Photos by Eileen Mellon and via Getty Images
A few months ago, I had the best pineapple I’ve ever tasted. While the claim seems bold, and you may be thinking, OK, it’s just fruit, the sensation it sparked was one I chased for the remainder of a two-week trip to tropical Costa Rica with my boyfriend.
It came following 10 hours of travel, two flights, a couple packs of Biscoff cookies and a shuttle ride to the car rental. Trekking north and hoping to make it to our destination prior to sunset, we cruised for 30 minutes or so before pulling over at a roadside produce stand between beach towns.
As we were walking up, the owner of the market pulled out a machete and began slicing into various fruits, opening the spiked exterior of a rambutan and cutting into a fleshy mango before inviting us to try them. Picking up a passion fruit, he jabbed his thumb into the orange-colored orb and pulled back the rind, exposing a gooey, sweet and seedy pulp. When I reached for the avocados that were as big as my palm, he asked if we wanted a one-day or two-day fruit and smiled in a way that made me think he understood we were first-timers here. And then there was the pineapple, a fruit that was familiar but tasted foreign — brighter, more vivid than pineapple at home, like the sharpening of a photo. It tasted like the golden ticket.
Approaching the car, my fingers sticky and stained, I was utterly intoxicated, buzzed from the sun and high from the potency of the ripe produce.
For the remainder of the trip, we averaged a piña per day (along with mango, guava, papaya and other fruits), packing it as a snack for the car, eating it outside for breakfast while listening to toucans talk in the trees, devouring it dipped in dark chocolate. I craved it.
Every time I bit into the chunks of tropical candy, I was reminded of why we travel, why we uproot ourselves from our normal and comfortable lives — our own beds, that favorite coffee mug — for the unknown and potentially challenging — language barriers, canceled flights. I felt renewed, and an excitement for life that I hadn’t experienced in a long time. The pineapple wouldn’t be the only evocative bite over the multistop journey.
I ate a granadilla, a cousin of passion fruit, in the middle of a beachy national park dotted with sand dollars and pink seashells as I struggled to spot another beachgoer in sight. I took shelter under a tiny umbrella on the side of the road with a young local selling pinchos (skewered meats) at two for 1,000 colones (about $1.86), waiting for a storm to pass as he fanned a piece of cardboard over his tiny grill to keep the coals alive.
In all those instances, food was the foundation, this underlying layer that elevated every moment.
My partner and I had a conversation over coffee and a casado — rice and beans, plantains, fried queso, and stewed meats — with a stranger in a soda (restaurant) that resembled a room in someone’s house. Instead of shaking her head as we fumbled over our words in Spanish, the older woman grabbed us a fork after noticing we had only one, proceeded to ask us questions about our trip and listened with a patience and presence that is rare to find.
During a rafting excursion down the Balsa River, after spotting sloths, a poisonous frog and the Jesus Christ lizard (look it up), we huddled with fellow rafters on a rocky beach to feast on a bountiful spread of fruit arranged across our flipped-over vessels.
In all those instances, food was the foundation, this underlying, subtle layer that elevated every moment. It was the universal hello, the understood goodbye. In a world where trauma and tragedy tend to triumph and peace and joy can feel fleeting, I will relish those bite-sized memories forever.
While traveling is a privilege, it helps us to remember that there’s a world other than what’s right in front of us. That beyond the four walls we occupy, the jobs we hold and the emails we answer, there waits the juiciest and most tantalizing of pineapples to be discovered.
In the words of Anthony Bourdain, the late, great culinary visionary of our time, who would most likely denounce such a title but whose prose and poetic sarcasm have undoubtedly pushed generations of people to be more curious, especially through food, “Who wouldn’t travel if they could? It’s unthinkable to me. Who wouldn’t want to enjoy different, new sensations, especially when the world is filled with so much great stuff?”
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