medal for humor in the Foreword INDIES awards in 2019. You can follow her on Twitter at @LoriBDuff and on Facebook. For more blogs written by Lori, click here. For more information about Lori in general, click here. If you want Lori to do your writing for you, click here. If you want Lori to help you market your book, click here.