Food Safety

You're not really supposed to eat in foreign countries. At least not in 'real' foreign countries where there aren't any product labels or FDAs or USDAs or recall alerts. You're told to be pretty wary anytime you're in a place where they don't require the health inspector's grade to be prominently displayed in the window.

You can't eat raw fruits or vegetables, even if you're in a country that sources its produce to your local grocery store. There could be bugs or bacteria or god-knows-what. Cooking is the only safe way to go, and even then, you have to make sure everything has hit a certain temperature to ensure proper sanitation. Do I need to say don't drink the water? Of course I don't. But I may need to warn you not to drink anything that doesn't come directly from a sealed bottle. The ice. The ice in that Coke Light you just got served is made of water that hasn't been properly boiled.

Obviously, you shouldn't eat street food. It's prepared by poor people who are trying to poison you. (Maybe. You never know.) This was a hard rule to follow on my 4th hour into a 7 hour train trip in Ecuador. I was riding from Riobamba to Alousi on top of a train, and the supply of Oreos I'd bought at breakfast had run out. I could smell the empanadas as we pulled into the station. A few of the other starving train travelers bought them and gorged away happily. They looked sensational. I fingered the bottle of Cipro in my bag and passed.

But no one got sick, which almost pissed me off. I missed out on delicious empanadas for no good reason.

Years later, I was in Thailand, and I wasn't going to make the same mistake again. They don't serve street empanadas in Thailand, but they do sell freshly caught shrimp off random shrimping canoes to vacationing sailors. It's a boat-to-boat transaction. There's no way the government can be involved. I purchased live shrimp from a man in a loincloth, and I ate them, and they were delicious.