That was good. What do you want for supper?

Eating in Thailand: 

Kevin

It's hard not to talk a lot about food when chronicling a trip here since the Thai people and their visitors spend so much time eating and eating with great intensity out in public. The French do this too but you don't really see them actually swallowing any food..they just jabber and smoke  in each others' faces while the food cools between them.

The Thai people eat with great concentration and little conversation, and not because they  or not sociable or use chopsticks. It's just that the food is so delicious. 

The standard utensils are a fork and big spoon. The fork is used to fill the spoon with the a specific amount of rice, vegetables and/or meat, and topping. The perfect mouthful is then shoveled into the mouth. Then on to the next succulent morsel. Why chat when you can work on constructing the next delicious biteful? What is there to talk about? How many times can you intone , "This is so fucking good" or ask "Are you going to finish that?" Just shut up and eat.

It's, of course, a cliche to observe that what these people are eating is the most delicious national cuisine in the world. I am not going out on a limb in saying it might be impossible to find a bad meal anywhere here--outside of ,yes, McDonald's--whether it is prepared by a woman squatting on a curb or by a chef in starched whites in an elegant restaurant. Damn, even those Lay's chips taste better than ours.   In Chiang Mai, Bangkok, Ayutthaya,  we ate a meals prepared on a primitive mountain top, in a fast food restaurant, in a Chinese banquet hall, in a mall food court, and in an swank hotel restaurant. In truth the only difference was in the decor, the  price, and the willingness to risk dysentery.   Each dish we downed was delicious and distinctive. There is no one way to make Pad Thai but all versions taste great. 

 What seems to make the food so special is the availability of ingredients and the interest in creating dishes that layer flavors onto them.   Familiar items   like chicken, eggs, pork just taste better here and are the case of fruit, the variety and level ripeness is simply unavailable elsewhere. It's so interesting to watch school kids slurping down dishes of noodles with blood sausage and bok choy, food it would take the jaws of life to get an American kid to consider eating. What's also interesting is that in a culture where everyone seems to be eating all day,  there are very few fat people...except for us tourists. 

Es