For the food

"It was a very odd sight, especially in a country as tightly controlled as Vietnam, and I wanted to ask someone - anyone - about it. Was the man a gangster? A cop? This was a mystery that needed solving.

"Then my food arrived. I hadn't known quite what to order, but something on the menu caught my attention: lu'o'n nu'o'ng mia. A variation on chao tom nu'o'ng, the popular dish of shrimp paste wrapped around sugarcane and grilled over charcoal, this was made instead with freshwater eel - held in place with a chive tied into a bow - and as I bit in, I fell in love.

"The eel was rich and oily, caramelized from the charcoal heat, infused with garlic, fish sauce, and the raw sweetness of the cane. And the cane itself, when I gnawed it, released a burst of sugary juice tinged with the meaty slick of the eel.

"This, I knew, was what I couldn't get back at Chez Trinh, the only Vietnamese restaurant in Williamsburg. This was why I'd picked up stakes and moved to Vietnam - for the food. The eel, in fact, was so great that I wanted to tell strangers about it, to turn to my neighbors and tell them - in English if they were tourists, in pidgin Vietnamese if not - that it justified everything."

Matt Gross in "The Turk Who Loved Apples and Other Tales of Losing My Way Around the World"

Girl hunter

"They say you always remember your first time. For me it was that turkey hunt four years ago, early on a Saturday morning deep in the Arkansas Delta, in a place they call the Village. It was after a spring night spent drinking aged Scotch and smoking cigars on a wide veranda with some of the most gregarious and unpretentious Southerners I had ever encountered. 

"They were well-heeled country folk who liked to live large and take no prisoners when it came to what they stood for and the life they prized. Good food was a huge part of that life, and on that particular evening before the hunt, there were rows of silver-haired men smoking cigars, mud caked to their leather boots, before a granite table bearing endless stacks of cheese and freshly baked bread, and a mound of salad that could feed a regiment.

"Meats - cacciatorini, salami, ham, pork belly, catfish, and other delectables, too - were piled high on platters, and, of course, we had collard greens with white macaroni, and chips and dips. 

"And there was plenty to wash it all down: red wine, beers in large tubs with ice spilling out over the edges, and then the whiskey before the meal and after, too, when everyone moved gradually into the smoking room by the fireplace and the guitars emerged, and the loose, hard notes of the blues drifted beautifully overhead in a haze of Cuban cigar smoke, a sort of bacchanal to welcome in the warmth of spring and summer and, more important, the start of turkey season."

Georgia Pellegrini in "Girl Hunter: Revolutionizing the Way We Eat, One Hunt at a Time"