In the thread Vacation in a hotel with a kitchenette - do you pack food to cook?, I’m starting to realize my fundamental approach to travelling seems to differ drastically from a lot of the other people chiming in in the thread and it’s helping me articulate some “this is water” style fundamental assumptions I make when travelling.
At the core of it is the underlying assumption that “stomach space” is the hardest constraint to butt up against and thus, should be the first thing to take into consideration and everything else can be fit around that. You take the number of days you’re travelling and your average calorie consumption per day and then you have a little room to wiggle around your budget but eating lighter the few days before and after your trip and gaining a little bit of weight on the trip but you’re up against a pretty hard line that you need to budget everything inside of.
I always start my trip planning by researching what are the local specialties to try, any restaurants that are particularly unique & dishes in those restaurants that sound amazing to get a general sense of what the lay of the land is, and then a very rough idea in my head of the calorie budget I’m playing with and the idea that a calorie allocated towards one purpose necessarily means a forgone calorie somewhere else.
At the same time, it’s not pure gustatory pleasure that I’m optimizing for and I have very low regard for travellers who seem to be checking items off a list of some “best X” thing they found on the Internet and the social context of the food is the far more important constraint I’m optimizing for. I’m there to spend my calories in a way that leads me to bond tighter with my friends, provoke new experiences and lead me into serendipity.
One memorable recent example of “calories well spent” was on a trip to Mexico City, I was feeling like I wanted just a little something after a dinner so I wandered down to a local ice cream place and they mentioned they were having a 2 for 1 special that day so I spontaneously turned to the couple behind me and asked if I could cover their kid’s ice cream and then we sat down and had a lovely chat about how they were LA natives who moved to Mexico City a few years ago and how this was their favorite ice cream parlor and how living in Mexico City has been for them.
I’m very much a believer in improvisational travel and how no plan survives contact with the enemy and how the purpose of planning is to make it easier to go with the flow and there’s generally rarely a specific thing I need to eat or a place I have to eat at but more of a sense that every calorie has to be earned because it’s fighting against all the other delicious things that could have filled that spot and evaluating each thing I consume in a kind of “wins above replacement” style optimization. The idea of voluntarily eating something while travelling for pure sustenance reasons is a totally alien concept to me.
Once you’ve planned out how your trip goes, calorie wise, then you do the process of fitting everything else you want to get done around it as those things tend to be much more loosey goosey in terms of how you can arrange them.
I guess enough of my friends also think similar enough as me that I’m familiar with what it’s like on our side of the fence. I’m much more interested in hearing from, for the people that are the total opposite of this, what’s your reaction to this kind of travel? How different is it from the way you travel? Are there any questions or things about this way of travelling that baffle you? I’m just articulating a lot of these ideas for the very first time and kind of exploring what they mean and how there’s a whole universe of people who this is not their fundamental world view.
