Comida: Part One

It's often the seemingly small details that catch your attention while living in a foreign place. I find myself taking note of differences between life in Bilbao and life in Canada that I never could have foreseen before coming here. Aspects of life that I took for granted while living in North America but that simply don't work the same way here.

One big difference is the differences in attitudes toward food. Last year, I tried to teach a lesson in one of my English classes about Slow Food, a back to basics movement started in reaction to the proliferation of fast food that encourages people to reconnect with food through eating local and organic, eating homemade, eating for flavour as opposed to convenience and rediscovering the pleasure of cooking and eating with family and friends.

"I don't understand this movement," one of my students told me. "Homemade food, slow meals, eating together with family? That's just how we eat here."

And she's right. Cooking, cooking, eating, family and friends are all things taken very seriously in the Basque Country, so the Slow Food movement seems a little redundant. And though fast food and convenience food are more and more popular, their popularity is nowhere near what it is in North America. Fast food outlets are generally restricted to suburban malls on the city outskirts, and when they opened a McDonald's on Bilbao's main drag years ago, it eventually went bankrupt.

North America people are falling into two camps. The "live to eat" camp: Foodies, locavores, organic-or-bust shoppers and those who live, eat and shop by Michael Pollan's In Defense of Food manifesto: "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." And then the "eat to live"-ers: Those who blissfully ignore the hoop-la around fast food and Wonder Bread and spray cheese and food colouring and mechanically separated pork byproducts and hydrogenated this-and-that.

But in the Basque Country you don't have such polarization simply because attitudes and practices surrounding food have not become so unhealthy as to necessitate a revolution, a reaction or a manifesto.

For example, both Slow Food and In Defense of Food recommend seeing cooking and eating as an event to be shared with family and friends. Eating in your car or from Drive-thru's is a major no-no. But here? Moot point. I've seen maybe one Drive-Thru since I've been here, and requesting evenn a coffee "to go" is seen as kind of strange. The thinking is, if you want a coffee, go into a Cafe-Bar, take 5 minutes to drink it there. You're really not saving that much time taking your coffee to go.

And I think they're right.

People don't eat and drink walking down the street, in stores, in the metro, on the bus, like they do at home. They'll just wait till they get home, or pop into a cafe for a snack, or at the very least sit down in a park to enjoy their drink. I've started doing it too; it's less messy, you enjoy what you're eating more, and in the end, you don't really waste that much time.

Similarly, fast food hasn't taken off here ( in my opinion) because of the fact that on every street corner here you have a cafe/bar. Inside they serve everything from hot drinks and pastries to alcohol, sandwiches, tortilla and pintxos. If you're craving a snack, why would you order a BigMac, when you can pop into a bar and get a mini Iberian ham sandwich on homemade crusty bread or a pintxo of fresh seafood or local cheese? Instantly? And for 2 euros? With nary a neon light in sight.