We just announced our new contest winner and want to give the Food Memory we selected some airtime on the EYW Blog, too.

User alexfhalpern wrote the winning entry, entitled “We Came to Eat Fish.” Why do we love this story? As we noted on the Contests page, it’s a well-written tale of a basic grilled fish dish enjoyed on the shores of Lake Victoria in Kenya, but like elsewhere in Africa, it’s not just about the food: It’s about the energy of the setting, the sheer “life force” of the lake, humming with those who depend on it for survival and play. It’s about the pride of the Kenyans who brought the author there, four hours out of the way, to feast on fish. It’s about food’s irreplaceable role in bringing people together—providing that simple impetus to go somewhere and eat—opening that cultural window, and then stepping out of the spotlight, as if to say, “You can thank me later.” To us, this captured the essence of traveling and eating in (parts of) Africa.

Alex wins a yearlong subscription to the excellent AFAR magazine, courtesy of AFAR Media. Congratulations! Here’s the winning story in full:

We Came to Eat Fish

We pull up to Lake Victoria, hungry for fish. Dozens of stalls are set up, each one with tables in front displaying their tilapia. The fish’s eyes bulge like cartoons, caricatures of their own species, staring straight at me while flies feast on their dry skin. It is a four hours' drive from the orphanage where I volunteer to the lake, and we make the journey with Swahili beats blasting from our open windows. I am with four Kenyan men, towering above me in height, who work for the orphanage and want to show me their favorite place in Kenya.

We choose a stall to eat from and sit down. Two plates of tilapia, completely intact, are served, grilled to perfection and flavored with cooked tomatoes. They come with two bowls of kale and ugali, maize meal cooked into a thick paste. Finally, a cold Coke, the bottle sweating in the humidity, tops off the meal. The men show me how to roll the ugali into a ball in the palm of my hand and press my thumb in the middle, making a spoon with which to scoop up the kale. Though almost tasteless, the gritty ugali and chewy kale stumble on my tongue until my mouth settles into a smile. We rip the fish apart with our hands, carefully picking out tiny bones. We devour everything but the tail; the fish is tender and juicy, and I imagine the water from the lake flooding into my mouth.

A few feet away, men scrub their cars or motorcycles in the shallow of the lake. Women do laundry, wiping their brow with the cool water between shirts. Children swim completely naked, pushing each other’s heads under water. I am scared for them, having heard about man-eating hippos and crocodiles that roam the waters, and exotic diseases like bilharzia or dengue fever. The lake is abuzz with people who know that, in a country where running water is a rarity, Lake Victoria is a life force and a luxury. People come from far and wide to make use of the lake, a precious source of free and unending water. Or, like us, they come to eat fish. —alexfhalpern

Photo credit: Johan Swanepoel/Shutterstock.com

If you had to choose one quintessential dish to represent your hometown, what would it be?

This is a question we at Eat Your World ask ourselves, and everyone we meet, all the time—though we ultimately step it up from one dish to, say, 40. (We never said we were completely sane.) It’s a question we relish asking again and again for every new place we visit, each answer a unique culinary discovery we couldn’t have made anywhere else.

We started, of course, with our own hometowns, both original and adopted: the Jersey Shore and New York City, respectively. In New Jersey I loved revisiting the pork roll and cheese sandwich—at one point my favorite school-cafeteria lunch, I must admit—of my youth, the boardwalk funnel cake I grew up craving (pictured above), and the staple sub sandwich my family still brings to the beach every summer. In New York it was hardly work to make extra bagel runs (below) and indulge in cheesecake taste tests with friends, in the name of celebrating the city’s many iconic foods. We’re not even done yet—soon we will be paying tribute to Chinatown via the beloved soup dumpling. And we just may get around to giving the more recent trend of cupcakes some airtime on the site.

We’ve realized, in the course of slowly building up our New York City content, that it’s easy to get a little lax about the place in which you live, to think you’ll “do it one day”—this is precisely why many New Yorkers will reluctantly admit they haven’t yet tried the pastrami at Katz’s (below), or been to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, for that matter. It’s also sometimes more difficult to think objectively about the foods that really speak to your city, because they’re so close to you. You might not realize that the pedestrian dish you grew up eating in your hometown could be very interesting for a foreigner to try.  

