Welcome to Food. I'm Kate Bitman. Thanks for being here. We'd love to hear any comments, feedback thoughts. Reach us at food at Mark bitman.com. We've also got a robust website that's

bitman project.com with not only a ton of recipes but writing and reporting about all things food.

And please allow me this tiny bit of self-promotion. Last week I wrote about how to buy good

meat, something I really wanted to write about, after I started to feel

confused about my own meat purchases and consumption, and went online for advice and couldn't find much.

As Mark says, the Good Meat conversation is one that never really ends,

but there's always advice to be had and more learning to do.

Find it on bitman project.com and it's also very relevant to today's

episode which Mark will intro in just a moment. We'll get back to that. We'll get back to that conversation in a minute, but first I want to talk about something

that lots of people ask me about when it comes to global cuisines.

There is something magical about eating a cuisine in the place where it originated.

One of the reasons for that is that the dishes that define a cuisine are built around the

produce that's native to a place. It's why the feta and tomato and a Greek salad tastes so perfect in Athens, or the artichokes

in olive oil in Rome are to die for.

They have a certain sweetness and tang that you can get close to, but not easily replicate.

And not surprisingly, one of the best ways to get a sense for how something

should taste is to visit a region of the world

and sample a dish in several forms from lots of different

neighboring areas. Then you can appreciate the local variations as well.

And the most efficient way to do that, for me at least, is the first-class experience of a regent cruise.

I was able to do that on our recent all-inclusive Tora Vezia.

I had a hankering for seafood, well I always do, seafood that you don't get easily in the U.S.

...