Hi, I'm Mark Bitman. Welcome to Food. A couple of reminders here. You can always email us at

food at Mark bitman.com. We love to hear from you and we will respond. Also please check out our fabulous new website

Mark bitman.com or you can find us at bitman project.com more on that in a sec. What we published on bitman project this week was a piece on

Reviving your stock and doing soup as a kind of daily project sort of like stock is the new sour dough starter.

I wrote a little piece on fake meat and why we don't need it and also on salting

vegetables but a little detail about when and how for each kind.

In case you've missed our podcast episode last week, you can find that also on our website at bitman project.

com. That was an interview with the great

Mavis J Sanders so you can subscribe to our three or four times a week newsletter

also at mark bitman dot com or Bitman Project.com and we hope you will and

please subscribe to this podcast as well and rate us wherever you get your podcasts.

Okay, back 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 in 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.

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