It’s time our hometowns got the credit they deserve. We hereby declare May to be Hometown Foods Month. We want to hear from you, via photos, Food Memories, and comments, about the quintessential dishes and drinks in your own backyards. We want you to tell the world what your hometown has to offer the annals of gastronomy, no matter how minor it seems. We are practicing what we preach, too: Just today we paid heed to the evolving brand of Italian-American food in Little Italy.

So, once again: If you could choose one quintessential dish to represent your hometown, what would it be?

Get uploading here.

It’s April 16, which means: It’s National Eggs Benedict Day!* But also: We have a new User and Food Memory of the Month!

This time around we’ve selected Jessie as our User of the Month, and one glance at her profile illustrates why: The girl gets around! To date she’s contributed 21 food pics, from Guatemala to Sweden to Syria, always with detailed descriptions. Most recently she put Bolivia on the map for us, adding foods traditional to La Paz and Santa Cruz, including the colorful queso humacha shown above.

Our new Food Memory of the Month is “The Kindness of Strangers in the Seychelles,” by spiceboxtravels (who blogs about food and travel at Spiceboxtravels.com). It’s a story about a memorable meal in the archipelago nation made possible by some unasked-for assistance, reminding us of the many times we’ve experienced the generosity of perfect strangers while on the road—and how those moments tend to translate to the best travel experiences.

The winners will be featured on our Get Involved page for the next 30 days or so. Congratulations, and we hope to see more from both of you soon. As for the rest of you: Contribute today, and your praises might be sung next!

*If you’re still thinking about eggs Benedict, read more about the NYC-born dish on Eat Your World.

Yesterday we arrived home in New York City after three extraordinary weeks traveling around West Africa. (We apologize for the spotty on-the-road updates here: Wifi was not easy to come by for most of the trip.) We have loads of written and visual content to organize and post on EYW, including two full local-food sections for Senegal and Sierra Leone (pictured above is delicious binch (black-eyed beans) and yams from a streetside vendor in Bo, Sierra Leone). But our very first order of business is launching a new contest courtesy of AFAR, our favorite travel magazine (now available on both iPhone and Android) for its focus on real-deal experiential travel.

While we explored the native cuisines of Senegal and Sierra Leone, our requests for specific dishes were always greeted with huge surprised smiles. “You want African food? Really?” came the unbelieving reply. Now we know we’re not the only travelers seeking out the local goods in Africa, and we’re eager to expand our knowledge and coverage of regional foods there, so…we need your help! If you have an original photo or story of local food in Africa—anywhere on the continent—we want to see it on Eat Your World. The user who uploads our favorite entry will win a yearlong subscription to AFAR, but we will tweet ALL of the entries that come through to us, to show the world a little something about regional African cuisine.

Have you indulged in kitfo in Ethiopia? Had your share of local wine and seafood in South Africa? Tried ibihaza after gorilla-spotting in Rwanda, or pap between safaris in Namibia? We want to hear about it!

Read more about this contest here, and then upload away!

Around the 15th of each month, we’ll select a new User and Food Memory of the Month. For the former, we’ll look for a user who contributes in both quantity and quality—that is, someone who’s uploaded at least eight regional food/drink photos with intelligent, entertaining descriptions…often the kind that make us want to get on a plane and go find that dish right now. For our Food Memory of the Month, we similarly will choose a story that we particularly loved, whether for being especially vivid, thoughtful, or funny.

Our newest User of the Month is Raluca, who has contributed 14 great photos and descriptions thus far, spanning the globe from her hometown of NYC to Sri Lanka (we especially enjoyed the Polygamy Porter Ale pic she added from Utah).

This month’s Food Memory comes from zboehmova, who made us giggle with her tale of eating her first sandwich in exotic America.   

We hope to see more from both of you soon! And to the rest of our users: Get uploading, and you might be next!