Food Comparison, with Graph [New Feature!]

Okay folks; it's time to institute a new regular feature. Every so often I intend to offer a comparison of a certain food item. Goodness knows it's near impossible to find food which tastes very much the same as back home. In fact, up to now I've only seen three items which even carried the same brand as back home: Coca-Cola soda, Heinz ketchup, and Pringles potato chips. Everything else is stamped with a brand name foreign to me, and their taste is generally equally strange. (Even the salt and pepper tastes different over here, for Pete's sake!)

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One of the first things I had to do here was establish a small stock of foods for routine consumption. Familiarity with the taste of these foods is much more important than actually enjoying how they taste. I know this sounds crazy, but there's only so much shock your taste buds will allow before they start complaining. At the end of a long day of work, as you make your way home while thinking of preparing dinner, you want to be able to anticipate what you will eating. The taste of dinner should not be a mystery all the way up to the point where it first touches your lips, at least not every night. Trust me, you will eventually get tired of such a surprise.

Of course, the best way to avoid this is to have full control over what you're eating. Get to know what the local grocery store has, and figure out how to prepare something yourself, even if it's just ramen and sandwiches. (Actually, I think the majority of my meals in 2007 here were ramen and sandwiches...)

So how can I convey something as subjective as the relative taste of food? I turn to my old data analysis standby: a chart.

Yay! Graphs!

In future posts, I will use a chart like the one shown above. Foods shall be ranked on a highly unscientific scale of between -10 (for "nothing would convince me to try that again") and +10 (for "this could easily be the only meal I eat for the rest of my life"). The horizontal axis represents my opinion of the food available in the 'States. The vertical axis represents the food's score here in Switzerland. Each item can then be shown as a single dot on the chart. (For an added dimension, I will also color-code by category. This will keep things interesting, and perhaps provide a little more insight.) Dots which appear in the upper-right quadrant are therefore foods which have a positive value both at home and here. Dots in the lower-right quadrant are foods which were enjoyed back home, but are disliked here. For foods appearing in the upper-left quadrant, I must have liked something here in Switzerland which I did not like back home. And finally, foods in the lower-left quadrant are ones which I did not like back home, and still do not like here.

It is unlikely that you will find many foods in the left side of the chart, since this will mean I am trying foods that I just didn't like back in the 'States. Hopefully I am smart enough to start with foods I expect to be good. Note: this is not about trying new things. There is no place on the graph for "unknown" opinions of Stateside food. Should I encounter items unfamiliar to me here, I reserve the right to try them back home as well in order to allow them to be charted. Otherwise, expect there to be little said about them.

So, as this experiment continues, we will be able to see what picture develops. A diagonal trend from the bottom left to the top right indicates that I find most foods to be similar. The opposite diagonal means dinner-time tends to feel like the Twilight Zone.