Exotics

When I'm traveling my priorities change(*), and when lunching with colleagues I defer to majority tastes, but when going out to eat from home I prefer to eat something we don't make at home. Since our Youngest Daughter is in a culinary arts program, the latter category is getting smaller. That points me towards different cuisines--most recently Peruvian fusion and Korean. Bibimbap is a good comfort food. (When I first went into a Korean restaurant I decided to go as outre as possible, and the description "rice salad" seemed weird enough. I've liked it ever since.)

My reasons are mixed. There's a bit of "Why waste $$$ on something we can do ourselves?", a little "It isn't as good as yours" (or the dread "Can you get their recipe?"), and some of "If we're going to live differently tonight, let's go whole hog."

I don't know whether the tendency is world-wide, but we in the USA (me too) have a something of a fascination for the exotic. IIRC the French had it before us, and I gather so did the Romans before them. I can't tell about Liberians, for example, because the Western culture is omnipresent whether they like it or not. In Senegal the traditional wrestlers are heavily into oriental martial arts now, but it seems to be because they are more effective rather than because of any sort of fashion for the exotic.

I have to try to take this fascination with the exotic into account in other ways too. I've evangelical/baptist background, but when camping some months back where the only churches with convenient services were Methodist and Catholic, my first and ultimate preference was for the Catholic rather than the presumably more congenial Methodist. Part of that bias was because of the studies I've been doing in church history, but it didn't occur to me until later that I'd never actually researched Methodism as it is practiced.

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(*) Food: rapidly, inexpensively, tasting OK, that I won't need Cipro afterwards for. Eating you can do anywhere. Dining you need friends for.