> > Full Disclosure

Eating, Drinking, Being Merry

Part I: Food

I am not the best authority to talk about food in Poland, mainly because I am a 99% vegetarian and this is a pretty meat-heavy society. But traditional Polish food is pretty good, from what I’ve tasted. I will just link to some information about real Polish cuisine (do check it out if you are interested) and instead I will focus on the stupid kinds of food and talk about what I actually eat on a daily basis.

Here are some ads from Gośka, a local almost-supermarket. Click on them for full-size versions.

After almost two years here, I have discovered that the food possibilities are not nearly as bad as I thought at first. It only takes effort and you can find almost everything. Or everything will eventually come to you: my local corner store suddenly started stocking weirdo soy products like soy cutlets and fake pork and stuff, and I can’t imagine who is buying it besides me but I’m not complaining. Still, it takes a bit more work than in America to find decent food, especially anything vegetarian. As I am usually lazy, for two years my diet has consisted almost exclusively of the following:

• Rice,
• Pasta,
• Beans,
• Cheese,
• Vegetables (frozen and fresh, particularly broccoli and peppers),
• Bread,
• Eggs,
• Yogurt,
• And occasionally fruit or cereal

That’s it. I don’t go out to eat that often and don’t vary from the above diet much at all. As a result, I started losing weight as soon as I came to Poland and after about a year it sort of leveled off to where I am now, about 20 pounds lighter than I was two years ago.

Actually, one of the main reasons I think I lost all that weight was by completely eliminating fast food and almost eliminating junk food from my diet. I don’t even drink soda anymore. But I haven’t given up junk food completely, so I want to mention a few things in particular…

Bake Rolls:

I don’t think we have these in the U.S. but I am way into them. When I was first searching for a cracker-type snack I stumbled across these tasty salty crispy delights. Later I realized that you could easily buy crackers (albeit not many different kinds — no Wheat Thins or anything like that), but I still kept a certain affection for Bake Rolls. I am partial to the plain and onion-flavored ones; the pizza flavor is pretty bad and the garlic variety is so-so.

Paluszki:

Paluszki are just simple pretzel sticks but for some reason people in Poland think of them as their national treasure, as if nowhere else in the world could you buy pretzels. I am not really too sure of my pretzel history — maybe the Poles did invent the thin pretzel stick — but anyway paluszki are a favorite snack here.

Chips:

The Polish word for potato chips is chipsy and I eat them less than I did in America. But I remain slightly addicted to them. You can get Lay’s potato chips over here but usually only in weird flavors that they probably don’t have in America, like “fromage” and “spring onion.” They usually have little promotional cards inside the packages for Pokemon or Lord of the Rings or something. I feel a little guilty for buying Lay’s chips instead of supporting the local competition, but most of the Polish brands are quite inferior. I do wonder if my Lay’s potato chips in Poland are made from Polish potatoes or not. Presumably yes since potatoes are so cheap here that they won’t let me buy less than a huge sackful at the local store.

There is an almost total lack of the nacho-family of chip here, which is kind of a bummer. The vaguely Dorito-type chips I have found tend to be yucky and expensive.

Sweet Things:

Polish people are really into cakes and such things. They don’t go for cookies or brownies, but they do love cakes. For every special occasion at school, like somebody’s name-day or Women’s Day or various other random holidays, we eat little cakes. They are nice enough, but not something I will ever come to love. One time I was in Warsaw and I swear I smelled chocolate chip cookies being baked in one of the apartment buildings and it was quite exciting. It must have been some nostalgic ex-pat or else a Pole who got addicted while living abroad. I guess I could make my own but I don’t have an oven and I can’t see myself figuring the whole process out and going to somebody else’s house for a day of baking. Maybe someday…

I’ve mentioned before that in Łomża there aren’t too many restaurants. In the bigger cities there are more, and they have a reasonable variety of types. One thing I have consistently looked out for is a decent Mexican restaurant, but I haven’t found one yet. But in the process of looking for one, I’ve noticed how the Poles consistently convert all foreign food into Polish categories. You try to order a “burrito” and it ends up including cabbage and potatoes with a nice little beet-salad on the side. It is sort of cute, I guess.

