Food

What We Actually Ate for a Year (And What We Missed From Home)

Food ended up being one of the most memorable parts of the whole trip, but also one of the areas where we had to be genuinely careful. Here's what a year of eating our way through Latin America actually looked like, the good, the cautious, and the things we properly missed from home.

Rice, Beans and Tortillas: The Backbone of Latin American Food

If there's one thing that ties together the food scene across most of Latin America, it's some version of rice, beans and tortillas. Country to country, the exact style changes, but the base stays remarkably consistent. We got very used to it, and honestly, we liked it. It's simple, filling, and when done well, genuinely good food.

Street Food: Enjoyed, But With Real Caution

We did enjoy local street food, and a lot of the best meals we had came from small local spots rather than anywhere aimed at tourists. But we were deliberately cautious about how much of it we ate, especially in certain countries.

Places like Guatemala and Bolivia, along with some of the more remote islands we visited, generally had lower hygiene and sanitary standards, and we found ourselves pulling back on street food specifically in those spots. It's not worth feeling sick over. Getting ill on the road can take out days, sometimes weeks, of a trip you've spent a long time planning and saving for, and that's too high a price for a meal that could easily be skipped.

A Word on Chicken

This is a specific one worth flagging. In some local markets, we saw raw chicken left out in the sun, uncovered, with flies landing on it. Once you've seen that a few times, it changes how you order. There were stretches of the trip where we went fully vegetarian, purely because we didn't trust how the meat had been handled that day.

Bottled Water, Always

We avoided tap water completely, for drinking, brushing our teeth, even washing food. We know people who drank the local water without any issue at all, and equally, we met plenty of travellers who drank it and were constantly ill for weeks at a time. We weren't willing to take the gamble. Bottled water became a non-negotiable, everywhere, for the entire year.

The Occasional Familiar Brand Was a Genuine Treat

You don't see recognisable chains that often once you're off the more touristy routes, so when a Pizza Hut or a Domino's turned up somewhere unexpected, it felt like a proper treat rather than a compromise. A familiar, predictable meal from a known brand was sometimes exactly what we needed after a long stretch of uncertainty around food.

What We Missed From Home

A few things came up again and again, no matter how much we loved the local food:

A proper Sunday roast. Nothing quite replaces it.

Home-cooked meals in general, cooking for yourself, in your own kitchen, exactly how you like it.

Being able to wash fruit and veg under the tap without a second thought.

Just picking something up and eating it, without wondering whether it might make you ill. That instinctive trust in food that you don't even notice you have until it's gone.

Familiar, internationally recognised brands. Nando's came up more than once. It wasn't really about the food itself, more about the comfort of something known and consistent.

A year of eating our way through Latin America taught us to love rice, beans and tortillas in all their local variations, to be properly careful around street food and water, and to genuinely appreciate the small, familiar comforts of home food that we'd never really thought about before we left.