We just returned from a trip to the East Coast. We visited friends in New London, New Hampshire. Then we attended a wedding on Cape Cod. The trip was fabulous. The weather was mostly sunny and warm. The wedding took place on a beautiful stretch of beach, no one was pregnant and both the bride and groom looked happy to be there. The trip was a success in every way but one.

We won’t candy coat this. From a dietary perspective, we cheated more often in the past week than we did in the previous three months combined. This dietary lapse, however, did not come as a surprise. We knew that would fall off our diet and exercise routine even before we purchased our tickets. When it comes to divining the future, Uri Geller and Sylvia Brown can only dream of such certainty.

Our not-so-psychic premonition left us with two choices. We could act surprised when our diets faltered and return home to a week of self-loathing and Nightmare Mode. Or, we could plan ahead and perform the DYC equivalent to the Polio Booster. We opted for immunization.

“How much hairspray does it take to make a McDonald’s Big Mac look edible?”

Our fellow travellers and tasters on our Culinary Tour of Istanbul were the famed food photographers Nancy and Chris Cassidy. Among other projects, they do nearly all of the mouthwatering photography for the Rick Bayless empire. It’s unlikely that they have ever photographed a Big Mac, but we couldn’t resist asking. For the first and possibly only time in our lives, we were sitting across from people who could answer this time-honored question.
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Chris shook his head, clearly indicating that our question was a stupid one. “You can’t do that any more,” he said. “There are still tricks you can use, but everything in the photograph has to be part of the actual dish.”

We would’ve been less shocked if he had told us that the process involved medical waste extruded through a 3D printer. The last thing we expected to learn on our trip was that the fast food pictured in advertisements contained even a small percentage of actual food.

[You may want to start here: DYC Goes to Asia Part 1]

As we mentioned last week, there is still a question which must be answered: if people in Hong Kong and Japan eat tons of high-carb white rice as well a lot of sweets, why don’t they have the same obesity problem we have in America?

We believe the answer lies in calories in vs. calories out. All weight gain or loss is directly tied to this formula. If you eat more than you burn, you put on weight. If you burn more than you consume, your friends start throwing veiled compliments like, “My God, Stan. Where’s the rest of you?”
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There are several factors we observed on our trip that we think dramatically reduce the calories taken in on a typical day in Asia. We will begin with a factor that’s nearly absent in America: surgical masks. Huge numbers of people on the street in Hong Kong and Japan wear surgical masks everywhere they go. To Americans, it gives the streetscape a uniquely post-apocalyptic feel. At the same time, we must admit that it makes snacking more difficult.

Remember how we told you that the world wasn’t going to end in 2012? Turns out that we may not have been entirely right. We just returned from Japan where we saw, with our own eyes, the chilling scene of people in cages feeding monkeys who roam free. It’s a clear harbinger of the apocalypse, although it is worth acknowledging that it has nothing to do with the Mayan calendar. Evidently, Armageddon will look more like the Planet of the Apes.

If you have a bottle of wine you’ve been saving, now is an excellent time to pop the cork. You’re also going to want to spend some time in front of a mirror practicing the words, “Take your stinking paws off me, you damn dirty ape!” If you giggle, even nervously, it will be interpreted as a sign of weakness by our simian overloads.
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Knowledge of the coming monkey rebellion—we assume it will be referred to as the Monkeypocalypse—is not all we brought back from our trip. We also learned that staying on DYC is more than a little difficult in cultures with rice-based cuisines, particularly when we don’t know enough of the local language to say, “Extra veggies, no rice.”

Perhaps the four most frightening words we’ve ever heard spoken are, “No, no. Not spicy.” We were sitting in Chili Fagara, a small Sichuan Chinese restaurant in Hong Kong just a few blocks away from the Cat Street market. We’d just polished off the last of an appetizer called Dumplings in Chili Sauce which was essentially pork-filled ravioli floating in a thick stew of bubbling red chili oil. It was the single spiciest food either of us had ever tasted. We were on fire. We were visibly soaked in sweat. No quantity of beer seemed able to quench the burn. We grew up in Colorado. We pride ourselves on being able to handle spice. If this restaurant considered this dish “not spicy,” we were in serious trouble.
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The waitress must have seen panic on our faces. She smile softly and added, “Not spicy, numbing.” And she was absolutely correct. It took a moment to realize it, but our mouths weren’t on fire at all. The sensation we were feeling was more akin to having your foot fall asleep or licking a nine-volt battery. For the first time in our lives, we were experiencing numbness. It turns out that there’s a sixth taste about which we we’d never heard.

We are adventurous eaters. Aside from a few obvious restrictions from allergies and Drink Your Carbs, pretty much anything else is fair game. If we’re travelling and the local delicacy is squirrel heads our only question is: “How are they prepared?” As long as they aren’t battered, fried or drowned in a cream sauce, we’re all over it.
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Of all of the foods we’ve been fortunate to try, the most perfect Drink Your Carbs food we have ever come across was Meat Cooked in the Manner of Thieves on the Greek island of Crete. Whole, salted fish-on-a-stick in Kyoto, Japan was a close second, but it just can’t compete when it comes to backstory.