I’ll eat anything offered to me when I’m travelling (except licorice)

April 2, 2026 — 5:00am

Always say yes to the food you’re offered: this is my rigid travel philosophy. Unless it’s liquorice, in which case I’m obliged, for reasons of public health and safety, to politely decline.

Once, while staying at Benesse House on Japan’s Naoshima island, I was served a sublime-looking chocolate dessert; even before the waiter had placed the confection before me, I’d sensed my nemesis lurking within: liquorice, the last thing I expected in this land of nuanced flavours and genteel etiquette. It’s the one thing I cannot eat; my stomach simply refuses to contain it.

Noxious substances notwithstanding, I’m no foodie prude. My tastebuds were trained on a South African childhood diet of ox tongue, chicken livers peri peri, biltong and the occasional restaurant treat of snails in garlic butter sauce. My father’s favourite dish of tripe smelled fetid but tasted bland; his preferred snack of dried mopane worms was crunchy and vaguely herbaceous.

Cartons of umqombothi appeared in the fridge occasionally, but I was an adult when I took my first sip of this African beer. The maize and sorghum mash had been fermenting for days; inside the calabash swam a foamy, acrid brew; it was reminiscent of the spittle-doused chicha I’d later encounter in Ecuador’s Amazon. I drank my fill. The verdict? Give me a Soweto Gold lager instead.

My new home, Australia, offered an alternative menu: kangaroo steaks, camel pie, emu carpaccio, crocodile skewers. The wallaby filet cooked for me in Tasmania by a MasterChef finalist and avowed forager was succulent, though I was a tad queasy about its origin: a friend hunted it, she said, right after sharing her penchant for collecting roadkill and turning it into haute cuisine. Had this steak been tenderised on the tar, I wondered?

I was more conflicted when offered raw reindeer while staying with the Nenets reindeer herders in western Siberia’s Yamal Peninsula. I’d watched the herder kneeling before the doomed creature and giving her thanks; I’d witnessed her taking her last breath. Her body was still warm as a Nenets man sliced a filament from her liver, dipped it in her salted blood and held it out to me. Later, I’d be slurping reindeer soup for dinner; it would be hypocritical to refuse this man’s elemental offering. The liver left a metallic taste on my tongue, and an aftertaste of sorrow.

Less troubling were the worms my guide unearthed from a seed pod in the Peruvian Amazon. Following his lead, I popped one into my mouth. It was lemony, not unlike the green ant I’d plucked from a tree in West Arnhem Land at the direction of my Indigenous guide. Still, fire has a way of making protein more palatable: the plump chontacuro larvae threaded onto skewers and grilled over coals at a roadside stall in Ecuador tasted like crispy chicken.

Some unfamiliar eats have eluded me – notably balut, the fertilised eggs enjoyed in parts of South East Asia. They slipped from my not-so-desperate grasp when Manila’s gridlock prevented my Filipino host from reaching the vendor’s stall before closing time. No skin off my nose. No egg on my face.

Of all the oddments I’ve ingested – Cambodian frog legs, Myanmarese grasshoppers, Russian horsemeat, the sacred slice of turtle offered by a Kuku Yalanji man in Far North Queensland – there’s only one (besides that liquorice-laced dessert) I simply couldn’t abide: goat’s trotters, which I ordered from a restaurant in Soweto. It wasn’t the taste that offended me, but the bovine malodour that assaulted my senses as I raised a brothy spoonful to my lips. Just one taste and I was – rather sheepishly – defeated.