7 things I learned eating foods from 23 World Cup countries (2024)

July 24, 2018 4:00 pm ET

Over the course of the 2018 World Cup, I sampled staple foods from 23 of the 32 countries that participated in the event without leaving the New York City area. I initially hoped to hit all 32, but swiftly abandoned that goal when I learned it’d be extremely difficult to track down foods that could accurately be attributed to a few of the countries — Saudi Arabia and Panama, especially. The complete archive of my adventures is here.

Here are seven things I learned in the process:

1. Food is amazing

For real, though. For all our differences in appearance and culture and beliefs and values, people are all pretty darn similar biologically, and we’re all drawn by millions of years’ worth of evolution to appreciate those flavors and textures that allowed our simian forefathers and cave-dwelling ancestors to survive under harsh circ*mstances. Palates vary, of course, but we tend to like hearty things that give us strength and sweet things that give us energy and starchy things that give us sustenance.

And few cultures I know of at any point seemed content to think, “OK, we’ve got cows and spinach and potatoes, this is all we really need to survive, let’s just eat this stuff and only this stuff.” Dive into the backstory of any popular regional foodstuff and you will undoubtedly find some evidence of cross-cultural exchange — some cheesemaking village of antiquity adjacent a hill full of ham-smoking pig farmers willing to trade, and so forth. Human history often seems like it can be boiled down to the course of people around the globe always seeking better food.

One of the most surprising things about the whole endeavor, I found, was how familiar so many of the foods tasted. It could be that there’s only a limited range of edible flavor combinations that people find pleasant, and you kind of just run into them over and over again. Or it could be that, because I ate all these foods within a 20-mile radius of my home, they were all prepared with ingredients available around here and are only Americanized versions of their overseas namesakes. Maybe someday someone will sell New York’s interpretation of Serbian food in China, the way there are people in the U.S. now serving Peruvian-Chinese cuisine.

2. The 5 best things I ate

Everyone I told about this venture asked me to name the best thing I tried, so I’m busting out a sub-listicle to celebrate five particularly memorable foods. This obviously does not reflect which countries have the best food so much as it does my ability to identify and secure foods I enjoyed from each country, and, probably, how hungry I was when I ate them. Click on the names to revisit the original posts.

1. Serbian pljeskavica
2. Brazilian feijoada
3. Russian pelmeni
4. Senegalese lamb maafe
5. Danish kanelsnurre

3. The World Cup is kind of dope

Before the World Cup started, I wrote a haters’ guide to enjoying the event for this website. And while soccer as a sport remains really not for me (more on that in a minute), visiting so many different neighborhoods gave me further appreciation for the World Cup as a global spectacle. It’s hard to think of anything else that captures attentions and imaginations in practically all corners of the world. There’s just no way as many people in as many places get up for the Olympics the same way. If you need to find some cultural common ground with any random human from anywhere, your best bets are probably the World Cup and Bob Marley, and that’s it.

Played out just in New York city, it’s an awesome slideshow of the area’s diversity, all tied together thematically by the soccer games perpetually airing in the background. At one stop, a match’s Spanish-language broadcast blares out into the street from speakers set up outside a clothing store. At another, African dudes sit over steaming stew and lament Senegal’s tough-luck loss. I even found myself, on multiple occasions, faking like I knew or cared about the outcome of the event on behalf of making pleasantries. That said…

4. Soccer’s still not really for me

I apologize. And I know that American guys complaining about soccer is extremely, like, 2004, and I want to make it clear that I believe people should be entitled to do whatever the hell they want with their leisure time as long as it’s not infringing upon anyone else. I’m not trying to tell you that you shouldn’t enjoy soccer, just as I wouldn’t expect you to tell me I shouldn’t enjoy baseball. We’ve all got preferences and such.

But watching more of the World Cup than I might otherwise put me in better touch with why soccer doesn’t really appeal to me, and as far as I can figure, the issue is twofold.

First, I recognize that World Cup players are incredible athletes and inconceivably good at soccer, and I find it utterly astonishing that they can control the ball as well as they do. A perfectly placed pass in soccer is an amazing thing to behold, in large part because it seems so unlikely anyone should be able to manage that, given the size of the playing surface and the number of opponents running around. But I prefer sports where the players have a little more control of what’s happening. I don’t see this as any sort of flaw fundamental to soccer so much as the aesthetic I personally appreciate in sports I enjoy. But I suspect I would get over this aspect of soccer and ultimately come to love it if I invested more of my time in the game.

What I can’t get past is the flopping. And I know flopping is often a smart strategy necessary to call the ref’s attention to some illegal contact, but it seems completely specious to draw comparisons between flopping and something like a baseball catcher trying to frame pitches. In the latter, a call must be made, and the catcher is trying to have it swayed in his team’s favor. Flopping is an effort to force a call where it would otherwise not exist, and, for a handful of reasons, it seems completely antithetical to sport. I can’t understand why more people don’t find it insulting: My man writhes on the ground clutching his knee like he’s never going to walk again, then gets up and sprints away. It looks ridiculous, and it happens way too often. And yes, I hate it when guys flop in basketball, too. There should be no room for flopping in any sport. If the rules of your sport make flopping a good strategy, you need to change the rules. Down with flopping.

5. Borders are fairly arbitrary

I’m not trying to get at all political here, but I don’t think this observation should really count as politics: National borders often seem arbitrary, or at least generally incongruous to the ethnic particulars of the areas they govern.

