food
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FOR various reasons, I seem to be "going native" as the saying goes. I became aware of one of them through an email from a friend in England, in which she told me about a meal she had had in a restaurant and what she had eaten: "Pan-fried salmon, on a bed of mashed sweet potato, with a walnut pesto."
Pesto originally comes from Italy and is made from pine-nuts (songren) ground up with olive oil, herbs, and a little hard cheese. It has now become fashionable in England, and is used in many ways quite different from the way the Italians use it. Often it is made with different ingredients walnuts instead of pine-nuts in my friend's case. So why did this make me feel a little alien? It was the differences between the two "food cultures" that struck me.
In the West, when you go to a restaurant, you choose what you yourself want to eat; you do not choose a dish to share it with others. So Rebecca wrote, "I had .....