A Torrid Affair

Invariably, after people realize that I'm an international student, there's one question they'll always ask: "What are you studying in Italy anyway?"

In an effort to staunch the bewildered stares and blank looks I get when I try to explain why an English majour ventured to a non-English speaking country, I've recently began telling people that I'm studying Italian history in Italy. But this is mostly because no one takes my real answer seriously.

I came here to eat.

Brioche nutella, pear and percorino ravioli, wild boar marinated in dark chocolate and red wine, local olive oil, chianti wine, Florentine steak, fresh made pesto, brie and honey bruschetta, truffle sauce, ciocolatto fondente, mushrooms with rabbit, ten year old balsamic vinegar, every flabour of gelato imaginable, procuitto, fresh mozzerella... Oh my God, I have to stop. I'm making myself hungry even just thinking about it. I have never eatten better in my entire life. My food snobbery has reached soaring new heights, to the point where it's rubbed off on other people here.

It is bad my friends, seriously. Once the excitment of chicken wings and endless maple syrup wears off two weeks after my return, I can't think of a single place in Buffalo where I would want to eat. Except for the Pie Plate, which is in Canada anyway. Even Butterwood's creme brulee was surpassed by Italian creme brulee, which is better than actual Parisian creme brulee. I compared them.

They will have to drag me kicking and screaming from the Mercato Centrale, the local market open 9-2 every day of the week except Sunday. It has everything a cook would ever desire there, vegetables, fruit, meat, seafood, fresh pasta, bread, artisan cheese, spices. And if you don't fancy cooking, they do an amazingly good lunch for a price that makes you certain there must be a five euro cver charge on top of it. But there isn't. I feel like I hallucinated it, it's simply too good to be true.

But despite the delicous factor, I think most of the reason why I've been in foodie heaven since I got here deals more with the Italian philosophy of food. Like the fact that it perfectly dovetails mine.

To start, here's three things I hate about food in America:

1. The 'More is Better' mindset

2. Corn syrup

3. Chain Restaurants

None of this exists in Italy. Or not to the same extent. Like the bubonic plague, McDonald's has insideously flourished across Europe, but I can tell you exactly where all three Florentine McDonald's are, and none of them are in the city centre.

Also, in Italy (or Europe in general) there is a philsophy of eat whatever the hell you want, but in moderation. There's no binge and purge American mindset where we eat two double cheeseburgers with fries and wash it down with a diet coke, to save ourselves those 200 extra calories. Actually, diet coke did so poorly in Italty they had to pull it from the shelves. They seriously don't believe in diet here.

And, what might be maybe my favourite aspect of Italian cusine culture, is the idea that good food is meant to be shared. In Italy, to-go cups are almsot nonexistent. If you eat lunch by yourself, you've bound to befriend one of the waiters or other patrons. Sometimes you befriend them anyway. Kara, Arielle, and I just went to our pizza man and he bought us all a rose from the rose seller and made our pizzas in the shape of hearts. It's more than a meal- it's a connection. Taste is the medium of my memories, and in the recollecton of these moments I taste the sweetness all over again. The inextorable pull of the palate has me firmly in its grasp, and of it will be in Italy beyond all others places that I forever recall with the clinking of china and the scraping of silverware.