Whale blubber ice cream, anyone?

Things gradually grew more complicated, with people starting to cook across racial, social and, eventually, national lines. So you had the Trinidadian curry stew and the English tikka masala, for example. Nowadays, anyone who adheres to the limited diets of just ten, 20 years ago is seen as unadventurous and boring. The meals themselves are viewed as monotonous. Rice five days in a row? You joking!

Food has not only gone international — in Uzbekistan, you can buy an authentic Texan steak with pico de gallo and fajitas — but it’s become daring too. In Japan, the dizzying assortment of culinary delights includes, somewhat disgustingly, whale blubber ice cream. But it’s easy to forget all that when, at 10 pm. on a Sunday night, you’re trawling the streets of London for a fast food restaurant that sells vegetarian food.

As someone who doesn’t eat meat, I can tell you that the culinary world isn’t the great embarrassment of choice that we all assume it to be. The world is littered with pizza, Chinese (of course), kebabs and burgers. And more and more people have stopped eating meat so you would imagine things would be easier. But sometimes, try to get anything that doesn’t have meat or any animal by-products (and this includes eggs) and you wind up just going home and eating a banana and going to sleep.

I eat fish because not eating it makes eating out a desperate, impossible situation in a country where peas and beans are not common side dishes. A former co-worker warned me about this years ago, when she did a tour of Europe and suffered because almost every country she visited not only did not serve legumes, but almost every dish consisted of beef cooked in various ways. I’ve also included eggs in my diet because, well, push come to shove I can get some Chinese food but this almost invariably contains egg.

But as I hunt the streets of the city on a daily basis looking for appropriate food, a new category of eaters has cropped up that leaves me, well, baffled. They’re called locovores and what they do, quite simply put, is only eat food that is locally produced. Sounds easy? Think about it. Food that is only grown in the town/city/or country where you live. If there is a culinary hell, this has to be one of the strongest contenders. In a world where most of our food comes from a dizzying array of sources, short of starting your own farm, your options would be extremely limited.

Recently, a Russian journalist who works for the newspaper KP.RU —Komsomolskaya Pravda tried to be a locovore for a week. She failed. She couldn’t even buy bread since the flour was Russian but the sugar came from Brazil and Cuba, the yeast from France and the milk may have been imported. The real stinger of the experiment was that when she did manage to find 100 percent Russian food, it costs up to 40 percent more than the imported stuff. And I thought fruitarians were bad. What’s a fruitarian? Someone who doesn’t eat cooked food but rather only fruits and seeds since they believe the act of cooking food is physically and emotionally addictive and tantamount to murder. Imagine being a locovore fruitarian. It has to be one of the more novel forms of self torture. The thing is, just when finding something good to eat is supposed to be at its simplest, it’s not. In the past, the amount of manpower needed to ensure that we did not die of starvation was enormous. Now, we have machines that do the work of thousands in a fraction of the time it used to in the past with little wastage. We have enough food to feed everyone in the world several times over, yet mothers in Haiti are giving their children dirt to eat. Meanwhile, there are people in the world who are so certain of their next meal that they can whittle their options down to virtually nothing. For something that’s a basic need, food has become awfully complicated.

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