Food should be tasty, and it doesn’t have to come in a bowl. Could someone tell my lovely American hosts? | Emma Beddington

I've had some amazing experiences in Boston. But I want fun from my holiday meals, not joyless refuelling

I almost never leave Europe, so spending a month in Boston is expanding my provincial horizons and blowing my tiny mind. Wild turkeys (huge!) wander the streets, there are rodeo bouts on TV and everyone drinks iced coffee even though it's absolutely Baltic. I feel more foreign here than in places I've visited where I didn't speak the language, and I keep getting things wrong. I think I rode the bus illegally yesterday.

Mostly, though, I'm baffled by bowls. In this corner of the world full of twentysomething Stem graduates wearing Patagonia and Lululemon activewear, with earning potential many multiples of mine, meals seem almost all bowl-based, composed of grain, protein, greens and some kind of sauce.

Emma Beddington is a Guardian columnist

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