Over the course of college, my cooking improved. I cooked curries, soups, stews, fish, and other cheap meals, partly with my cooking group. I cooked food from the Indian and Japanese shops in Cambridge, and cooked out of Sundays at Moosewood, the Moosewood's "ethnic" cookbook.
I left MIT a decent cook, but nothing special. I went to grad school at Cornell, and found a different food world.
The market is limited to local produce, which forces buyers to eat seasonally. Much is organic, and there are the lots of vendors: one gets used to one's own favorites, but there's still variety.
And the local giant supermarket, Wegman's, is awesome, from bread to produce to cheese. Not paradise, of course (they often didn't know what the Asian produce or French cheese they sold was, for example), but the best North American grocery store I've ever seen. Many people who leave upstate NY describe it as the one thing they most miss. I don't quite agree, but I do see their point.
Ithaca also had great restaurants in a lot of different categories: Italian (Giovanni's, long gone), taqueria (Viva, still there), Thai, etc. It's just about paradise.
There are also good wineries there, but I couldn't afford much when I was a grad student.
Then, we left Ithaca. We moved to Medford, two towns north of Boston, and a 12-minute walk from the subway. I'd already lived there. But you can't go home. Boston food was the pits, after Ithaca.
Farmers' Markets in Boston were pitiful, with something like 5 stalls. There are over a hundred at the market in Ithaca. (They have since improved. This was ten years ago. That said, there's a competitive consumption feel to urban markets since the "locavore" revolution. I still hate it, just less.)
Meanwhile, grocery stores were depressing, and we had to fight traffic and spend 15 minutes in the car to go to Bread & Circus (long ago re-badged as Whole Foods), where we paid 2-3 times normal prices.
So we ate out a lot: eat (comfy bistro food, long gone), Anna's Taqueria (still there), Tu y Yo (authentic rural Mexican food, still there), the Diesel Cafe (still there).
We liked the around-the-corner Italian restaurant (gone now); our neighbourhood included the oldest pizzeria in America (thought there are lots of pretenders to that throne, and DePascuale's closed a few years after we left).
We did like the ethnic markets, especially in Chinatown. Great Vietnamese food there, too, and some decent Latin markets. But really, the year in Boston wasn't a good food year.
K/W is more diverse than you may think (a commenter on Ta-Nehisi Coates's blog recently said that this area was 99% white, for example, which isn't true). Actually, it's 23% immigrant (Ontario is 28%, but outside of the Toronto area, which has two-thirds of the immigrants, the rest of Ontario is only 15% immigrant), and K/W is 14% "visible minority", as compared to 8% in the non-GTA part of Ontario. It ain't London, England, but it's more diverse than London, Ontario.
And because of the Mennonites who settled this area in the 19th century, we have a lot of local farms. They're not adventurous: if you like German foods like sauerkraut, you'll find the veggies you want much more successfuly than if you like heirloom tomatoes. But it's easy to get around, and after ten years here, I know much better how to find food I like here than I ever did in Boston.
Also, I'm a lot wealthier now than I was when I lived in any of these other places; which does have strong bearing on the quality of what I eat. I comment with experience about expensive restaurants in K/W. I can't do that about 2000-era Boston, partly because there were many more, but also because I couldn't afford them.
Similarly, I know much more about Ontario wine than I do about NY State wine. I don't drink much foreign wine anymore: we make a decent product here in Ontario, which I like, and I pay the premium to drink it, much as I pay a premium to eat Ontario peaches or (involuntarily, thanks to the Canadian Dairy Board) to drink Canadian milk or eat Canadian cheese. I'm okay with that.
In 2006, I spent six months living in Davis, California (though I was travelling for a quarter of that time). It was a good experience, and the food was excellent. But I don't live in that country anymore, so I came home. To Canada, and to Kitchener.
Anyhow, you can go back to my K/W food page now.
dan brown (browndg@uwaterloo.ca).