Getting used to eating across America can be quite the heart-burning experience. The food is nothing like what can be had from the Jamaican countryside I know, or the uptown eateries in Upper St. Andrew. This here, at Uncle Sam's table is a whole other kettle of fish.

On the way from Kingston to Montego Bay you can stop at Faiths Pen to have a roast corn or a piece of saltfish or a cup of manish water. If you don't want that kind of food, there are a hundred more jerk pork spots that serve a hundred other things to choose from. If you want upscale you can stop at any tourist-type restaurant in Ochi and be fed by soft smiling Jamaicans wearing a multitude of different colored uniforms and no name tags.

Traveling across America, there is MacDonalds, Burger King, Wendys, Fridays, and a few other places that serve the same six things on the menu. I get so tired of French fries and burgers that I know are not burgers anymore. They do so much to the poor cow before they even kill it. Then there is the preserving and the packaging. By the time it gets to that shiny paper in your hand it could very well be a mongrel from one of the backyards in Port Antonio. They have to add beef flavor to it then. Nobody knows what the meat is in that wax paper. The beef taste the same as the cow, as the chicken, as the veggie-meat.

Sometimes, I sit in the cold Taco Bell in Indianapolis and fantasize about the curry chicken my grandmother used to cook. Other times I just bite the frozen chicken nuggets and pretend that it is really a nice piece of fried plantain I eating.

Thank God for the small pockets of the West Indies in Brooklyn. Jamaican food joints all over the place call out to me when I am passing; Golden Crust, Brawta, Buff Patty-In New York, you can get food that is almost as good as the food from Jamdung. Whenever I miss home so bad I only want to play some Bob and talk to other Jamaicans, I pick up my bag and head out to eat at Negril, in Manhattan. The prices are a little steep for the small pocket, but that is New York. And I must tell you 'bout the food! Lawd have mercy! They have everything, red peas soup, callaloo-they even have turn cornmeal on the menu! I don't know what they put in that food, but -hmm hmm, hmm!

And all sorts of people gather at that restaurant, rich, poor, gay and straight. Everybody welcome.

Life so busy here, we hardly get a chance to cook, and for those of us who live far from Flatbush Avenue, or Jamaica, Queens, we can't get the ingredients, so the little we cook is more American than Jamaican. It's a dicey state of affairs-living and eating in this America. But "if you want good, you nose haffi run!"

And while we here in this foreign, but not so foreign country, we running and hoping for good and eating where we can and dreaming of home all the time. If you have the time, cook something Jamaican tonight. If you running against the clock, stop and eat a meal in a place that smell a little like Faith's Pen.
Walk good.

Till next time,

Staceyann