Food for Thought and Love Handles

“Oh you’re in Thailand,” a slender, globetrotting friend wrote me the other day. “You must be enjoying all the excellent fruit.”

“Fruit?” I thought, “What fruit?” While the carts of lychee, pineapples and watermelon don’t look bad, nothing has been further from my mind since I came in contact with the delicacies of Thailand’s street carts over a month ago.

There is fried chicken skin. Yes, I’m not kidding. That thing most health-conscious Americans detach before digging in—is not only eaten here, but fried and sold separately, in little baggies sure to bring happiness Pringles addicts could only dream of.

Thai Iced Teas are sold on most street corners in the morning, along with coffee, green tea, and chocolate drink. If the first gloppy dollop of sweetened and condensed milk were not enough, after pouring it over ice, the vendors add a triumphant layer of unsweetened condensed milk to the top, occasionally throwing in some real milk. Why choose one when you can have both? Trash bags filled only with empty condensed milk cans line streets in popular eating areas. And if you have a hankering for that synthetic, American feel, duck into any Seven Eleven—literally, three to a block in Bangkok--and get a slurpy version for one baht (3 cents) less than the street cart supreme. Clever, clever Americans.

And if your love handles are not already spilling over your jeans just reading about this, there is perfection—a dollop of sweet purple sticky rice topped with flan-like custard, wrapped in a bright green banana leaf and served with coconut milk. When people speak to you while you are eating one of these, you just don’t hear them. It’s their own fault.

Pork, noodle soups, sausages, chicken, curries, fried eggs, myriad sauces with rice are staples too, with the surprisingly infrequent Pad Thai.

And the punch line, as always: Thais are not fat. In Thailand, as elsewhere outside America, portion is king— and babeliciousness is maintained through small portion sizes, not health food consumption. Let that be a lesson to those of you emailing me about fruit.