In a backyard in Istria, a food writer finds out what it really
means to “eat local.”  The closer you are to the land, the more
you appreciate the food it produces, whether that food is plant
or animal. Obvious, no? But though I had given lip service to
this notion for a long time, I only came to fully understand it
in Istria, the western part of Croatia, after I had been writing
about food for 30 years.  No doubt I was disoriented. I’d been
traveling all over western Europe, moving every couple of days,
researching and eating and writing about places and things that
were already familiar to me. So to cross the border from
Trieste, Italy, and travel through Slovenia, felt … abrupt. To
me, eastern and central European countries seem more foreign
than even remote Asian villages. This might seem odd, given that
I’m a third-generation American with roots all over eastern and
central Europe. The people look familiar, they sound familiar,
and the way they eat is familiar. Yet somehow, this makes their
differences a