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After earning our degrees, and before children and careers, my wife and I did what all good Canadian university grads do: we backpacked across Europe. I wanted to document our journey, but it didn’t feel right to simply follow the established structures and tropes of so many travel narratives that have come before. Too many others had been to these places already; too many others had marveled at the sights and the culture as framed through their own comparisons to home. And the food. Travel narratives always go on about the food.
Food, beyond its pleasure value and its basic functional role of providing sustenance, plays an integral part of one’s day-to-day life while travelling. It can dictate what part of a city you might visit/discover. It also likely plays a central role in your overall feelings about a place—if you don’t like the food, you probably think less of that place.
But even these connections to food are on the surface. When we travel, our bodies need to adapt to new schedules and new combinations of caloric intake and ingredients that we might not be used to. We eat differently when we’re on vacation, especially when we go to a place we’ve never been before, and our digestive systems can easily get thrown out of whack. Thus, we form an incredibly personal and intimate relationship with the food we eat while on vacation, even if we only consciously recognize it as an adventure in new tastes and experiences.
That clam pasta in Venice might have been beautiful. Those pastries in Berlin might have been delicious. But a million people before you have had those same reactions. The real, honest, and most personal take on food is not through a camera, or even through our tastebuds—it’s how we digest it and what impact it has on our bodies.
Of course, digestion and bowel movements are not the most romantic way to describe one’s vacation time, let alone the food we ingest. Shitting is something we do in private. But despite the incredibly personal nature of this bodily process, the experience of shitting in a foreign country is also profoundly universal. All bodies respond to changes in eating patterns, and everybody poops. And how our bodies respond to food will undoubtedly shape how we interact with the places we explore.
My hope with these poems is to offer an alternative take on the travel narrative—one that remains true to the hallmarks of the genre, while prompting readers to consider an aspect of the travel experience that is almost always left out but is incredibly significant to our experience of place.
They’re also poems about shitting, so don’t be afraid to laugh.
Thor Polukoshko was one of the founding editors of Memewar Magazine, and his work has been published in West Coast Line and The Incongruous Quarterly. He teaches English and Creative Writing at Langara College / snəw̓eyəɬ leləm̓ in Vancouver, where he has organized and hosted the Strangers on a Train reading series for the past decade.
