A Cultural Manifesto: With Flavor

It seems no matter how much a culture dislikes a new group displacing them, there are two things they’ll accept: their food and their attractive women. And that’s because food (and beauty) transcend. They move through cultures without friction, yet food is a strong cultural identifier. When a migrant or a sailor is far from home, they miss two things: their family and their comfort foods.

Ride > Eat > Repeat exists because of this. It is the lens to investigate how food shapes culture, and how culture shapes food. How did the fortune cookie become so popular in America that Chinese Restaurants throughout Asia now carry them (even some in China)? Why is sushi a fusion cuisine in the American west but closer to traditional fare on the Atlantic side? This is our launchpad and our destination.

And this isn’t just history — it’s fieldwork. We need to taste what’s happening now. We need to work our way north and watch how the taco changes as you get further from Mexico (and taste a few as we go). We need to meet the people putting on a fish fry at a local church and hear the conversations in the kitchen and out at the serving line.

And out in the field we don’t judge: we taste. The “Gringo Taco” popularized by fast food chains still deserves love, so long as you remember it isn’t trying to be anything except what it is. We’ll sample the best Haute cuisine in every city, but we’ll never shy away from gas station fried chicken. Life is too short to be a food snob.

It’s not all about food either. We’ll talk about campfire cooking and easy to make recipes that fit in your saddlebag. That also means you’ll need to know how to buy good cooking gear, a decent stove, and you’ll need to know how to clean plates and pans when you’re camping in the desert or away from a water source.

We’ll get into the “why” of food but also the “how” and — more importantly — the “where.” It sucks to stare a pictures of food if you can’t look up the place and plan a trip yourself. If you want the stories, the routes, and the recipes as we find them, you can sign up for The Weekly Dispatch below. So saddle up, pardner, I the road is calling, and it is saying “let’s get tacos.”