Pill or Meal – Would you make the trade?

If you could get all the nutrition you needed in a day with a pill — no worrying about what to eat, no food preparation — would you do it?

That question was posed by our friends at WordPress in The Daily Post recently. My immediate gut reaction was, “What? Heck no!” I am one for whom, while important, the nutritional value of food is a bonus. I eat because I like food! If it’s also good for me, all the better. (Thankfully, I really don’t like the bad stuff. Sugary snacks rarely pass my lips but I just can’t pass on fruit, veggies or cheese. Or bacon, of course.)

For many, food is a huge part of the appeal of travel. Sometimes it’s the entire purpose of travel. You don’t have to look hard to find gastronomy tours, cuisine camps, pub crawls, tapas tours…the list goes merrily on. Even when it’s not the focal point, many travelers have a list of must-try restaurants on the itinerary. As they say, “You must eat, so you might as well eat well.”

It only makes sense that food is often an important element in travel. As cultural explorers, we naturally want to learn all we can about our hosts and their ways. Just as we have comfort foods that reflect our passions, traditions, agriculture and heritage, so do the lands we visit. Not sampling local dishes would be to miss a distinct and important element of life and culture. Can you imagine visiting Venice and skipping the canals? Just as they are integral in daily life, so is food.

I see food from around the world almost as an extreme sport (but not in a Bizarre Foods kind of way). The elite athletes who engage in these death defying stunts inevitably say they do it for the rush of adrenaline. Similarly, there is an inexplicable satisfaction when you bite into something and feel like your mouth, maybe your whole head will explode with sheer happiness. Possibly it’s a flavor you remember; maybe it is something entirely new to you. All you know is that it’s good. Unbelievably good. You may not remember every moment of the trip, but you will always remember that one. Nicely enough, you can generally recreate that feeling – usually without risking life and limb – by visiting a restaurant or learning to cook the dish yourself, and by continuing to try new dishes wherever you travel.

No, I would certainly not prefer to get my daily nourishment in pill form because food doesn’t just feed the body. A good meal is nourishment for the soul, the psyche and, sometimes, the sense of adventure. And besides…it just tastes good!

Here are just a few reasons why I would say no to the pill:

• 14 Great Central Vietnamese Dishes on Serious Eats
• Top 10 Foods of France (Oh my – Chocolate Souffle!) from Expatica.com
• Travel + Leisure’s Best Mexican Restaurants in the US on Yahoo! Travel
• From Dolmades to Baklava, We Can’t Get Enough from Huffington Post

Now, if I could take a pill that let me eat all of these without gaining a billion pounds, I might be interested. What about you? Do you travel to eat or is it just a necessary evil in your itinerary?