Become a Tourist at Home: Let Your Appetite Wander
Bangkok, 2019. I eat som tam from a cart wedged between two massage parlors, the kind of establishment that would make me uncomfortable at home but somehow feels authentic here. The papaya salad burns my tongue with perfect intensity—chili, lime, fish sauce creating chemistry I’d never attempt in my own kitchen.
Back in Dhaka, I order the same jhinga curry every week from the restaurant downstairs.
Why does geography liberate appetite? Why do we become culinary explorers the moment we cross borders, while remaining creatures of habit in our home cities?
Travel grants us temporary exemption from our constructed identities. The careful food persona I maintain at home—someone who knows what he likes, who has refined preferences, who doesn’t waste money on experiments—dissolves at altitude somewhere over the Bay of Bengal.
In foreign places, we’re anonymous. Nobody knows our history of conservative choices, our established patterns, our reputation for playing it safe. We can order blindly, point at menu items we can’t pronounce, accept whatever the vendor assumes we should eat. We become blank slates for new experiences.
But there’s deeper psychology at work. Travel represents finite time, compressed opportunity. I have exactly ten days in Vietnam—every meal becomes precious real estate that must be maximized. Wasting a meal on familiar food feels like squandering unrepeatable chances.
At home, meals stretch infinite. Tomorrow offers another opportunity to try something new, so today we can safely retreat to comfortable choices. The abundance of time makes adventure feel optional rather than urgent.
Distance also provides perfect excuse for dietary boundary-crossing. The vegetarian who hasn’t eaten meat in years will try pho bo in Hanoi because “when in Rome…” The person who avoids spicy food will accept eye-watering mapo tofu in Sichuan because “this is the authentic way.”
Travel becomes permission slip for temporary personality changes.
But perhaps most significantly: travel removes social consequences from food choices. If I order something adventurous and hate it, only strangers witness the failure. No friends will tease me, no family will remember, no colleagues will question my judgment. Adventure without social risk.
The irony is profound: we become most ourselves—curious, open, willing to risk disappointment for possibility of discovery—when we’re furthest from home. Meanwhile, surrounded by people who know us best, we perform the most restrictive versions of ourselves.
The real tragedy isn’t that we eat conservatively at home—it’s that we wait for geography to grant permission for curiosity that should be available anywhere. The som tam vendor who changed my understanding of Southeast Asian cuisine has a counterpart in every city, including mine. The willingness to try new things shouldn’t require passport stamps.
Maybe the solution isn’t traveling more—it’s learning to travel at home, to approach familiar places with tourist curiosity, to grant ourselves the same permission for culinary adventure that crossing time zones automatically provides.
The next time I walk past an unfamiliar restaurant in my own neighborhood, I’ll pretend I’m visiting from somewhere else, that this meal might be my only chance to try something new in this city, that nobody here knows my history of safe choices.
Sometimes the longest journeys begin by becoming strangers to ourselves without leaving home.
