TRAVEL + LEISURE / MARCH 2016
A Bite of New
Celebrated children's books author ROOPA PAI tells us sweet
and tangy tales of travelling with two kids who have polar
opposite views on food. ILLUSTRATION BY SHREYA KHARBANDAEven though you yourself are nothing like
your sibling, it is always a bit of a shock to
discover how diff erent your own kids are from
one another. Mine certainly are. Where food
philosophies are concerned, the two—Girl
(18) and Boy (13)—are at opposite s ides of the
spectrum. It has made for interesting times for
us as a family, particularly when we travel.GIRL VS FOOD
Travelling with the girl is a breeze—she’s easy about food,
as she is about everything else. When she turned 8, we
took her to the famed Sunday brunch at the Leela Palace
to celebrate. She raced excitedly from one laden counter to
another, oohing over the tottering piles of Danish, aahing
over the fragrant cinnamon rolls. Then she stopped short at
the very end of the Indian lunch spread, fi lled a plate with
curd rice, and proceeded to scarf it down with indecent
haste, looking blissfully happy.
But the girl has her preferences, her likes and dislikes—
yes to cheesecake and prawns, anytime; no to mushrooms,
yes to medium-to-well-done pepper steak, ‘Are you kidding
me?’ to baingan. Her appetite is elastic—if we are on the
road somewhere in the hinterland, she will work her way
through a packet of biscuits and half a packet of chips
between breakfast and dinner and be okay, settling down to
a gigantic meal—two double chicken shwarma rolls chased
down with lemon ice tea, followed by a doorstopper wedge
of chocolate cake—when we hit civilisation again.
Her food philosophy when we travel abroad is simple:
she likes her food without eyes, tail or whiskers, and from a
familiar genre—pizza, pasta, fried (familiar) meat in a bun,
rice, dessert; she is not one of life’s great adventurers. In Cape
Town, she gave the ostrich burger a wide berth. In a Singapore
kopitiam that became our de rigueur breakfast place, she took
one look at the hundred diff erent unidentifi able edibles being
dished out, and ordered kaya toast for fi ve days straight. In
Liverpool, on a mom-daughter holiday, we walked into a Tesco
one night and picked up a large apple pie (slashed to 99p) and a
tub of icecream for dinner because neither she—nor I—could
stomach the thought of bland fi sh and boring vinegary chips.
In short, she makes a great travel companion for a
vegetarian mom—pizza and pasta places usually have a veggie
option, and the world, thank god, has no non-veg desserts (oh
wait, Japan does—raw horse meat ice cream, anyone?)—who
much prefers chai to real food, and isn’t often hungry.FAMILY TRAVEL