Strawberries at the airport when meeting your future husband for the first time, finally tasting world famous fish and chips and wondering why on earth the pasta is green. These are some of this week’s stories of first impressions of food in a new country. Devina Gupta visits a multilingual cooking class in Manchester, UK, to find out how language, culture and food help people find a home in a new part of the world.. She speaks to a chef who fled Ukraine when the war started and now runs a restaurant in the Netherlands. Nathalia adapted to life there very quickly, but still can’t comprehend why the Dutch eat toast for every meal. Mariyam and Marius share their love story from across continents, and talk about the dishes – and those strawberries - which brought them together when they finally met. If you would like to get in touch with the show, please email: thefoodchain@bbc.co.uk Presenter: Devina Gupta Producer: Hannah Bewley Translation: Irena Taranyuk (Image: Devina Gupta has afternoon tea. Credit: BBC)
I'm Rory Stewart and I want to talk about ignorance.
I will die without having read everything that was written in classical Latin because ignorance isn't simply the opposite of knowledge, it's part of what it means to be human.
Just about every game I can think of involves ignorance.
There's no adventure without ignorance.
There's no narrative.
The long history of ignorance from Confucius to QAnon.
With me, Rory Stewart.
Listen on BBC sounds.
I'm at a tea room in central Manchester, here in the northwest of England.
It's a place with red velvet chairs, pink and black wall patterns, lots of artificial flowers, and tables filled with fancy white bone china teacups dotted with 48 trays of sandwiches, cakes.
This was one of my first experiences when I came from India to the UK.
My sister was visiting me and we always wanted to have the british afternoon tea in style.
So one sunny afternoon we made way to this place.
But boy did we get it wrong.
For starters, you don't need to dress up in a formal dress, which we did.
Then taper down your expectation from the tea variety, especially if you're looking for a cardamom, ginger, spicy indian tea.
And dont ever mention when eating scones, whether to put jam first or cream.
This really gets people from here upset.
Believe me, its a debate about which needs to come first and you dont want to be at the center of it.
But apart from that, this alice in Wonderland themed tea room made us feel welcomed with loads of laughter and conversations with strangers.