At dinnertime, we can choose whatever we fancy. Korean take-out, chicken soup or maybe even avocado salad? Perhaps, however, it’d be better to look around and reach for something grown and produced locally, rather than across the globe.

By nature, humans are omnivorous. They’ll eat anything. They’ll make a pancake of ground cereal grains, ferment seal intestines, pick papayas, currants and hop shoots, press olives, dry seaweed. They’ll milk sheep, turn the milk into cheese, shape the cheese, and even smoke it. Wherever they go, they’ll find produce to process into sustenance. They must process; they must modify. This is, apparently, human nature: “A grape seed I will bury in the warm soil, And will kiss a vine, and pluck a ripe bunch,” wrote the poet Bulat Okudzhava. This great practice leads to many unique culinary inventions, such as Parmesan cheese, Bordeaux wine, miso paste, and proziaki (soda flatbreads from the Subcarpathia region in Poland). It also leads to a growing appetite.

Baguette in lieu of a passport?

Culinary invention knows no limits, but why do we want to eat miso in Rzeszów and parmesan in Tokyo? The answer appears simple: humans are not only omnivorous, but also inquisitive. I first ate sushi as an adult. Born in the 1970s, as soon as the borders opened in 1989, I went to Europe – mainly in search of taste. Once I left the plain People’s Republic of Poland, I wanted to eat like the natives (that is, the inhabitants of the