The same thing kept happening when I was trying to find foods. I’d come upon a dish deemed a national delicacy of some World Cup country, then research further and learn that it actually began as a regional sub-speciality of someplace inside that World Cup country. Recipes for many of the foods I ate, and the cultures that produced them, long predate the borders that now define these nations.

Maybe it’s just my own ignorance, but I suspect many other Americans sleep on this concept because our major borders have remained fairly static for the last 170 years, and because the overwhelming majority of people who live here have familial roots overseas. But it turns out a bunch of these World Cup countries, in their internationally recognized shapes, represent both the ancestral home and current location of several-to-dozens of distinct peoples, all with their own traditions and dialects and cuisines.

There’s overlap and intermingling, and the national boundaries, in many cases, seem just one more set of blurry lines. Tarte flambee, here representing France, comes from Alsace, which has changed hands between France and Germany five times since the late 17th century, and where nearly 40% of the population speaks the Alsatian dialect of German. Jollof rice, the Nigerian entry, gets its name from the Jollof or Wolof Empire and and the Wolof people, who now roll six million deep in Senegal, but was spread throughout West Africa — it is believed — by merchants in the Mali Empire.

On and on like that. Maybe this all seems obvious to those who spend less of their time examining the MLB trade-deadline market for left-handed bench bats, but to me, the most interesting takeaways from this exercise were its countless sociocultural and historical lessons and refreshers. The Wikipedia is phenomenal.

6. The bike-to-food method of appetite enhancement

When I told people about my assignment eating World Cup foods, many of them asked or joked about how much weight I must be gaining. Truth is, I tacked on more weight in four days of covering the MLB All-Star Game than I did in a month of tracking down unfamiliar — and often extremely rich — dishes.

This one’s pretty easy to explain: I biked to practically all these places. Doing so also meant covering all my other errands on bike-back, and by my best estimate, I rode somewhere around 280 miles on weekdays alone between June 14 and July 13. The drawback is being perpetually sweaty, and I owe an enormous debt of gratitude to various coffee shops around the city for providing air conditioning, space to work, bathrooms for changing t-shirts, and, naturally, caffeine to keep me chugging along.

It’s hardly groundbreaking that physical activity helps us eat delicious foods with fewer consequences, but I witnessed first-hand the enormous potential of bicycling for appetite enhancement when I met up with a dude I know in Pittsburgh in the midst of a cross-country bike ride on which he averaged about 50 miles a day. I watched this guy eat two huge sandwiches from Primanti Brothers in the course of about 20 minutes. About an hour later, he ate a third gigantic sandwich. We parted ways soon after, and I remember thinking, “there goes the coolest guy I have ever seen in my entire life.”

7. Biking is the best way to see New York City

This last one’s largely a tip to able-bodied locals and adventurous tourists: There’s really no better way to see and experience New York City than on a bike.

There’s a feeling you get when you unexpectedly come upon a place you’ve been before, a sense of the world you inhabit compressing around you with a more refined orientation. Such moments make a place seem a bit more comprehensible and manageable, and turn flags on a Google Map into real navigational reference points.

And biking to various unexplored enclaves — even after living in the New York metro area for my entire life — becomes a near-constant reminder that the city is far smaller and more negotiable than its crowds and its crush would have you believe. Neighborhoods transition across the course of a yardstick. The little stretch of Uruguayan eateries in Queens is right near the spot where you always used to get lost driving out of Shea Stadium; the Polish place you sought is around the corner from that former church where you saw once your friend’s band play. By “you” I mean “me,” here.

Riding a bike for transportation means operating on your own schedule, moving at your own pace, and taking your own path. For the most part, it proves faster than any subway trip that requires a transfer.

This is another thing treated as politics that doesn’t really seem like it should be political. I know, from ample experience, that biking is an extremely convenient, efficient, and inexpensive way to travel in this area. And given the way the streets and subways and buses all seem stretched to capacity already, the bike option feels like something the city and its residents should want to encourage. There are far more bike lanes — and far more bike ridership — than existed here even just a few years ago, but the city’s cycling infrastructure still has a long, long way to go. Striped lanes are too often ignored, separated lanes are too often blocked, there’s far too little signage, and good luck finding anywhere to safely and unobtrusively lock up a bike in midtown.

So it’s not for the faint of heart, I suppose.

But when you’re speeding across the George Washington Bridge and look out at the city’s expanses, it’s impossible to avoid its bedazzling allure. There’s New York, with its dueling, triumphant skylines in Midtown and the Financial District and satellite towers growing across the water in Long Island City and New Jersey, alive in all its recesses with the sticky summertime bustle of commerce and industry and daily mundanities, full of crowded highways and empty byways and dark nooks and charming crannies where weathered curiosities spar against glitzy modernity. And the people, crammed in or spread out throughout its broad sweep — the business-casual bro stepping out into traffic near Times Square, the little girl splashing in the Jackson Heights sprinkler park, the guy in the sea plane touching down in the East River, the teenagers smoking weed on a pedestrian overpass above the Grand Central, the super in Sugar Hill sweeping up the sidewalk, the swimsuited canoodlers on a lonely beach in Fort Washington Park, the tourists, the cabbies, the financiers, the doormen, the old lady languishing on a beach chair on her balcony in Forest Hills — they’re all part of it, contributors, for its heterogeneity is inseparable from its vigor.

To see from a distance all that I can see up close, I can’t help but appreciate my good fortune — that this should be my playground! How lucky I am, to have the time and energy and ability to tour this city’s far reaches and enjoy even tiny fractions of all they can offer. There are easier places to live and work and explore, undoubtedly, but few anywhere so densely and disparately delicious.