The most satisfying meal I ever ate was while alone on a bed in a rented room in the speck of a nation called Andorra. I was a hungry 28-year-old backpacker a month or more deep into a summer in Europe.
I’d maxed out my graduate school loans to cover the adventure, a fantasy too long deferred and one that might never again be within grasp. Now or never, it seemed. But the power of the American dollar was diminished and everything was more expensive than expected in Europe.
I’d gotten to Andorra already depleted of resources and nutrients. I was not indulging in Europe’s array of cultures via varied cuisines. I was eating to exist. As such, I stopped in a grocery store and bought three items:
One can of Chef Boyardee ravioli
One bag of dinner rolls
One medium sized bottle of Sunny Delight
And in the room I’d found to rent, I savaged all of it, save possibly a roll or two to jumpstart the next day.
These 20+ years later, I live a grown-up, non-nomadic life, one replete with a wife and two sons. All are inclined toward rating and ranking their favorite meals or foods. Somehow they keep a catalog of such things in their memory banks. I don’t.
My brain does not hold such details of how a food tasted, or from what experience when and where. I have no list ranking my favorite burgers or sushi or, I don’t know, whatever all they recall. But that one meal …
That one can-bag-&-bottle meal so ordinary yet so enjoyed in that solitary room in that tiny principality that’s situated between France and Spain in the Pyrenees mountains? Oh yes, I remember. With great fondness and fullness.
The best meal I ever had.
The Best Meal is #Fifteen in the weekly memoir series, Among Other Things. What’s it about? Read Introducing ‘Among Other Things,’ A Weekly Memoir Series.
