Tastes that are as big as Texas

After eating myself silly for the past few days, I’ve decided to take a break and just sit still in front of the computer for a while, until it’s time for dinner. Yes, I’m in Italy, and dinner is served quite late here—an 8 o’clock reservation is the equivalent of the old-timer’s early bird special. There’s still a lot for me to process, but I will just say this: if you’re the kind of person who gets excited when they have free samples at the grocery store, I highly recommend you make the trip to Slow Food’s Salone del Gusto, a biannual fair held in Turin that showcases artisanal food from around the world. I couldn’t tell you how many booths there were (I’m a bad attendee as I haven’t fully read all my pamphlets), but let’s just say after five hours of wandering the halls of the Lingotto, I felt like I still hadn’t tasted everything. And yes I had a full belly, a light head and a pocket stuffed with toothpicks. Some of the foods I sampled: algas marinas from Chile; kanihua, a grain flour from Peru; chaam chicken, an endangered species from the Netherlands; asiago with honey; more stinky cheeses than I can count; uncooked and uncured sausage from Bra; smoky mezcal from Mexico (hence the light head); enough varieties of olive oil to fill a library; bitter chocolate, milk chocolate and hazelnut chocolate; purple grapes as big as plums; fois gras and various other pates; some strange hard ball of cheese with a tangy oozing center; my first whiff of a fresh, white truffle as big as a baseball—and that’s just the beginning.
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