How to: make sure what you just ate was actually good

At home, it is fairly easy to discern between the restaurants that you don’t want to eat at for fear of getting sick. Here, it isn’t so easy.

The best meals I’ve had here have been at shady looking places that I wouldn’t even dream about walking into at home, and the sickest I’ve been has been following eating at a fancy restaurant.

So, as the saying goes, “Don’t judge a book by its cover”. You cant judge whether what you are about to eat by the appearance of where you are going to eat it. Similarly, you can’t judge the quality of the meal by the initial taste.

Here is my tried and tested evaluation of whether what you ate was any good, and whether you should go back for more!

 

Emily’s Food Checklist

1. So you’ve just finished your meal, and you thought it tasted pretty good. Now, sit for 30 minutes, and see what your stomach thinks. All ok? No grumbling, bloatedness or discomfort (NB: discomfort from eating too much and discomfort from illness is easy to tell the difference between)? Then you can progress to the next step.
2. Now you’ve arrived back home/to the office/to the shopping mall/to the zoo, and its been a one or two hours since you ate. How is your stomach feeling? Is it still happy, or is it starting to grumble? If you don’t have an overwhelming urge to play princes and princesses and sit on the throne, then congratulations you can progress to the final step.
3. The final step can occur several hours after you have eaten this meal. There’s no delicate way to put this… But if you and the meal part ways as friends, then you are friends. But if it leaves your life in an awkward, or overly dramatic way, then it does not matter how good the friendship thus far has been, it was all a lie.