Polish “ketchup” is more like barbecue sauce, and not very useful for anything. You don’t want it anywhere near your freedom fries. And it is almost impossible to find decent paper napkins here, and I have no idea why. Every restaurant has these napkin-things that are like little squares of waxy paper, the sort of thing you would use for picking a donut out of a box but not for wiping your hands with afterwards.

One place the Poles have us beat is in packaging materials. They don’t have all the wasteful extra packaging that we have in America, where your toothpaste tube comes in a cardboard box, and your cheese comes wrapped inside layers of cardboard and foil and plastic. Not that the Poles seem to care very much about the environment, I think it is just that Americans are incredibly wasteful.

Part II: Drink

Well you can quickly divide up this category into alcoholic and non-alcoholic and the former is more interesting so I’ll just mention here in passing that I drink a lot of orange juice, but this is sort of looked as an odd American fixation. Poles who have spent time in the U.S. notice that we drink orange juice all the time. Well, yeah. They tend to drink other juices like grapefruit and strange thick “juice drinks.” They also have odd-flavored juices like cherry and black currant (whatever that is, exactly). Juices come in annoying boxes that almost always spill when you open them up.

Oh but before I get to the alcohol I should mention the caffeinated beverages. In Poland people seem to be pretty split between drinking coffee and tea. I have the sense that tea is more traditional but anywhere you go you are offered both. But they almost never have drip-coffee like we usually do in America; instead they either have instant (the norm) or else “Turkish” coffee (where you just throw coffee into the bottom of a cup and pour boiling water onto it). I have become used to instant coffee but sometimes I have some Turkish and it is always a blast to have to spit out that last mouthful of coffee grounds.

Okay so about the alcohol. Poland is a traditionally vodka-drinking country, and you can’t really avoid vodka (if you wanted to, I mean). But most people drink beer and other things as well. I am not really a vodka fan but I have had it fairly often here. For any special occasion, Poles drink vodka (you should see a wedding). When a Pole is being friendly to the unexpected American at the bar, he buys him a shot of vodka and it is rude or awkward to refuse. So I have learned to like it, but I don’t drink it out of preference, just social necessity. I am not really able to talk about the different kinds of vodka or anything, I just can’t tell the difference between different brands. I do think that Pan Tadeusz comes in a cool cannister-thing…

I am on more comfortable ground talking about beer. I find that all the Polish beer is reasonably good but also all basically the same. The biggest national beer is Żywiec and it is fine, I can’t really complain about it. It is good but not really memorable. I think I prefer Tyskie, another major brand, but it is basically the exact same thing. There is also Lech, another clone, and Okocim, and they all basically taste alike. Oh, there is Warka, that is a bit different, but not by very much.

Polish beer is a little bit stronger than most American beers (something like 5.5%) and it comes in bigger doses (half a liter at a time). It is also pretty cheap compared to American beer, but with less of a difference between the price in a store and the price at a bar. You can get a few imported beers here, mainly Heineken.

I think I noticed from the first night I went out in Poland that many Polish girls have the strange habit of sipping beer through a straw. I’ve never noticed it in America and it seems kind of yucky to me. The beer is served cold, though I’ve been offered some hot beer a few times during the winter.

The drinking age is 18 so you do see lots of young people out drinking, but it doesn’t seem to be a major problem. For one thing, they take drinking and driving much more seriously here than Americans do and there is none of that “I’ll just have one or two and then I’ll be fine to drive” stuff here. This seems like a good thing, especially considering the condition of driving and roads (more on that some other time). For another thing, they probably need those 18-year-olds to keep the bars open at all, since so many 21-year-olds are already married and settled down and the mid-twenty set mostly has kids already.

Next time: some cultural observations (like music and such).